The Check is in the Mail

A friend of mine named Anna is a teacher at a language school here.  Most of her students are missionaries of various denominational flavors.  Once, about 5 years ago, one of her students expressed his gratitude to her as a teacher.  He said, “I am so thankful that you have patiently worked to teach me Spanish.  How can I repay you?”

Anna was not sure if he meant to give her a gift or what.  She wisely replied, “When you preach in Spanish and someone gets saved, that will be my pay check.”  She saw her ministry continuing through HIS future ministry.  She saw with Kingdom Eyes that we are all interconnected when we work for the Kingdom of God.  She kept up contact with this student through email over the next year.  He went on to El Salvador to be a missionary.

One day Anna got an email that said, “Here’s your check.  This weekend I preached in Spanish for the first time.  I asked if anyone wanted to ask the Lord to forgive their sins and to come into their heart.  Three people got saved!!”  Anna wiped away the tears when she told us how honored she felt to be a part of something bigger than herself.  Her ministry reached to El Salvador because she was diligent, her student was persistent, and God was Faithful.

My English student Leticia. I’m so proud of her!

Today is a very special day for ME as a teacher too.  I too have been a language school teacher.  And today one of my first students will be getting on an airplane and flying from her home in Chile to her mission field in India.  I taught her English for a year, and she worked so hard!  I am so proud of my student for sticking with her dreams and seeing them through.  I worked patiently, forming and crafting her English.  She worked persistently, pushing herself to study and learn.  Then God was faithful in her fund raising efforts as well.  Now, FINALLY, she is leaving for India today.

Pray for my student-missionary Leticia as she travels alone to a country where she’s never been before.  Pray for Leticia as she works to communicate in a second language.  Pray for Leticia today.  I look forward to the day when I receive a message from her saying that she prayed in English with someone and they received the Lord into their heart.  I thank God that some day soon MY check will be in the mail, metaphorically speaking.

I see you

I wrote this article last summer for an on-line newsletter about women in ministry.  I was under contract not to publish it anywhere until the newsletter published it first.  Now that they finally used it, I can share this story too.  If you want to see the original page, go here.

I could feel my palms sweat and the index cards in my hands tremble. Taking a deep breath, I slowly recited my Bible verse in Spanish to my conversation partner, Sujen. As a new missionary on the field, three times a week this young Nicaraguan woman would come to my house to teach me how to clean my ceramic floors or how to cook the perfect chicken and rice dinner. And three times a week this introverted missionary would be pushed to my conversational limits by having a Spanish speaker in my house. It was way beyond my comfort zone, but I pushed myself even further.

One day after practicing my Bible verse with Sujen, she casually told me that she was having marital problems. She asked me if I thought prayer would help. I said, “Of course!” With my 3 months of Spanish, I said a simple prayer for Sujen and her husband Jimi. When I opened my eyes, Sujen was crying. I was shocked that the Holy Spirit could do anything with my pitiful little vocabulary – my loaves and fishes’ sack lunch. Right there in my kitchen, I prayed with Sujen to accept Jesus into her heart.

Soon after, Sujen invited my family over to her house for lunch. We followed her directions to the entrance of a little alley where she met us and lead us back through a maze of make-shift houses. Her house consisted of one small living room with a kitchen divided off by a curtain, one bedroom, and a small bathroom with the only running water coming from a pipe shoved through the wall. Her “kitchen sink” was a cold water tap shared by several neighbors just a few steps outside her house. She considered herself fortunate to have running water so “conveniently” placed near her kitchen.

I sat humbly on a stool in her kitchen watching and listening as she taught me to make tortillas by hand. It was such an awesome thing for me to feel the love of God radiating from Sujen towards me. I was the missionary – the one who was supposed to be blessing her – and on that day I felt God shine His love on me through her. There was nothing in her background that could have prepared her to accept a foreigner. Nothing taught her the patience she would need to converse with someone just learning Spanish. No one could have prepared her to be my friend, but God had glued us together somehow, and we were both blessed by the relationship.

