What to do when "your low self-esteem is just good common sense."

A friend's Facebook status popped up on my newsfeed. I asked Bet, "Hey, what's moralism?" She's a pastor's kid, and also a person with a diversified knowledge base, so she fields a lot of these questions from me.

"Hum, it could be like legalism, or like excessive fixation on morals?"

The status said "He's been working to kill my moralism for years. Tonight I saw clearly the huge victory He has won in me!" Snaps to that! I love hearing testimony about His victory. Which is what had prodded my question; victory over what? In my attempt to clarify my understanding of the term, I stumbled across this article by Tim Keller on the Resurgence. "Underneath all of our behavioral sins lies a fundamental refusal to rest in Chr!st's salvation." I was like, oh, huh, right, okay. 

Then I started watching Spanglish. As a rule I don't watch Adam Sandler movies, part habit after generally not being allowed to watch them as a teenager, and part snobbery after a professor pointed out what low-brow humor they usually contain. But we're in Kazakhstan, with still a week to go before we start teaching classes, and the movie selection is limited. 

There's the part where he goes, "Guilt, you know that word?" -- "Of course!" She says. "We're Catholic!" This movie made me laugh. The way Deb talks, and describes herself: "Laid back, yet, meticulous!" How Flor accidentally throws the ball for the dog. The way John rambles to his staff. Hilarious. But I cried so much, too. The transformation from joy to hurt when Bernie realizes her mom bought her clothes a size too small. When Cristina scorns her mom in public. How John comforts his daughter.

But Deb, oh Deb, this character who tries so hard, who reads all these parenting books and keeps herself busy with events and pampers her housekeeper's daughter and exercises like a mad woman. She tries so hard, but she's just a screw up. And you just kind of pity her because she's so miserable but she doesn't get that trying hard is not going to fix her misery. Hence the zinger her mom dishes out, "Your low self-esteem is just good common sense."

I've been trying so hard this week. Trying hard to be cheerful. Trying hard to work on Russian. Trying hard to be a good roommate. Trying hard to serve my teammates. Trying hard to make the administrators glad that I've come. Trying so hard to prove to myself that this was a good idea and that I will be good at this. (I don't know why it matters to me that I be good at this. Lower those expectations, Hay.) But I feel a little bit like Deb, as in, let me do all these things and then everyone (and Jesus) will love me. I don't know if that's what moralism is, but either way I would appear I've got a tenuous grasp on the joy of my salvation.

Keller writes, "If we aren’t already sure G0d loves us in Chr!st, we will be looking to something else for our foundational significance and self-worth. . . . We are looking to something else to give us what only Jesus can give us. " Hm. You know when you don't expect Him to call to you in an Adam Sandler movie? That's when you've forgotten that He's everywhere! 

It rained in Karaganda today. I woke up to a drizzly sky that let the sun through intermittently. The capricious turn of weather reminded me so much of New England. Bet and I walked to Magnum Cash & Carry in the afternoon and it felt glorious. Crisp and blustery air on my arms, ambivalently dark sky overhead, and how fresh everything felt, with the dust and pollution dispelled by water. Five minutes after we arrived back safe in our flat, the floodgates opened. The bus stop fell over. People were blown down the street. The gutter burst in our (third floor) entryway and flooded our front hall. It was like a hurricane outside. And we were safe inside. 

Look up at the rain, a beautiful display of power and surrender. What do you do when you realize that your efforts and trying are moralizing idolatry? That you are your own best reason for feeling low? Remember His faithfulness. Great is His faithfulness.

я не понимаю

I had a professor my last semester of college who tried to explain to the class what learning was. (Our actual topic was the rhetoric of courtroom dramas, but we stuck to that theme somewhat loosely.) He asked us what we hoped to learn in the upcoming semester and then turned our answers back on us. "If I'm doing my job right," he told us, "You'll learn things you didn't know you didn't know."

I feel this way about living in Karaganda.

