The Ordinary Ones

I hear rumors of death. I see scorch marks on the road from burning tires, in a neighborhood I knew to be peaceful five years ago. A woman tells me that her husband’s brother was killed in a roadblock. A man tells me that a young girl was caught in a roadblock in a town I have driven through many times – raped, he said. A sugar shortage.  I hear that when people can’t find food, they eat bread and drink sugar water.  Until now, when the sugar is running out. She stands outside of the big white cathedral. A child, maybe eight years old. She is barefoot and eating something. What is it she is eating? There is no packaging. It is the color of earth, flat like a thick tortilla chip. What are you eating? I ask her. She breaks a piece off with her teeth. Dirt. She says. Dirt? I repeat. Does it taste good? Yes, it is salty, she says. Do you want some? I thought about it. Eat dirt to be in solidarity with this small child, to taste it, to know her suffering. Maybe. But what would it do to my s

We sat on the short cement stoop together. She talked. I listened. I had met her before and it was always the same. I couldn’t understand most of what she said. She was speaking so fast, rambling on. No pause for me to respond. Even if she did pause though, how would I respond when I understood very little of her words? Good thing she didn’t pause. I nodded, smiling at her. I can be present to her. Sit with her. Show her that she is worth my time. I can stop my day for her. Sometimes she looks away while she is speaking. Sometimes she looks directly at me, into my eyes. Sometimes touching my arm or my face. I’m not sure if she is all there. But she is here, and that’s what matters. Be present. I know she came from far away, walked here on foot, down the mountain. Someone took her home in a car to spare her feet and what was left of her shoes. She came back a few months later, on foot, down the mountain. Lather, rinse, repeat. Listen. Be present. And again, she came back, on foot, down

There’s been this feeling in the air recently – 2020 is almost over. The sun has not yet come up over the horizon, but the morning is here. We can see everything a little more clearly. We are waiting anxiously with baited breath. And despite the inevitable challenges that will come in 2021, it seems that we all feel a little bit of relief to see the end of this year that held so much difficulty in it.  But even as I want to rush ahead to the beginning of something new, to a year with a different number, the Lord has been reminding me of all the good He is doing here, now, today. Don’t get me wrong. The pandemic caused an international move for me. Multiple quarantines. Multiple moves and rearranged plans. The disappointment of unfulfilled hopes and dreams. Trying to navigate boundaries around travel and social distancing and exposure in two houses of multiple roommates. A couple weeks ago, I got an email about a canceled retreat I had planned to attend. More disappointment. And that on

Here we are, in the midst of a pandemic. Personally, my life has been uprooted and turned upside down by COVID-19. Just a few months ago, in March, I was living in Haiti again, expecting to be there for at least a few years. Now, here I am back in America, uncertain when I will be able to go back to Haiti, just waiting. For me, it's easy to feel discouraged, disappointed, and confused in the midst of all of this upheaval. Life has felt like a train wreck. In April, I paid way too much money for a flight into America after Haiti's airport had shut down, traveling with a way too thick mask that I had made myself from a foldable mask tutorial (stop giving bad advice internet!). I spent two weeks quarantining after traveling, worried that every time my throat tickled, I could have the virus, or that the anxiety I felt in my chest from "What's happening in my life?!" was a sign that I was about to be seriously ill. I tried to make the best of things. I learned to m

I don’t even know how to put to words what I am feeling right now. “What the heck just happened?” I imagine that’s what the apostles were feeling on this Holy Saturday many years ago. “I thought this would end differently.” “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” Being a foreign missionary in the time of the Coronavirus is a confusing, heart-wrenching, emotion-filled time. And yet there is beauty, hope. We have the gift of watching the Lord move, of hearing His voice in new ways, and of moving with Him when He asks us to move. I can’t say that my heart isn’t broken. It very much is broken. On March 19th, after celebrating the feast of St. Joseph with our local parish in L’Asile, Haiti, we received news that the Coronavirus had finally reached Haiti with two new confirmed cases. The borders were suddenly closed. No flights in or out. The procession from the crowded feast of St. Joseph The next day our community jumped into action. We made hand sanitizer and bleach water.

I remember sitting caffeinated, late at night, in the library with a friend in college, talking about foreign mission. One day, we could live in Africa, we said over our lattes and laptops. It seemed a glorious thing to me, this missionary life in a foreign country. At the time, I wanted to travel. I did have a true and real desire to love and live among the poor, but the rest of it was a dream, built on nothing – I had barely left the country then. In fact, I don’t think I had ever met a real live missionary. I had heard about mission trips, but never been on a foreign one. My imaginary life was just that, imaginary. A little more than a few years later, I was moving to Haiti to start a mission there with a few other people from an organization that I loved. I don’t think I could have admitted it then, but it definitely felt glorious. I had read a few books about missionaries, met some missionaries, been on mission trips, been inspired by the passion, zeal, and sacrifice of others

About five years ago, I went to a Theology of the Body conference where the speaker asked, "Are you a spiritual being?" After everyone started to say yes... He responded, "No! You are not a spiritual being. You are a HUMAN being. The angels are spiritual beings. You are not an angel. You are human. You have a soul AND you have a body." And you know what else? Being human is not bad. It's actually not a sin. You know who else was human? JESUS. And He never sinned. So being human can't be a sin. It's actually a good thing and a gift that God gave us. My body, my emotions, my intellect, they are all good, holy things. It's so easy, especially as a missionary, to live as if I am a spiritual being, and not a human being with a body, emotions, and a mind, as well as a soul. It's easy to live as if what I feel, think and need doesn't actually matter unless it is a spiritual thing. That is just simply not true! It's a big fat lie, okay? It is

