I'm all cozied up at the Starnes' tonight, because sometimes I just need to remember what it feels like to be part of a family in a house full of people...so I get in my car and come here for a night or so. I've spent the day working on various to-do list items, and now the house is quiet and all the littles are in bed. I went out and got some wood, started a fire, brewed a cup of peppermint tea, and sat down with a new book. I finished Wobegon earlier today. I left home yesterday knowing I'd probably finish it so I tossed the next book in my purse just for good measure. There's always reading to be done. I'm about a fifth of the way through now, and I am absolutely convinced you need to read this book. It is a collection of essays, compiled by Hope Through Healing Hands, and it was given to me at the Mobilizing Medical Missions conference last weekend when I attended a seminar on Healthy Timing and Spacing of Pregnancy in the Developing World. The essays are written by men and women from vast and varied callings, occupations, and places in the world--all uniting under one banner: Worldwide Maternal and Infant Health. Jim Wallis, Jenny Allen, Natalie Grant, Tony Campolo, Rachel Held Evans, Jennifer Nettles, Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu...the list approaches fifty unique voices and writing styles. As a future midwife, I have a unique calling into the world of maternal and infant health, but I believe each of us is called to care about this issue, no matter our other unique callings or occupations. One of my greatest passions is teaching & mobilizing. I have this constant nagging voice that says you can help a few--maybe a thousand--but if instead you teach & mobilize a few--a thousand--to teach a few, a thousand more...the impact will be a million-fold. So when I read David Steven's essay "Transforming the World," I got so excited. He and one nurse convinced a few local Kenyan volunteers to become Community Health Leaders. They were then each asked to recruit 7 volunteers to be trained under them, to go into the villages (each volunteer covered 100 huts) and encourage every household to change FIVE behavioral health practices (build a latrine, eliminate standing water, immunize their children, space their pregnancies, and have a source of clean water). The organization now reaches a million people through local volunteer efforts and has SINGLEHANDEDLY eliminated many of the preventable diseases Dr. Stevens was treating in his mission hospital just five years ago. You guys. We do not have to be paralyzed by the needs in the world. Get your feet wet Upstream, roll in the mud a little Downstream--we need people of all kinds in both places. The one place we are forbidden by God is the place of indifference. When the earthquake stuck Haiti in 2010, hundreds of thousands of people were killed and 1.5 million people were made homeless. The downstream people raced around Port-au-Prince in all sorts of fashion and many others flew in from all ends of the earth. And they did what they could to help injured people strewn all over Port. And the upstreamers sat at home or in their university offices and determined that the earthquake DIDN’T really kill people and make them homeless. They determined that bad construction, faulty zoning, widespread corruption, and a feudal land owning system were the culprits. We have such immense resources at our disposal, and I'm not merely talking financial/tangible resources. We have educated minds; the ability to make choices; encouragement and support systems that enable us to keep going when the going gets tough. These are intangible resources that people in developing nations often go without. Most of the time, they want to help their own people--they are plenty motivated. If we can teach them how, and give them the resources to do it, they will. They're humans just like us--what they lack is not character, stamina, willpower, or diligence. Many times, they simply lack the knowledge (education) of how to improve their conditions; many other times, they lack adequate tangible resources. To illustrate this point, I'll share an excerpt from Jenni Allen: I have a good friend named FeeFee in Haiti. She pops popcorn every day for her kids. I pop popcorn for my kids when they come home from school. She pops popcorn and sells it bag by bag for her kids to be able to go to school. FeeFee's kids don't need sponsorship. She's taking are of them. What FeeFee needs is not for us to come in and rescue her with our money. That we have an opportunity to be a part of sustainable and worthwhile solutions excites me. However, when I think of all the different sorts of lives I could live in the next 70 years, there is one that seems to keep threatening to wrap its tangly tentacles around my soul: The Life of Comfort, with The {The Illusion of} Safety. Pretty soon, I'll be making a decent living. I'll have a lot of options regarding how I do life. My prayer is that I never settle into comfort and that when I do, God will make me uncomfortable very quickly. Comfort is my idol, and it's a subtle one.
