Ask Me Where I Was

As I've mentioned before, we've had a lot of conversation lately about how we are called to love and serve the poor as Christ did, and wrestling with what exactly that might look like in our everyday lives. There's an incredible organization, Servants, that has sent people to the slums of urban Asia to live with and love the poorest of the poor. They literally live in the slums with these people, establish relationships with them, help determine their needs, and help enable them to resolve those needs as a community. What they are doing is incredibly inspiring, yet convicting at the same time, because they are truly serving the least of these. I was browsing on their website and came across this poem that was actually written after a Servants member's trip to Sudan - I was nearly in tears by the end, and all I could think about was those sweet children, how much they need, and how little I have done.

Ask me where I was.

And still I hear it
on and on
in the hidden corners of my mind
that eternal scream
which echoes
down the corridors of time,
refusing to be silenced
it accuses me
of passivity, thus
an accessory to crime.

And still I see it
that spreading stain
a wound that never heals
that bloodied mud
that asks me where I was
that asks me what I saw:
all the children dying
in the hidden corners
of a distant foreign famine,
in a small forgotten war.

So I pray my prayers
I pay my tithe
I read my Bible every day,
I live in plenty
I sleep in peace,
and offer praises to Our God:
that though you are there,
I am here,
and so your pain is far away,
a different world
I pray to never know;
for I hope to live a blessed life
where my hands are clean,
my heart stays pure,
and there'll be no stains on me.

And yet, and yet,
there are those awful moments
unguarded and unbidden
when your screams finally reach my ears
and you ask me if my Jesus
really is the same Jesus
that was tortured for his faith
crucified for his love,
and there are those awful moments
I finally see the terror in your eyes,
and you make me wonder
if He will one day ask me
where I was and what I saw
when His children were all dying
in a distant foreign corner
in a small forgotten war.

[Kristin Jack is the Asia Coordinator of Servants]

Slacker

I am a slacker blogperson, I know. The last month or so has been crazy/hectic/busy - full of good things, but simultaneously exhausting. Every day I think to myself, "well, I should probably think of something to blog about," but I get to the page and it just seems too darn brain-cell-consuming to put together a coherent, thoughtful, post. Haha. I'm still working up to one of those, so here is a summary of the last few weeks. In bullet form. Full sentences are hard.

• Spent 10 days having fun in Chicago and relaxing on the lake in Wisconsin with the Egyptians. Sometimes I take for granted how blessed we are to have such an amazing, inspiring, fun, weird family.
• Got to see Wicked in Chicago - absolutely amazing, want to see it again. Still listening to the soundtrack in my car.
• Ate tons of delicious food on trip and enjoyed being outside in the summer without feeling disgustingly sweaty and in need of a shower. Wore a sweatshirt on the 4th of July. It's the little things...
• Had tons of fun doing nothing productive with Scott on trip. It's not often we get to do that.
• Got back from trip and got the keys to our new house! (Pictures coming once things are presentable and non-tornadic)
• Realized how weird it was to be away from church/people for two weeks and how that group of people is really beginning to feel like home.
• Went to practicum orientation for school - quite exciting!
• Had many evening family interviews for work, meetings, etc. I miss getting home at 5:30 and staying there!
• Hung out with some friends we are getting closer to, had some important discussions
• Packed and moved [most of] our stuff from the apartment to the house! It's 1940s charming, but lots of quirks and little things that need attention. Nothing in the refrigerator, so have been living off of Starbucks, Subway, and pizza. Want to cook something. Living between places is strange.
• Bachelorette party, got to see a good friend get married and be oh-so-happy.
• More moving, unpacking - finding places for things is not my forte. It is not so fun to step over things in every room and have no idea where to start. Slightly overwhelmed and disoriented...it doesn't bother me as much as it does Scott, however...we all know his obsession with order. Poor guy.
• Saw The Dark Knight...Heath Ledger was phenomenal in his role but incredibly freaky. Awesome movie, though.
• Drove to Denton to see the brother-in-law's drum corps competition. Who knew marching band could be so cool? (Yes Jessica, it's sort of like Drumline but without the drum fights and flips).
• Made plans for Project Runway parties. Yay!
• The parents and brother are coming this weekend - that should help to alleviate some stress. My mom is great at saying, it's not that bad, let's start here. Yay parents.
• In 10 days - trip to Austin to see my girls who I miss so dearly!! Can't even tell you how excited I am for silliness, Sex & the City episodes, dessert, and wacky conversations.
• Weekend after that - trip to Indianapolis for drum corps championships. Haha.