I believe in wasting time. Wasting time in my personal life. And wasting time in ministry. When I look back at the best moments of my life, they were ones that didn’t accomplish anything. Sitting around a table, telling stories, laughter. Definitely laughter. When I look back at the best and most fruitful times in ministry, I also fully believe that those are the ones that would be considered wasted time. Like when my high school girls’ small group in Nashville would eat dinner together, usually resulting in stories, jokes, and laughter. Or sitting outside of someone’s house in Haiti, playing with kids, letting them tell us about their lives. Or playing a card game with teenagers on our porch in Haiti, before I could speak much of the language. Or jumping rope with the kids and our neighbors in Asia. What is the point? Relationship. Sometimes when I was a teacher monitoring the playground, kids would come and tell me little pieces of their story. How she stayed up all night wit

A month and a half ago, I came back from mission in Asia, after three and a half months. Many different things contributed to our early return, and after a lot of prayer and conversations, I decided not to go back to this particular mission. I still feel deeply called to foreign mission, and am taking some time to rest, then pray and discern where the Lord may be calling me next, for hopefully a longer amount of time. The view from the roof of our home in Asia How awkwardly difficult. I wanted to be the kind of missionary that could love Asia, the continent with the least amount of Christians, and a variety of incredibly different cultures. And while I won’t say that I didn’t love it, and that I couldn’t come to love it with time, I do feel very clearly that right now is not the time, and this was not the particular situation, in which the Lord is calling me to be a missionary in Asia. Maybe one day. A different season in my life with a particular kind of grace. It took a lo

We finally arrive at our house that we have been waiting for since we arrived in this country exactly one month ago. Pulling up in our van packed full with suitcases and belongings. Two guitars. Some kitchen items and storage. A yellow, blue, and green house. Smiling faces as we step out of our van. Women and children at the corner. A child hides behind his mother’s legs. Coming down the stairs from the rooftop. I walk around my friend who is staring over the wall at the neighbors, smiling. Pick up a coconut to see if we could find a tool to crack it open and drink the coconut water. I turn around again and see my friend standing in the same spot, still staring over the wall, still smiling. She hasn’t made a sound but her hands are moving. I stand on my tiptoes to look at the neighbors and their hands are moving too, smiling. - Days later, sitting on the floor of our living room. No furniture yet. Running water, check. Trying to eat our food before it goes bad since we don’t y

When I was 24 years old, I moved to Haiti, a small country in the Caribbean. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. To me, Haiti is a place where there is much suffering, but also much joy. I lived there for three years. Many times, I thought about how crazy it was that I was living my dreams in my twenties. Some people never get to pursue their dreams in their lifetime and here I was living it at my quarter century mark. What is next? I used to think. How could God possibly outdo Himself here? I thought that the Lord could be good to me only one time. My vision was so small. It took me three years after I left Haiti to trust the Lord for this next adventure. Now I am living on the other side of the world. A new community. A different organization. It is incredibly hard to be in a new place with a new community. But it seems that the Lord can outdo Himself. Not because this is better, but because once again, He has been good to me. He doesn't stop blessing

Making gestures with our hands. Three women in the family are deaf, so this is how we communicate. Somehow it has been easier than a foreign language. A fishing net. Shrimp. Their work is peeling or cutting shrimp after the fishermen bring them in. They ask us if we ate the shrimp they brought to our house. Not yet.. We try to communicate with our hands.. We don't know how to cook them. They try to tell us how with their hands. Put them in a pan with oil and spices. That's the best I can understand. Their mother is in her eighties, crippled and sitting in a chair. Her hands and feet are bent more out of shape than anyone I have ever seen before. They tell us that she had fallen and broken her shoulder at some point. Their father died in 1992. One of the women traces 92 with her finger onto the inside of her forearm. We are sitting in a two bedroom house, in one of the bedrooms which might be just an entryway. But it's where these three women, their mother,

Washing laundry in a blue bucket in the bathroom. I remember Timanet and Bibi who taught me to wash laundry in Haiti. All of us laughing as I tried to make the squelching soapy sound with my hands and my clothes in the water like they did every time clothes hit clothes. Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. I maybe succeeded a couple of times in the three years that I lived there. Maybe. Now, here I am again in my bathroom on the other side of the world with a bucket of laundry and some soap. This time, more than six years later, my bucket is tall and deep instead of wide and low. This time I sit on a low stool in a tile bathroom instead of on a cinder block under a tree. Last week my laundry came out smelling more dirty than clean. Such is life. Here there are banana trees, mango trees, coconuts, rice almost every day. It feels familiar to me. New but familiar. More familiar than dinner in a big city that costs more than $20 per person. Here I can eat for $2 or less. A simple life.

In the past ten years, I have lived in twelve different houses, in nine different cities, in three different countries. When I write it out, I can’t even believe that those are real numbers. I am very familiar with transition, and am in the midst of it right now… again. I am also an introvert. I love people, but in small doses. Intentional, quality, share-the-depths-of-your-heart time is where I thrive. This is sometimes hard to find in the pace of changing places, people, relationships. So I wanted to share some of the things I have learned (and am still learning) about what I think is one of life’s greatest challenges – transition. Things Not to Do: • Continually dig things out of your suitcase for the first couple of weeks while you run around like crazy. Avoid unpacking because it seems stressful. There will come a time when you spend fifteen minutes in the morning looking for something and then just go back to bed, with your suitcase spilling over, still unable to fi