My father sat in the pew of a church in Philadelphia with a slip of paper in his hands. The cold encamped outside was a far cry from the mosquito hot shores of South Africa. Three years. He had brought his young family Stateside for three years to add a Masters of Divinity to his medical degree. Before Internet, cell phones, or frequent fliers, three years was a full time commitment.
We lived in 13 different houses in the first year alone. My brother, Joshua, was born in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. I experienced Kindergarten, Fourth of July, and the cold, frosted beauty of snow angels. We drove on the wrong side of the road and loved everything.
One missions Sunday at church the pastor proposed a practical exercise in praying outside the familiar. Everyone in the congregation of hundreds placed their name on a slip of paper and into a collection bin. The sermon followed and then everyone dug deep and took back a different slip with a different name.
My dad thrilled at the idea of a name from a far-flung land he could invest in and go to battle over in prayer. He tells me often and often about his profound disappointment when he opened the small slip of crumpled paper and recognized my mother’s name.
In that sea of hundreds of people her name had drifted back to him. And all he felt at the time was let down.
Three years.
Three years in Zululand and then three years in Pennsylvania. I was six when we returned to the land of thatch roof houses, blood gold sunsets and the hadeda. My mom was the center of the loud music, poems, literature, and youth group I grew up in. And one Friday night I was called out of the hot core of my teenage self and into the dark car where my father tried to tell my brothers and I that the world was about to change.
We listened with eyes streaming in the moonlight and one-by-one climbed out of our seatbelts and into his lap. And then the praying began in earnest.
We clutched at her name as it began to slip through our fingers. We traveled hours to spend time with that name and always, after each visit, begged just one more day with that name. We got 18 months. Which brought my total to 18 years and one week.
Eighteen years and half my life. I turned thirty six last week.
I feel the heavy line like black tar painted across my existence. Starting tomorrow she will have been gone for more of my life than she was with me. September 2nd and a lifetime. But I can choose to keep count from here on out in my own way, can’t I? There is always a choice for those willing to look for it. I can take the math of the memories and bend them into my own theorem. Because I believe in an infinite truth.
He makes all things new.
And so I keep count from September 2nd but not because it was the day she died. But because it was the day my first born, heir to her name, was due. According to my calculations, we have had five years of life now.
Five years of loud, drumming, stamping, wrestling, reciting, laughing, hugging, high-fiving life.
And it has been beyond beautiful.
Selah.
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In one week I will board a plane with a team of three other bloggers and travel to Guatemala with Compassion International. I want you to come with me. I want to paint a picture of the child development programs we visit that is vivid enough for you to feel the sun on your back and hear the giggles of kids trying to figure out the foreigners who don’t understand anything beyond “yes” and “no.”
I want to lay down words sturdy enough for you to walk across and meet another country and take bits of it back in your heart. Because I am convinced that what we all have in common far outweighs any of our differences.
1. Kids are kids are kids
What they wear, where they live, or what accents they have – these are incidental to who they are. When you see the photographs that start to come out of our trip I hope you see your own children in the images. I hope you see more than poverty. I hope you see joy and laughter and a twinkle in a mischievous eye. I hope you see your boys building forts and bear caves and your daughters planning tea parties and bossing around their brothers. I hope your heart feels more love and delight at these beautiful, perfect reflections of God’s image than burdened by the distance between you and them.
2. Your family is not so different as you think
The Father of Lies would like nothing more than to convince us we have nothing in common with our brothers and sisters who live in a poverty we can’t relate to. He’d like to cripple us with a guilt that tells us we can’t make a difference so what’s the point in even trying. Well that’s just plain ridiculous. I have met families that lived in the garbage dumps of Egypt who cared just as much about making their one room apartment one level above the dumps as hospitable as my cousins who live on a sprawling estate in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Every family wants their children to go on to live better lives than their parents. Fathers the world over get up and go to work to provide food and moms cook and clean and complain that no one helps them clear the dishes. Families tell stories about that crazy great-aunt and kids always want to stay up later than they are allowed.
Some families are trapped in squatter camps and a poverty that tries to strangle them while others are overwhelmed by the need to keep up with their neighbors and buy the minivan, the Wii or the wardrobe they can’t afford.
