Normal Day

Monday.

We begin normal life again today.  Laundry.  Shopping for food.  Taking J to Taekwon Do.  Pulling the weeds.  Our life is rarely glam and travel.  Actually, never glam.

Normal has a new nuance though.  Everything I do is post-India.  And in my head I am, indeed, thinking that as I go about.   When I do laundry, I can hang dry my clothes and know that they'll dry today.  When I shop, I don't have to shoo flies away from tomatoes.  When I drive my son to his class, I can stay inside the lane lines and trust others to do the same.  When I put my hands to the earth it won't be layered with defecation and trash.  I can put it to my nose and smell it.




I heard a horn this morning some distance down Broadway. And in that quiet moment, it took me back to the mornings in the flat on Shivalik.  On our quiet street, the occasional horn would alert me that others were stirring. The fruit vendor sounding out his call from his wooden cart.  The housekeeper letting herself in to wash yesterday's dishes. Metal cups and plates rattling.  Stale air reminding me that two showers would be on the day's agenda.

Most friends held the expectation that this would be a life-changing trip.  That when we arrived back we'd be different.  Perhaps startled into a new way of living or guilted into something more simplistic.  Perhaps that's true a little.  But for me it was life enhancing.  Everything that I do here, my friends in Delhi do there.  She can cook a fabulous Italian dinner or homemade chicken soup if she wants to.  She can get her clothes pressed for 80 rupees.  She can stop at the market for milk and eggs and bread.  She can sit in a coffee shop.  She can call home.  At the core, we live similar lives.


What I'm left with is the feeling that life is the same everywhere.  Mine may be easier, cooler, cleaner and for that I can be very grateful, but all of humanity wrestles with the same F's:  food, fuel, faucets, feces, fodder, financing.  And so we are tied together by our similarities rather than torn apart by our differences.

I move through my normal day feeling the rhythm of Delhi; sometimes I am chaos too.

Day and Night

God in the Yard: Week Eight

"Morning never seemed that astonishing until I started going outside at night... My senses woke to things that day, in her bustle and brilliance, had eclipsed.  A variation of experience highlighted contrasts, deepening the separate experiences of sunup and sundown.  One informed the other.  In these changing contexts I felt like a different person, more raw and attuned at night, more bold and curious by day.  I became more comfortable trying on these different selves." -- L.L. Barkat

This has been my India experience.  Life in the U.S. being day and life in India being night for so many reasons.  Night is something you just move through, even closing your eyes so that it goes faster.  Night is simply where you wait for the day.  But I had to walk through the night, eyes wide open.  And there were details in the night that I took note of.  When I did, night looked a little different.  And day grew that much brighter.


The boy in the day care with the scabs on his face was still a boy who liked to play Legos.  The family in the hot one-room apartment where we painted next door still nuzzled their baby and kept her cool, asleep in just her diaper. The boys in the childrens' home without a family still buzzed and played and bounced exactly the way my boys do.  We don't play and nuzzle and buzz because we live in the light of day; we do these things even with night all around us.  Because our human spirit knows that too much night will never grow a thing.


We in the day like to live only in the day.  We push away the night.  It either frightens or bores us.  But those who live in the night know how to live in both.  They are tenaciously unafraid. 

I have seen the night... sickly water, putrid trash heap, choking stench, hopeless shrine, burning body, beggers at every idle window, t.b. patient leaving life, fly-covered woman lying in the roundabout, babies asleep on concrete, men peeing in the field outside the train, long judging stares, police with machine guns, pushing...

But I also saw the day peeking through...families, beautiful careful dress, simplicity, pragmitism, conserving energy, finding solutions, old men worried I'll trip, helpful police, thorough tour guide, the pastor's wife who offered me chai, the children who want their photo with you, the people of God's church in India, showing them the iphone photos of snow, sensibility. 

And home, I suspect will feel brighter, less weighty.  Night informs day.  My night self encourages my day self to be bold and confident, to look for the beauty among the ashes.  And my day self can look at the night with less sorrow.  Both belong to God's rhythm.  He is everywhere still.

To Listen, To Sense, To See

I'm going to India in a week and a half.


Anxious.

As much as I want to prepare myself in some way, I can't.  I've checked out books about India from the library and returned them unread.  I've briefly reviewed Hinduism, but I took a whole course in college.  And, honestly, I'm not really sure that I should reschool myself in it for this trip.   My time has actually been spent reacquainting myself with the God that I already know. In some sense I'm setting myself up for an experience that will simply happen to me, like jumping in a lake and emerging drenched in an element that I don't normally exist in.  Floating in it.  Letting it carry me.