I was blessed with her trust when she showed me her wedding photo album. I was blessed with her intimacy when she opened up a well-loved box of photos. With tenderness and a few tears quickly wiped away, Sujen showed me the birth certificates of two baby boys, both stillborn. I saw little faded footprints stamped onto the treasured pieces of paper. I saw a glimpse into her pain. I saw her mother’s heart. I saw her.

After my visit to Sujen’s house, I struggled to put the experience down on paper for my interaction report that week in language school. It was more than just a cultural experience for me. After reading aloud the first few paragraphs, my Spanish disintegrated, and I dissolved into tears under the weight of the kindness I felt from Sujen. I simply lacked the vocabulary to describe it.

In English, I apologized to my teacher. I said, “I just don’t have the words to describe how much it meant to me that she invited me into her home, and that she loves me like that!”

My teacher had such a tender heart. She told me, “But April, we see who you are in your heart. And we can tell that God’s love is there even if you don’t have the right words to say in Spanish.” After that, I began to relax in the knowledge that God’s love was indeed shining out through the cracks in my paltry Spanish and my nervous, introverted social habits.

We don’t need to worry so much about being missionaries who want to save the whole world. Instead we need to see ourselves as women with the love of God in our hearts, just looking for friends with whom to share His love.

 

 

Word Mash-up

Man, that ol’ Tower of Babel really messed us up.  When God confused the languages of mankind, He really did a doozie on us.  I know a woman who can speak 5 languages, but most of us struggle to master even one.  So it just amazes me when I observe how babies are wired for language learning.  I see the 9 month old daughter of our friends learning to speak her Mother Tongue, Spanish, and I am in awe.  Spanish equals work to me, and here this baby understands some of it better than I do!  It amazes me.

Last week I had a weird conversation that really was a mix and match of languages.  I met a French family.  They know very little English and a little Spanish.  I remember a very little French from high school, but I have English down pretty well and Spanish trucking along from behind.  So between those 3 languages, we managed to communicate!  It was a shallow conversation, to be sure, but it felt good (in a crazy way) to be able to communicate with this French family.

This last month our school hired a Chinese woman to teach Music class.  She doesn’t speak English and this is a school where we mainly use English.  She speaks Spanish… sort of… so when I talk with her, Spanish is our common language.  It was the same when we were in Mexico.  There was a large group of families from the Korean embassy who sent their kids to school with MY children.  The parents spoke no English and I spoke no Korean.  When we wanted to communicate with each other, Spanish was our common language.  Their kids amazed me.  Their kids were going to school in their THIRD language!  Their Mother Tongue was Korean, they were really good with Spanish, and they were studying in English. Talk about some brainy kids!!

In all of these situations I have found myself literally STUTTERING in whichever language I finally pronounce.  My brain becomes like a plate of spaghetti with all these linguistic wires crossing.  When I’m trying to figure our which language to use to start a conversation, I’m always afraid I’ll go to say, “hola” and “aloha” will come out.  I swear, one day this will happen.

What did I expect?

There are two things that are difficult to know about yourself:  your true motivations and your pre-conceived expectations.  When we were in our missionary training days I remember one speaker talking about culture shock.  She said that we all carry our culture secretely within us.  At some point it will most definitely collide with something our new culture, but we won’t be able to anticipate the collision ahead of time because most of us are completely unaware of our cultural expectations.  They are as natural to us as our own skin.  I so desperately wanted her to tell me exactly what I would struggle with in my new culture, but she couldn’t.  And I couldn’t see myself objectively enough to identify my expectations.

But with time comes perspective.  This week I wrote this for an orientation for missions teams:

Be flexible and expect the plans to change.  Expect to ‘hurry up and wait’, expect things to go wrong, expect things to start late, expect traffic, expect hunger, expect exhaustion, expect to hear from God, expect to be changed, expect to see great things happen, expect to be uncomfortable, expect to have your eyes opened, expect to fall in love with missions, expect to have the time of your life!