We all wrestle against the forces that try to destroy the heart of a home.
3. You don’t have to be wealthy to make a world of difference
I come from a country that has one of the highest HIV rates in the world. The numbers of orphaned children is skyrocketing by terrifying numbers and most days it is daunting to think about how to make a difference. So mostly my family doesn’t. Instead we focus on the people right in front of us – one individual at a time.
And that’s how my little adopted brother Karabo snuck into our hearts. And he brought with him siblings and a personal connection to a community. One community out of an entire country. Because that’s the community God laid on my parents’ hearts. So that is where they serve. But if you asked them they wouldn’t think of it as service, they’d just tell you it’s youth camp and birthday parties and buying new school uniforms before the semester begins.
It’s through the messy, down-to-earth relationships that we make the most difference. On a 1:1 ratio.
That’s what I hope you discover in this trip. That the stories we carry back to you are your stories too. That the people we meet remind you of your own family. And that the difference you can make doesn’t require a grandiose commitment, rather simply making a new friend.
Just one child at a time. That’s how Compassion is changing the world.
Won’t you be a part of this wonderful, messy, completely ordinary opportunity to make a new friend with me?
And in the hopes that your answer is “yes” I’ll have this button up on my blog from now through the remainder of my trip. With one click you can connect with one child.
And maybe change both your lives.
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Click on the link below (twice) to download and listen to an audio recording of me reading today’s post. Once it’s loaded you can come back to this page to read along.
My Zululand; My Birthday
Under the boughs of the mango groves in the heat of the hot, tropical Zululand sun my mother labored long over me. It was August, the season of South African spring. My young father, just fresh out of medical school, and his friend Cliff Alwood were the only two doctors serving the Manguzi Mission Hospital. Remote, rural, and steeped in the guttural clicks and lore of Shaka Zulu and his language it was a place where Apartheid was only slowly encroaching.
My young parents beat it back with nothing but their faith and how they chose to live.
In the heart of the community – working, living, praying, serving, teaching – doing life alongside. And over nine of those months my mother’s belly grew large and stiff as stywe pap and she swayed to the rhythm of feet stamped and voices joined in chorus across mealie fields and in the chapel where my father would preach on Sundays.
Mr. Zondo’s cows were crossing a road and a passing Mercedes Benz slammed into one of them. The cow was killed. And the magistrate ruled that Mr. Zondo would have to pay R30 a month for the next year to make the Mercedes-driving-man whole again. The beautiful car had been damaged.
Sangomas swore that the spirits spoke to them and demanded sacrifice when a child was ill or a woman barren. And the people paid. The people always paid. They paid the malaria and the TB, they paid the wealthy and they paid those with white skins. They paid the government and the leprosy and they still retained pieces of themselves.
Mr. Zondo loved my father like a son and my father loved Mr. Zondo. You can stoop through the door way of a smoke-stained hut and eat over a three-legged cast iron pot using your fingers as utensils as you share stories of the day and for a moment you can be family. Our moment lasted three years. And I was born into the heart of it.
I don’t know if my mother was afraid to have me so far from home. I do know that she claimed the promise that the chosen of the Lord would not labor in vain or bear children for calamity. And my father tells me that half way through her labor she stopped pushing.
“Jo,” he said – “Jo-babe, you need to push. You have to push. She’s coming! It’s time.”
And my mother, he tells me, she grinned and waited before she bore down again and delivered me into his hands. Baby-catcher, father, missionary man. They say I screamed loud enough for my stoic Ouma to comment, “Yes, you can tell she’s her father’s daughter.”
Only later when I was in the yellow crib they had painted and safe under the mosquito netting he asked her why. “Why did you stop pushing?” And ever since I was a little girl my toes have curled up in delight at her answer. “Because I didn’t want it to be over.”
She loved me. She loved me so. As she ached and groaned and delivered me up into this world she was already savoring every moment with me. Her only ever daughter.
We would grow together and apart and back together again over the next 18 years and I would inherit her name, her passion for story, and her fair skin. But I would never be able to ask her about that moment. I would never have the chance to compare labors with her. But I would get to watch her be brave.