So, all good things, just very, very busy, and a bit tiring emotionally. Every night is filled or scheduled with something, yet I feel like I am out of the loop with friends and like I have lots of catching up to do. Can I hit pause for a minute?

How do you measure a year?

10 points to those who got the cheesy Rent reference.

Scott and I celebrated our first anniversary at the beginning of this month, and while we ate the top tier of our cake and relived all of the great memories from our wedding one year earlier, we couldn't get over how quickly this year has gone. In fact, it hasn't felt like a year at all (although I guess that's a good thing...it would be a bad sign if we were going, ACK, it's ONLY been a year???). When we were little, the idea of "a year" was so out of reach, so beyond my level of comprehension, that it seemed like "next year" would never come...yet here we are. I now understand what all those adults were saying over the years - "Enjoy it, it'll fly by before you know it;" "Watch it, you'll wake up one day and 20 years will have gone by." So true. It's so easy to go through life every day, doing the steps, performing the motions, without actually living it. How scary is it that we can wake up one day and wonder where an entire year went? In light of this realization, I have vowed to at least try and reflect more often on where life is headed, what I learned today, what God might be trying to teach me through the moments that I may see as insignificant. Hopefully, instead of waking up next year, maybe I'll simply go to sleep tomorrow thinking, "I lived this day."

I'm rambling, so in celebration of one year of happy marriage (even a year later, it still sounds strange to say "marriage" in relation to myself), new friends, and growth, here are a few of the highlights:

1. Clearly the wedding :) But aside from that, getting to experience each day's highs and lows, serious discussions about life and where ours should be heading, and lots of ridiculously silly moments, with my very best friend...it has been such a blessing to get to a different level of knowing a person you thought you already knew so well.
2. Moving to a new city in which I knew 4 people and making it (definitely with many bumps and moments of "what on earth am I doing here?", and in large part due to Scott's persistent encouragement and the help of those mentioned in item#3).
3. Making new friends - these people have made this year not just less hard, but great for me. I was so worried about being able to do this a year ago, and I've already found friends who challenge me and whom I trust deeply.
4. Keeping up with my best friends from Trinity and elsewhere, seeing where life is taking each of them, and continuing to be there for each other every step of the way.
5. Every Tuesday night (related to #3).
6. New perspectives - God has used my new friends, our church, and various other things to get me thinking in new ways, and I think my goals and life in general are headed in a direction I wouldn't have considered or even been aware of in June 2007.
7. Wine and boardgame nights with Hannah and the mod crew.
8. Dreaming, musing, and making crazy plans with Scott for what we will do in the next 20 years.
9. Making friends with the best 18 month old ever.
10. Realizing that the saying, "You can do anything for a year" is absolutely true. Case in point: my job...1 year of the purple suit down!
11. Gmail's Chat feature and being able to stay up to date daily with some of my best friends (shout out to the group chat crew, thanks for getting me through this year at work).
12. Learning to allow myself to be open to others - friends, family, God - to speak into my life. I don't, and shouldn't, have to make life decisions or bear the burden of worry by myself, and how precious that feeling of community is.
13. Happy hours with Hannah and the mod crew.
14. Pushing myself, and letting myself be pushed to consider new options for my life that are outside of my "Plan A." And Plan B, or C, or whatever it is I'm on at the moment, is shaping up to be so much better.
15. Discovering Freddy's Frozen Custard (mostly with Hannah, working on the mod crew).

So, here's to a year, and here's to the next :)

We Must Go

There has been a lot of discussion going on in recent weeks - in church, among friends, in my head - about what exactly it looks like to live out our responsibility to serve the least, last and the lost in our everyday. We have been wrestling with what it means to be truly present and available to a community of people whose needs are so tangible and whose struggles sit right on their doorstep (if they have a doorstep) for all to see every single day. What it means to live a life of service and compassion instead of acting it out one or two days a week. What it means to love without strings attached, without agenda, in word AND in deed.