After I reread what I wrote, I sat back and thought about it.  These are MY expectations.  This is very much a reflection of my expectations of ministry overseas.  So what do I do when one of these perky phrases is left dangling, frayed and loose?  These are the cultural things in me that have come to a screeching, shattering collision with Latin America.

I expected that learning Spanish would be easier than it is.  Anyone who says learning Spanish is easy has never done it.  The verbs kill me!  Fifteen tenses, moods and voices, multiplied by six variations in person…  These verbs are hard!  I expected to be smart.  I didn’t expect so many tears.  I didn’t expect feeling frustrated at not being able to say exactly what I mean.  I didn’t expect to mourn the loss of eloquence.  I didn’t expect that 6 years later I’d still have days when I don’t understand what people say to me.

I expected to make a couple of really close friends that I could minister to.  Instead I have a few really close friends that humble me with how much they bless me over and over again.  I came here to make a difference in the lives of others, but I think they are having a greater impact on me.  I came here prepared to love, but I find myself the loved one.

I expected to settle into the culture and to never feel home sick.  This was to be my new home.  Now I have two homes. When I’m here, I miss Minnesota.  When I’m in Minnesota, I miss Costa Rica.  It seems like I can never be whole.  I always ache for another place.  I know that aching is ultimately a longing for my home in Heaven.  We are not citizens of this world, we are just sojourners passing through for a time.  I long, I pine, I ache, I didn’t expect this unsettled feeling.

I didn’t expect to feel so lonely, but I am.

I expected that living on the mission field would be more like living on a missions trip.  I expected miracles and dramatic salvations every week!  I didn’t expect boredom.  And I didn’t expect feeling so dry.  I’m spiritually parched, just trudging through this desert one step at a time.  I don’t feel God every day.  I know he’s still there.  I just don’t feel him or hear him very well.  I expected a view from the mountain top, instead this looks a lot like a valley of dry bones.

I’ve always had good health, so I expected that to continue.  I expected it in an indirect kind of way by not ever even thinking about my health.  Today I went to the pharmacy to buy another box of pills.  I didn’t expect getting cancer.  I could tell something was wrong, but never in a million years did I think I had cancer.  I knew I felt really awful- like I was always on the verge of getting the flu.  I knew this was not normal for me.  But I didn’t expect the worst.  Now I have a new normal.  I have less stamina than before.  I ache everywhere and I’m tired, so unrelentingly tired.  I never expected to be weak.

Have you ever heard someone say, “If you lower your expectations, you’ll be happier”?  If that’s true, then why does that statement make me sad?  Maybe a better way of saying it would be “If you have REALISTIC expectations you’ll be LESS DISAPPOINTED.”  Most of the time when I find myself unhappy I don’t really know why.  But if I take the time to wade deeper into the sadness, I find it’s source springs from an unrealistic expectation that has burst open under the pressure of an incongruent reality.  And it is no one’s fault but my own.

So the final question is, after this cultural collision of expectations against hard reality, can I still walk away from the crash unscathed or am I forever living wounded like Jacob with his limp after wrestling with an angel?  I limp.

A Taboo Subject among Missionaries

OK, it’s time to get brutally honest.  Today I’m going to blog about a taboo subject.  It’s something that most missionaries experience at some point in their careers and yet NO ONE wants to talk about.  It sounds sinful.  At some point in their lives, most missionaries say to themselves, “I don’t want to go to church.”

Now before I pick that scab off, let me clarify, I USED TO LOVE going to church.  I grew up in a ministry family and we were in church every time the doors were opened.  The overwhelming majority of my childhood church memories are wonderful, so I’m not processing repressed emotions here.  Then I grew up and had my own family.  We became a ministry family too.  As an adult, I saw the good, the bad and the ugly of ministry… but I still loved going to church.  Even though Sunday was the longest work day of the week for us, I still loved going to church.  It was all about Jesus!  Yeah for Jesus!

I loved going to church, until I became a missionary.