I feel it when I tune out the conversations of the people at the bus stop, because I can't understand what they're saying. I feel it when I try to Google something and I realize I exclusively frequent sites hosted in the west. I feel it when I strain to look at the signs and circulars, attempting to decipher what I can't read. I feel it when I stalk the aisles of the grocery store, examining unfamiliar spices and attempting to fathom how they're used. I feel it when I stare at stores or establishments from the outside, trying to figure out what they are on the inside.

I know that I don't know stuff. But I don't know exactly what it is yet. When you're in a new culture, your only frame of reference is the culture you left across the ocean. You just don't know what it is you don't know.

A few days ago we visited Рамстор, a supermarket that occasionally stocks peanut butter and in general carries more western-style food. Because it was lunchtime, and because I had turned down a meal at Mac & Dak (Kazakhstan's version of McDonald's), I resolved to find something from their prepared food section. And so I proceeded to order a slice of pizza . . . entirely in sign language.

In retrospect this wasn't necessary. Pizza is pronounced much the same in Russian as in English. I know the word for "one." The price was even written in a little card next to the pie. The obliging and amused smile of the girl behind the counter made the whole encounter more funny than humiliating, but I left feeling that this was not a sustainable way to conduct business out in public. As a child I learned how to read because I was frustrated I couldn't read the signs I saw out the car window. A similar motivation drives me to my Russian study every night. I want to make sense of the society around me, and I want to be able to make myself understood. 

Not sure what this sign over the bear cages at the zoo says, but I'm sure its meaning can be inferred.

The language barrier aside (and from within our flat it all but vanishes), so much about Karaganda feels similar to my home. I close my eyes and can imagine myself back in the USA, maybe even RI. The hum of traffic outside the window, my daily morning Nescafe, the buy-in-bulk supermarkets, the nightly Big Bang Theory & Settlers of Catan teammate bonding time. And the things that are different (the toilet closet comes to mind) I could easily get used to. (Like seriously, I don't know why I didn't realize this when we were in France last summer, but having the toilet in a separate room from the shower is the best idea!)

I bank on the promise that the longer I live here, the more I will learn. And though my instruction is not strictly academic anymore, the prospect of learning though exhausting still thrills me. It's a different kind of back to school season. 

There is no fear in love

I can't believe how rapidly the days are ticking by now that we're in week three. Each day is as full as ever, with worship and group time in the morning, followed by TEFL baseball (our homework game) and TEFL instruction before lunch, and culture or spiritual cultivating in the afternoon, and practicum prep before dinner, and practicum followed by debrief followed by various activities (tonight, swing dancing!) at night. Yeah, it's pretty busy. But this Saturday the first teams depart for Vietnam. And next Sunday, my team gets on an airplane. Man, that came up fast! We switched dormitories on Tuesday, and we forecasted as we rolled our luggage between buildings, "Next time we take our suitcases down this path, we'll be headed to the airport."

Practicum prep in the CIS team room.

In one of our workshops this afternoon we talked about Bible studies in our host countries. How to respect the "no proselytizing to minors" law, reasons to host a study, the difference between eisegesis and exegesis, et cetera. The instructor talked about how he had found himself the teacher of a kids' church, how rewarding it was to take them through a study of the entire Bible, how he trained them to memorize verses and know the word. But my eyes filled with tears as he talked about the six kids in his very first class, how they had walked away from the faith and even how he had attended one student's funeral. How do you disciple youth, pour yourself so intentionally into others with faithfulness, knowing that so many will walk away?

(I have never wondered this about the students in Ignite. Even though I saw so many students walk away. Even though I saw so many youth leaders lose hope. But I think forward to my students at the language center, the friends I have yet to make, the trick dates and the dinner parties. I theorize about being used, people hanging out with me just for my language skills, being manipulated. I am not so cynical to expect it, but with anxiety I acknowledge the possibility.)

The workshop instructor asked the class how it was possible to maintain hope after the arguably "failure" of the kids' church, and they gave some great answers. If it mattered to just one student, it was worth it. His word does not go out void, seeds were planted. Those who turned away made the conscious choice to do so. And these answers were a comfort. But the instructor asked, what is the greatest way you can love someone?