Scott recently attended a conference in Nashville for people in the healthcare field who want to serve the poor and underserved in their respective communities. They talked a lot about community development and gave examples of communities that have been literally transformed and given a new start by people who cared enough to go there. Scott came back more excited and passionate than I think I've seen him, and as he enthusiastically explained their philosophy to me, I got excited as well. These doctors, social workers, nurses, public health workers, whoever, picked one of the most dangerous, poverty-stricken, gang- and drug-ridden neighborhoods in Memphis and established a huge clinic that now performs approximately 80,000 patient visits a year. That's great. But the truly remarkable part comes next: after several years of working in this area, establishing relationships with people, and making themselves available to people who needed them, a group of them got up and moved. Moved. To the ghetto. A bunch of white, formerly suburban, Ivy League-educated physicians got their wives and children together and moved to one of the most desperate and dangerous places in the United States.

Because they went there, they were able to get to know the people in the neighborhood, form real-life relationships, and show this broken, desperate community that they were going to live right alongside them. After a time, kids would stop by and hang out at the house with the doctors' kids. After-school programs were started, as well as skills classes for adults and teenagers. Gardens were planted. Parks and buildings were revitalized. Families were taught how to manage their money, take ownership of their careers and houses. People were taught that they mattered.

This all sounds amazing, doesn't it? To actually get up, stop just singing (see video in last post), and go? It's tricky, though. It's all well and good to sing every day about what we need to do or how to do it, but it's a whole different thing entirely when you are confronted with actually doing it. Going requires a complete renovation of priorities, ambitions, and thinking. I definitely believe that the willingness to make that kind of life change is only something that God can put in our hearts. And He can do that in so many different ways - I realize not everyone is called to move into gang territory and live next door to drug dealers. But what an amazing inspiration.

How do we know when, where, or how, we're supposed to go? I have no idea, but I'm praying that at least being aware of the need is a good start. It's a struggle, a process, that has to be cultivated and grown. We know that it has to happen - we know that we're not just supposed to sing. But just singing can be easy...Going is not.

Keep us from just singing

LOVE this song...it encompasses perfectly so much of what I've been wrestling with lately...more to come.

Music Defines

I love how our lives are defined by music. 3EB's Semi-Charmed Life came on the radio the other day, and Scott and I yelled simultaneously, SOO 8th GRADE! I'm always amazed at the power a single song, melody, chorus, or phrase has to instantly scoop us up and put us right back in a memory of a summer, a relationship, a state of mind. For example,

Alanis - pretty much ANY song from Jagged Little Pill, aka the album of my adolescence, puts me right back on the bus to and from Jakarta International School. My friends and I listened to Ironic, Learn, and that song about the poor kid whose parents expect too much from her (shout out to Hannah for our angsty road trip sing-a-long to this song!)

Duncan Sheik - Barely Breathing. This was the first song I remember hearing on American radio after we moved back to the States. I listened to it over and over, probably in hopes that it would make me a normal American 8th grader, ha.





John Mayer - Split Screen Sadness. Oh man, straight back to junior riding around with Navita, when we would vent about our "tragic" boy situations. How sad were we??







Gavin DeGraw - Just Friends - countless sing-a-longs with JMo and Jaz










Matt Wertz - Sweetness in Starlight - on the first CD Scott gave me. Sorry to cheese it up.

So there you go, I suppose this might be the soundtrack of my life thus far. What music defines your memories?

Heartbreak

Disaster doesn't even begin to describe it. These pictures speak for themselves. After we had watched the devastation unfold from Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar over the past couple of days, Scott and I went to visit our friend Mar, a Burmese woman who owns our favorite Thai restaurant with her husband, Issi (he is Thai). When we got to the restaurant, we were greeted by Issi and his 12 year old son, and they informed us that Mar had suffered a heart attack earlier in the week. Half of her family is still in Burma (as she still refers to it), and she has been unable to contact them because lines are down and the government is limiting access to telephones, so naturally when Mar found out about the extent of the damage, she reacted strongly. She came downstairs to say hi, and I've never seen such profound fear and pain in someone's eyes.

Over 100,000 people are dead, and the world watches helplessly as the death toll climbs and the government exists in its iron-fisted, heartless bubble. This really makes me take a step back from my "gigantic" (read: tiny) problems that look so trivial in light of the devastation that overwhelms these people's lives. My heart aches for Mar and her country, and I know God is weeping with us as we watch.