Eighteen years to the day after she gave birth to me, we would talk long about dying. And she would tell me, she was not scared. She would tell me, that this is love – to be trusted with suffering. She would labor long and hard for Him.
And a week after I turned 18, He would deliver her.
Thirty six today and I still bear the stamp of Zululand on my soul. I carry the rhythms of Africa in my heart and watch them celebrated in my sons. And I give her name to my firstborn and pray her courage for myself. My youngest bears her fair skin and Dutch genes and we celebrate wildly what she would have loved about them. Because birth-days are always about life. And life is always about Him.
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Discovering you, discovering this online space, discovering your stories, your hearts, your laughter – well, it was a lot like coming home. And for this travel weary girl who dreams of white picket fences and stability, that is something special.
You. You are the special.
To me, you are deep-fried, delicious friendship sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. You are tight, tight hugs in the wee hours and double helpings of ice-cream topped with bursting red strawberries. You are understanding and acceptance and a warm blanket on a cold night.
You are the snuggie of friendships.
And you should keep reading over at (in)courage today where I am sharing how amazing I think you all are and am giving away a $100 gift certificate. Yup, you are and I am!
See you over there!
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It’s not always how you might imagine.
I think cupcakes are very effective. But not as effective as sharing stories of failure.
Admitting we don’t have it altogether and that some days motherhood makes us feel just plain inadequate on every level. Showing our scars and the stories behind them. More importantly confiding how we emerged and lived to tackle another day.
Laughing. Loud and long and late into the night.
Stopping in the middle of everything – boiling over potatos and hamburgers on the grill – to really, truly listen to something a son is trying to share.
Encouraging.
Letting a friend cry without shame for as long as she needs to – with you.
And cupcakes. Always with the cupcakes.
OK, your turn.
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My mom used to take us out of school to go and see movies she considered important. That’s how I saw White Nights and the Back To The Future series. We would immerse ourselves in the stories and talk for hours afterwards about the characters, their choices, and what we might have done differently. I would emerge from the movies full of life and dreams and popcorn kernels lodged in between teeth.
To this day I find my childhood self every time I set foot in a movie theater.
When I am tired or weighed down by the everyday-ness of everyday. When I wonder why I am where I am. I am always able to rediscover parts of my story through watching parts of someone else’s.
A friend made time for me tonight. At almost no notice at all. And we sank into the depths of a story and spent time wading through its layers and wondering out loud how it could have missed the heart of the heart of the story that is the beginning and ending to every tale ever spun and every life ever lived. Because buried under every narrative it is always there, urging a more nuanced look at ourselves. It begins and ends with love. And at the center, comes an epic sacrifice from a Carpenter. The quintessential every man who is more than any man.
Who one quiet day in September called my mom to come follow Him home, and she did.
That is the part of her story I can’t read yet. How my mom knows more about Him now than she ever could have when we tried to map out what it would be like. That as much as she tried to “explain” the Back to the Future timeline to me, the continuum of eternity eluded us both. But how certain she was that dying is never the end of the story, just the middle. How the good guys win and the hero does saves the day and the gut wrench that comes with saying good-bye only hurts from this side of the chapter.
I have almost every one of her books.
They line my house with memories of how we tried to unravel the mysteries of love and death and the life to come.
We searched for truth in every nook and cranny of every story, no matter how unlikely the source.
Because we were convinced that the Logos resides in every tale, every dream, every bit of broken truth that is merely a shard of mirror reflecting back the Word that sustains all things.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. John 1:1-4.
He is both my once upon a time as well as my happily ever after and I scour stories in search of the Word.
Sometimes in the dark of movie theaters, sometimes in the wrinkled pages of books that are as familiar as old friends, and sometimes at my computer screen reading your heart. Everything I read – everything – testifies that we are made in His image, an image cracked down the center and in desperate need of repair. We cannot eat our way there, we cannot travel our way there, we cannot love our way there, we cannot hope our way there …..
we can only surrender.
And let Him complete the work– the story– that He began in us.
“Child,” said the Voice, “I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own.” — C.S. Lewis (The Horse and His Boy)
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