Share the good news, we murmured. 

The truth that gives life, sharing this with faithfulness is true love. 

The older I get the more certain I become that loving fully and whole-heartedly will eventually mean heart-break. It hurt to hear of those first six students who had studied the whole Bible in their youth and hidden His word in their hearts had also turned away. But does that mean he ought never have poured into them? Of course not. I think of my teammates, newly married and in adorable love. Sometimes they get annoyed with each other, it's true, but does that mean they ought never have married? Of course not. Love will eventually break your heart. And if it doesn't then you're not doing it right. 

And perhaps the reverse applies: if you try too hard to shield yourself from heart-break, you may miss many, many opportunities to love deeply, richly, truly. Is not love-given so much more important than collateral pain accrued? Why are we so afraid of the heartache when loving others is the very thing He has called us to? When I look forward to this year overseas, coming upon me oh so swiftly, I know I must give my whole self to this process. To be fully present. To be completely invested. To be intentional and purposeful and free with loving. 

Loving without fear of how it will hurt. 

So much easier said than done. 

From coast to coast

In our TEFL instruction session this morning I was overjoyed to see a shoutout to my homeland; we used New England for a sample activity. I felt a little swell of pride as I gushed about clam chowder and coffee milk, the backdrop of our national independence and Gilmore Girls. It was my little corner of the world, my New England, with the autumn leaves and the maple syrup and the rocky coastline and the pilgrim reenactment villages. 

After session, I tripped out of the building into the balmy sunshine. I eat my dinners to go sometimes; as much as I love the chaos and community of the cafeteria, I love sitting under the palm trees and watching the parrots fuss. The spongey grass makes a better seat than a chair ever could and the blessed absence of humidity in the air has made my hair more cooperative than ever before in my life.

Some things are strange to me. The bizarre plants that look like they belong in a western film. The way complete strangers greet each other on the street. Calling highways freeways. Horrendous LA traffic. It blows my mind to watch Ironman 3 and consider that the story takes place (theoretically) just twenty minutes away. Or the rumor that Danny Puti of Community hangs out at Intelligensia Cafe just two miles away.

I don't know. I guess I forgot Pasadena was a real place, and not just a good story.

I like how different from New England it is. And I like that it makes me love New England more.

Startings

I am so excited. Is there a better word? There must be a better word. Why, oh language, is it that I have not mastered you to explain this effervescent anticipation frothing inside of me?! This is it, this is lift-off, this is the beginning! The idea is becoming reality. The rubber is meeting the road. I'm really going! And this makes me feel just giddy, that this is really happening and that I would be so privileged. I find myself asking over and over, is this real life?

So I'm leaving for a month of training, and then in August catching a flight to Kazakhstan. My church supports a worker who got his start on the field through the very same agency and the very same language school through which I'm headed out. Because he has already walked this same path he has been a source of invaluable information and cheering encouragement. He wrote me this week, "Try to see what God is doing in you as you prepare to go, since this is part of your training, and not just a means to an end."

This is why I chose to be with Ignite Serves Providence the week before leaving. When I woke up Monday morning and frantically packed a bag, it didn't feel like a good decision. I left the house panicked about how much still was left to be done and overwhelmed by the idea of exhausting my stores of enthusiasm and perseverance during the week's heat wave. Surely this was too careless a preparation for stepping blindly into something I've never done before. But some time after we had finished washing the dust out of our living quarters, maybe just as we were met with effusive thanks from the men staying at The Urban League, something inside me clicked into alignment. I remembered.

It floods my heart with all kinds of warm fuzzies when I think about the privilege it is to serve and to share. To hug little girls and prove Jesus loves them by loving them oneself. To listen to a homeless man's life story and offer hope for the future with a cold soda and hot meal. To approach strangers and ask them the hard but humble questions about how they came to believe what they believe. And the students! To work alongside brothers and sisters who are growing in love right before your eyes! To watch them face their fears, risk their comfort, push through fatigue, and work so hard . . . I can take no credit for the understanding unfolding in their hearts, but I am proud, so proud, of how they have sought Jesus in this work.