But extravagant love isn't usually very comfortable. It looks a lot like loving enemies and risking humiliation and embracing the fact that the world is NOT safe and that my life is not more valuable than my neighbor's. I saw Bob Goff a few times last weekend, and he kept reminding us: "You don't save people to Jesus. Jesus saves people to Jesus." THAT is freeing me. Jesus saves people. Period. All my little boxes of safety and comfort and saying the right things at the right times--I can be free from all of that. I don't have to worry. I'm asked to love extravagantly, sacrificially, and then wait for Jesus Christ Himself to open blind eyes and soften hard hearts. And so, I am free to live on mission and to make a dent in the preventable problems plaguing our kind. So are you. I think if we start with Mothers (and I believe every woman, childless or childbearing, has a Mother's heart), we'll watch a world of healing unfold begin to grow...igniting Life.
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I was writing a birthday letter to a friend this morning, and after I signed off with a heart and JJ and xoxo I noticed the Blank Space on the back of the insert. Blank Space calls for the help of the little Book of Quotes that lives on the nightstand, next to my bed. I remember the day I found it or, rather, the day it found me. It was a dreary day in Carnforth, England, and the skies were drizzly. My friends and I had left The Castle and taken the little shuttle into town, and we passed by a small bookstore whose windows were all glowy and inviting. Naturally, we popped inside. It was a quaint and cozy place that smelled of old books and the English countryside, so we stayed a while. The only of its kind, I saw this brown suede-bound journal on a table and thumbed through its pages. "What is your purpose, little book?" I wanted to ask it. A Lifetime of Words. Yes. Just, yes. I paid the grey-haired man at the counter and tucked it into my purse. Back at the castle, I flipped to the inside of the back cover and scrawled "Est. Fall 2011 @ Capernwray."
So here we are, four years later, and the little thing is still alive and well. If you've ever found a letter from me to you in your mailbox and there happened to be a quote somewhere in the Blank Space at the end of the words, you can be assured the little Book of Quotes made the contribution.
This morning, I was flipping through its pages searching for the right words to fill the Spaces, and I landed on something Oscar Wilde once said: It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.
Nature Valley recently published an ad wherein they asked some parents and grandparents a simple question: "what did you do for fun, when you were a kid?" The answers were things like "built forts! rode bikes! played outside with friends!" Then, they asked a handful of kids the same question. The music turned forlorn, as the kids said things like "I play video games at least 6 hours a day." "I text." "I would DIE without my tablet." The parents and grandparents were then shown video clips of their kids' answers to the question. Tears welled up in eyes. "Nature is a part of childhood," the ad-man says. He's talking to...us.
You know what else is a part of childhood? BOOKS. Words. Reading. They're a part of childhood, and they're a part of life-hood. Books shape our lives. They give us a window into the mind and creativity of another person; transport us into the worlds of characters we'd never know, friends we'd never meet.
Dear ones: we get to choose what our minds learn. Words pass our eyes, get computed by our brains and then embed themselves into our souls. Our psyches are compilations of All The Things we've seen and heard and read and written. Our actions, then, do not exist inside a vacuum. The things we DO and the way we see the world directly correlate to the worldviews we've allowed ourselves to ingest. If we're reading garbage, we'll treat people like garbage. If we're reading about people who do their best to be kind; who learn lessons; who take time to hear the stories of their friends, we will do the same. We learn How to Do Life and How the World Works from the characters in our books and from the authors who create them. Our knee-jerk reactions, "what we are when we can't help it," are syntheses of the habits we've cultivated--of the words we've read and written and spoken over and over and over again. WE HAVE A CHOICE IN THIS MATTER. Let's make an effort to keep Good Books on our shelves. More than that, let's keep them in our heads and hearts. Most of us don't have to read. We're out of school, and teachers aren't assigning chapters, and life is freaking busy. Too busy for books, probably. But is it? I don't think so. Here's what I think: I think there is exactly enough time for the Important Things in our lives. And I submit that Books Are Important. There will always and forever be moments where we can't help what we will be, and we should prepare our reactions for those moments like it's our JOB. If we practice being kind and nuanced and compassionate...and if we read about characters who are practicing to be that way, too, then most of the time we'll react accordingly. Since we don't have to read, let's choose to do so anyway. Let's be the ones clinging to words that have shaped society and culture and hearts and reactions for hundreds of, thousands of, years. The World is getting too busy for books. And if you watch the news at all, you've probably concluded its getting too busy for Kindness, too. I bet the two go hand-in-hand. Let's read the Good Stuff when we don't have to so that we can be the Good Stuff when we can't help it. |
hey, i'm jordan.wife to one, mama to four, bible-believing christian. Archives
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