I have tried to cram 11 weeks of summer (and maybe a couple years of life) into about 6.  I've gone room by room, closet by closet, putting things in order.  All the appointments that needed to me made (well-child, dentist, travel vaccines, eye exam, the specialist I've been putting off) have been made and just about completed.  Lesson plans have been created up through Thanksgiving.  Family photo albums done to a point.  Women's retreat planned and organized for when I return.  Hacked bank account dealt with.  We've even met with a lawyer to put our living trust, will and powers of attorney together.   I'm definitely getting things done, but I'm not really present in them.

I've spent the whole summer making things happen.  In some ways it has actually been the most intentional time of my life.  Looking deeply at my children when they talk to me. Calling my son when he's home alone.  Taking them places for quality time.  Letting go of other normal summer stuff so I can just be with them playing catch, watching them play, spurring them on, swimming at the pool. When I'm with them, I'm fully present and I know it.

Am I afraid?  Am I putting my affairs in order as a result of that fear?  Am I drinking in my kids because of it?  Or am I anticipating that life will be different when I return to such an extent that I'm taking note of life as it is now?  Is all my preparation so that I can re-enter with a new set of eyes?  I can begin again with no loose ends to drag me back to what was.  I can simply jump off and move forward. 

Maybe a little of both.

Pray for us as we go and wrestle alongside an indigenous pastor who doesn't quite grasp a God of grace.  We'll pray with those wives who need love for the churches their husbands are leading.  We'll come face-to-face with sex trafficking in action; smell the slum; intervene for the sick.

And we'll also see the restoration that is already being done through charitable works, engineering and church planting... to see what God is doing through his church to end poverty.

Please pray for us to have eyes to see this part of the world as God sees it, to purposefully associate with a culture opposite from our own to make connections and exhibit grace.

And to return made new and fully present.

Formative Play

God in the Yard, Week 5

For the summer, we've declared Fridays to be Outdoor Day.   All this boy energy must have an outlet.  And all this preoccupation on my part must be balanced with the here and now.  I am going to India soon, but I'm not gone yet.  My sons ought to feel my presence.

And so, on Fridays we play with intention out in creation.  The lakeshore beach.  The community pool.  A little hike.  A little bike ride.  This photo was in a bicycle built for four.  J is in the driver's seat.  S's feet are dangling, along for the ride.

It's amazing how difficult this day of play was.  These vehicles are not easy to maneuver. Sometimes, B got out and pushed.  Sometimes we stopped and switched drivers.  We all had to do it together.  And we enjoyed the adventure.

I've been trained, perhaps trained myself, to think that growth happens more through suffering than through play.  I think this is based on a persistent human desire to explain suffering.  If the pain is useful, then I can endure it.  Consumer that I am, at least there's something in it for me.  And that is true in at least some of it's intents and purposes.

It has never occurred to me to think of play as a growth vehicle.  It is silliness, juvenile, appropriate only occasionally.  That's how I think.  I do, however, enjoy watching my children engage in it...immensely.  And it dawned on me this week why that is:  because they learn when they play.  Their play is how they grow.  And watching them grow is actually quite amazing.

In his or her first five years of life we attribute a child's ability to grow and develop to his or her freedom in playtime.  We bemoan the child who has never been camping, played ball, pretended to be a different character. We sense there is something missing from their experiences that won't give them enough momentum to push into life's next experiences.  This isn't an unsubstantiated theory.

But, apparently, this is not so for adults.  Why not adults?  Is there a switch that activates at 10 years old (the age when one son declared he was too old for playgrounds and superhero swim shorts and another son has poo-pooed VBS) in which the path of growth moves from play to work?  Isn't it another both/and?  We seem to think we ought to take away play and replace it with work and pain.  But I think we're missing half the cycle.  Or at least I'm beginning to think it.

When children engage in imaginative play they push the work of understanding the world more deeply into them. Whether playing house or Jedi knight, they are working out the truths of life in safe and controlled circumstances.   When J & B were younger I would intentionally stop our school day right after the days' lesson and give them some time to play because I knew that with the fresh imprint of the Revolutionary War or dinosaurs or flight they would take the Legos or Rescue Heroes out and incorporate scenarios in their play from what we had just talked about.  And the lessons grew solidly in their minds.  Play was their practice test.

In play the purpose of our ways is made clear.  We reveal our true selves when we allow our ego to be shoved aside and our curiosity to win.  It grows us.  So, why don't we value play?  Why don't we open ourselves up to less productive, more imaginative 'work?'  I think I've discovered something new to add to the summer.   Outdoor Day is a great first step, but my attitude toward it now might be freer, lighter and healthier as we head out to engage the world and let its imprint set deeply upon us.