Passing out water in Kennedy Plaza during the heat wave.

And what better send-off could I have asked for? A reminder in my own backyard of why I'm going half-way across the world. A model for how God wants to move through us to love and reach other.

I've been haunted all week by this quotation from Perelandra, "In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless he bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason?" A girl so guarded, so skeptical, so preoccupied with analysis and pro/con lists, how will she learn to obey by doing simply what He asks? Answer, practice. And it is an unfathomed privilege to be starting this adventure. 

Last week I was looking back, mourning the interruption of the community I hold so dear. This week I am looking forward, anticipating the faithfulness of a God who would work through me, and will teach me to do His will.

Partings

I guess no one really loves good-byes, and me, yeah, I hate 'em. And now I'm coming full force with their obtrusive reality as my departure ticks steadily closer. I am, to say the least, emotionally overwhelmed.

I've been trying to write about this for weeks, but I can't seem to force the words out. Another reason to hate good-byes. What is there to say, really? That I feel oxygen-deprived when I think of the experiences I won't share or the conversations I won't have or the people I won't see? That I feel a tightness in my chest when I think of the relational distance my physical distance will breed? That I feel like throwing up when I think of verbalizing the love I've felt?

Nope. It's no big deal. I won't see you for a while. So it goes. 

Truthfully, I'm grieving. I know I can trust this misty future to a God who is infinite in faithfulness and goodness. No, it is not the uncharted water of new beginning that terrifies me. Instead it's the heart-rending end of so much I have held so dear. The end of after-school Ultimate games at Pine Hill Farm, the end of LOST marathons with Sarah, the end of Sunday morning giggle fests with the junior high girls, the end of weekend movie nights, the end of long drives home in the middle of the night, the end of the comfortable (oh, but numbing) routine I've carved for myself. 

I am being dramatic, I know. A year away does not alter the fabric of my life. It is very possible, or even likely, that the things I leave will still be there when I get back. I'm young, but I've lived long enough to at least start to suspect that change is slow and subtle, not swift and severing. And that's yet another reason to hate good-byes: they imply a permanence that is not reality. Why must we bother with the farewells when most partings are really see-you-laters? If this is not the end, why do I have to get all worked up about it? 

Because closure. Because punctuation. Because people deserve to know what they have meant to me. And I had better find some way to tell them. Just in case.

1 Corinthians 13:12

One of my least favorite days of the year, Independence Day, has of late turned my favorite. There's something about wandering between brownstones, laying in the grass, eating from food trucks, sweating unholy amounts, talking and playing games with precious people, cramming into subway cars, and watching the most magnificently beautiful fireworks the modern world can conjure. A new family tradition has brought me so much joy. "This is my favorite part!" I would announce periodically, as though I had zero concept of the exclusionary implications of the term 'favorite.'

But standing on the subway platform waiting to switch trains, a horrifying thought dawned in the back of my mind and rose into my outlook. I was not jubilant, I was not miserable, I was not anxious, I was not content. I just was. Which meant that something had to be wrong!

Surely there was something to feel guilty about: things I ought not to have said, things I ought to have planned better, thoughts I should have swept away, thoughts I should have brought to mind. There were so many things to be stressed out about: fundraising and follow-up phone calls, packing and medical arrangements, the van's screwy transmission and empty gas tank. I gazed down the empty platform, wiped the sweat off the back of my neck, and wondered, "What on earth is wrong with me?Why do I feel so normal?"

So I took a moment to remind myself that sometimes it's okay to just be.

In my obsession with mindful living and in the throes of my right desire to be each day more like Jesus, I get a little carried away sometimes. I drink in the high highs and wallow in the low lows because I mistake the extremes for poignancy. As though there were something particularly profound about irrational happiness or erratic despair. I somehow came to believe that if I was neither euphoric with the satisfaction of living rightly nor despondent from the conviction of my shortcomings then I was doing something wrong.