With one change of location, church became something completely foreign to me. Church became the source of so much culture shock.  The minute I set foot outside of my house in Latin America, a tidal wave of Spanish washes over me.  I am swept out to sea.  For two and a half hours (five in Mexico), I tread water every Sunday in church just waiting for someone to pull the plug and drain the ocean.

Let me describe my cultural shock, I mean my church experience, through the eyes of a Minnesotan transplanted to Latin America.

Because we’re missionaries, we feel obligated to put ourselves through this practice for Hell every single Sunday.  We crowd into a VERY HOT room where everyone sits shoulder to shoulder, uncomfortably close.  (We’re so close that by the end of the service I am wearing the perfume of the lady sitting next to me.)  The music starts.  Somewhere in the rules of the cosmos it is ordained that if you give a Latino a microphone they will wrap their lips around it and sing at the top of their lungs.  I don’t know why, but it is true.  For an hour and a half, the singers howl like banshees into the hottest sound system in a 10 block radius because the neighbors who don’t go to church just might get saved if they can hear the service in their living rooms.  It’s hard to remember that this is about Jesus.

It does not matter if the drummer can keep a beat, he will pound the life out of those drums.  The audience does not clap on 2 and 4, they clap on 1 and 3.  (At each church we visit, my children always ask, “Mom, do we clap in English or in Spanish?)  If there’s not a tambourine in the room, then you’re not in an Evangelical church.  For the first year, my children would cry that their ears were hurting.  I stuffed cotton balls in their ears every week.  I think we’ve all lost a percentage of our hearing, because no one cries anymore.  I can’t hear myself sing, but I think sound is coming out of my mouth.  I guess I went deaf for Jesus.

The preaching… 90 minutes or more.  Remember that I have about a 20 minute attention span on a Good Spanish Day.  On the positive side, that’s a solid hour of Bible reading for me if my kids are behaving.  Jesus likes Bible reading, right?

But my children are another trial.  Every Sunday they become tormented by demons.  There is more screaming and crying and fighting in our house on a Sunday morning than in all the rest of the week combined.  By the time we get to church… I want to sell my kids to gypsies.  IF there are classes for them, I can guarantee that they won’t want to go to them.  I let them bring Polly Pockets and coloring books to service.  They still whine and wiggle and annoy each other and basically drive me nuts for two and a half hours.  I’m having a really hard time focusing on Jesus.

When Lucy was a baby I tried to acclimate her to going to the nursery, but each week I found myself sitting on the floor of the nursery picking up thumb tacks and staples from the carpet and taking batteries out of other babies’ mouths.  Diapers were changed on a filthy twin mattress that took up most of the floor space.  In the corner was a broken play pen.  The corner of the play pen was held together with a rusty wire.  Sometimes the toys were stored in the play pen, and sometimes children were stored there.  Every toy in the room was broken and dirty. There were broken balloons mixed in the heap, and one time I found a tangle of an old telephone cord that someone thought the babies might like to chew on.  There was no way I was leaving my child in here!  I’m sure this has nothing to do with Jesus.

When we get in the car to go home, I congratulate myself on making it through another service.  We won’t have to do this for a whole ‘nother week.

So this is what you won’t hear from the missionaries that are visiting your church to raise their budgets:  Going to church?  We dread it.

Sure there are things we learn to appreciate about it along the way, but for most missionary families, going to church is the most stressful thing we do all week long.  I can tolerate the difficult shopping challenges, waiting in line until Jesus comes back, crazy drivers who break the law left and right, filth and poverty everywhere, the heat, the smell, the prehistoric sized bugs, beans and rice with every meal, punching through the language barrier.  But when you take away my familiar church experience and replace it with THAT it’s like the cloud that can’t contain one more drop.  The cloud bursts and an ocean rains down on me.  I’m drowning in cultural differences.

I know I’m not alone in feeling this way.  I’m not the only missionary that has said to herself, “I hate going to church.”  Sometime when you have a missionary all alone in a quiet booth at Denny’s, ask them how they feel about church and let them be brutally honest with you.  It’s a relief to be able to admit it.  I don’t want to go to church.