And it's true, that the choice between life and death is always before us. It's true that each day carries a million different reasons to be glad and a million different reasons to grieve. Certainly Independence Day shows this, in the multimillion dollar pyrotechnics contrasted with the exploited homeless jingling change, in the triumphant #BOSTONSTRONG banners contrasted with the makeshift marathon memorial, in the unity celebrated from the loudspeaker contrasted with selfish disregard for others on the ground. I find much meaning in these highs and in these lows.

But not everything is an existential crisis.

There is no need to despair when the meaning can't be found. It is good to live with care to the consequences of my values, attitudes, and beliefs, but it is also good to stand on subway platform and just be there. To laugh with friends, and to take a walk, and to get on the train and go where you're going. I am finite, and I will not catch every shred of meaning in every experience. I will not even come close. John Tagliabue wrote once, "The ordinary blankness of little dramatic consciousness is good for the health sometimes." And I think that may be true.

For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

Cheer up, church

I was watching Friends and Monica was talking about some horrifying thing Chandler did, and Rachel remarks, "I always knew there was something weird about that dude. But you promised to love him no matter what." And the laugh track signals to us the absurdity of a committed love; this is why dating exists! So we can vet out people's flaws before we decide to spend our lives alongside them! We know no one's perfect, but we try and get pretty close. We seek out people who are stable, well-adjusted, good communicators, even-tempered, whatever. We have a concept that healthy exists, and we're trying to get to that state.

But the wonderful and infuriating thing about grace and our God who gives it is that we don't have to be perfect.

Just like spouses learn to love each other through financial hardships and emotional trauma and annoying pet peeves, God is faithful to us, freely giving us a love we're not worthy of. Sticking by us despite our dysfunction.

And I've been thinking about what this kind of love and grace looks like not just on an individual scale in my own corrupt heart, but on a corporate level. Oh Church, dear bride of Christ. Are we not the height of dysfunction?

We get down on the Church all the time. Particularly in the west (though I don't doubt dysfunction is a global and even universal thing), where our culture is so markedly incompatible with the teachings of Jesus, it's like our favorite pastime to criticize the body. And granted, we've got lots of problems. We're diseased with consumerism and universalism and bigotry and a pathological lack of unity. There're volumes that could be (and have been) written about the Church's shortcomings. And there's absolutely a place for self-examination.

But I've been thinking lately about cutting the Church some slack. How can I expect from a body of believers what I have not mastered myself?



Charlie Peacock has a great song about this: the Church is so much worse off than we think. There is so much we've gotten wrong. So many mistakes we've made. So many utter failures. (Aren't you tired of hearing about the Crusades yet?!) But still, the more the understanding of our sin grows, the greater our appreciation of His grace swells. The Church is sick, because it is made up of people who need the Great Physician. And if you stop right there the story's pretty bleak, because just like no betrothed would blithely walk into a marriage to a violent alcoholic, why would someone sign up to join a leper colony of fellow corrupted sinners? If we have a concept of what holy is and a desire to get there, why do we get mixed up in church at all?

Because the story doesn't end with the Church's incomprehensible inadequacy.

There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. [Romans 8:1-2]

This grace is real in my life. This is what's changing me and shaping me and it's within this context that self-examination is so sanctifying. I am flawed, yet He loves me. I am stubborn and lazy and fearful, yet He loves me. I am dysfunctional, yet He loves me. And oh dysfunctional Church. He loves His bride in the very same way. Is not that grace astonishing?

So when I hear church horror stories or watch videos like this one, when I sit in my own church and feel the judgment coil in my stomach, I hum it to myself, "Don't despair, grace is near. It's just like God to choose the loser, not the winner." Cheer up. The sins of the Church have been forgiven. There's no space for cynicism here. Let the full force of our need grow our gratitude for magnitude of His grace.