The Place Between My Own Two Feet

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...

When I left Haiti a few years ago, I didn’t leave because I thought it was time to start a career, further my education, and settle down and be rooted.  In fact, in my last year of living in Haiti, I was more and more convicted that there is a real call in the Catholic Church to foreign mission, and that it is a call, and a burning desire, that the Lord has placed on my heart personally. Leaving Haiti was a step forward. I didn’t exactly see how the Lord would fulfill the desires He was placing in me, but I knew I had to take the next step. After I moved to Kansas, I remember going to mass and listening to the Gospel. When I heard Jesus say to His disciples, “Follow me,” or “Go, and make disciples of all nations,” there was a burning and aching within me. All of scripture is FULL of the call to mission – I couldn’t stop hearing it, even when I wanted to. During the past two years I have spent in Nashville, I have loved teaching. I have loved learning and furthering my own educa...

This winding, wandering road. It’s a beautifully crooked one that I thought I began to walk down one day in a moment of lostness, or because of the fickleness of my own heart. Now I wonder if it is a road that I have been on all along and just never noticed or had the eyes to see. The Lord who made this fickle heart, He is not a God who is angry at my wandering, feet, my feet that are muddy from the distracted playing under trees and in fields on the side of the road.  Instead, He rejoices as He walks with me down my wandering way.  He stops to play with me in a field of dandelions. His feet are muddy too. He lays down by the deserted highway to watch the stars come out on a cloudless night, so I don’t have to wonder alone at their majesty. He is not standing at the end of the road waiting to chastise me when I reach Him. He has been with me all along and He has expected my meandering. He is not surprised by it because He made my little restless heart and rejoices in my ...

For the past few years, I have been trying desperately to find the Lord in ordinary moments and ordinary places. After moving back to America from Haiti a couple years ago, I became convicted that I was missing something if I couldn’t find Jesus in these small and regular moments, and set out on a journey to find Him there. To be very real with you, I feel like I have largely failed. I have felt a very constant ache and thirst for the Lord. I feel like I am constantly missing Him. I feel like I need to do and to be more. But those could really be just feelings. At the same time, I know that He is here in the midst of my life. I can find Him in my heart when I pray. I can find him in my desperate prayers for patience while I am teaching. I can find Him when I am speaking with a student who is difficult but needs some love. I can find Him in worship or in the rosary while I am stuck in traffic. I can find Him in the community of teachers at my school and my grad school who are amazi...

There is a very important cardboard box in the back of my closet that I pull out from time to time to help me remember. Almost a year ago I came home from an interview with a wonderful mission organization that I deeply admired. The interview went well and I was in the interview process with another organization that I also had a missionary-crush on. Living a deeply missionary life has been my dream for a while now, and it still is a something that I hold very dear and ache for each day. But that day I came home from this interview with a need to map out a vision, large so that I could see it, touch it. There is a verse in the book of Habbakuk that has moved me since college. “Then the Lord answered me and said: Write down the vision; Make it plain upon tablets, so that the one who reads it may run. For the vision is a witness for the appointed time, a testimony to the end; it will not disappoint. If it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late.” Ha...

His sign said, “Hungry, anything helps.” He was standing at the corner of a street. I was in my car, driving from grad school to my elementary school where I was supposed to teach in a few minutes. Of course, I looked away at first, trying to justify myself because I was in a hurry and didn’t have much to share. Giving a man some granola just seemed like an insult. A few weeks before, I had passed someone and tried to give them half a cup of coffee and an apple, which they refused rather bitterly. Admittedly, half a cup of coffee is not the best gift, and an apple will not do much if you are hungry. But it was all that I had at the time, and the rejection left me a bit sour and hesitant to possibly be rejected again. “I never know what to do in these situations,” I thought to myself, frustrated as I oscillated between my instincts to help and my fear and questioning. But when the traffic was too heavy and the light turned red again, leaving me at the same corner for a couple mi...

This month marks a year since I left Haiti. It has been a year of aching, restlessness, discernment, confusion, and re-discovering truths about the Lord and His love for me in the midst of all the chaos. He has never left me. God is here. He is Father. He is good. In the past year, I have moved three times (four if you count a move from a dormitory to an apartment in the same town). These moves began when I moved from Haiti to Florida to spend time with my parents, then from Florida to Kansas to work at a boarding school, then from Kansas to Nashville, Tennessee where I have been for about a month and a half (with a quick flight to Uganda in the middle of the move, leaving all my personal belongings both in my car and at a friend’s house). This past year has felt crazier and more difficult than the three years I spent in Haiti. I have slept in many places, bought a car, paid my taxes, switched jobs and locations, and most recently started grad school. I have met new people, upon ne...

At the risk of sounding like I have it all together (because I don’t), here are some things I have learned in the past almost seven months of being out of missions. 1. Everyone needs some humble pie... even me. I have learned that I was never holier or better than anyone else just because I had the title of missionary. Since being in America, one of the most encouraging things has been meeting other Christians who are living with missionary hearts in the midst of the world. God very quickly showed me people who have deeper and more committed prayer lives than I do, and who have been living lives of evangelization much longer than I have. So alas, I must confess, I am not the bomb diggity that I thought I was .. unfortunately. 2. I will never stop being on a wild adventure with a loving Savior. Despite leaving a life of frequent transition, lots of community, multi-cultural living, and radical amounts of prayer . . . I am not done being a Christian. Jesus has never left me,...

Mariah (one of our summer volunteers) & Niva It is hard for me when we talk about the poor. I wouldn't want to be characterized and defined by my financial status, because there is more to me than how much money I do or don't make. So why do we do that to some people in the world? To be honest, I sometimes wonder if “the poor” or “people in 3 rd world countries” or any of those phrases should be used at all. Saying “the poor” is actually very impersonal. So I want to break that open today, and shatter it a little bit. Let me introduce you to some people I love. When I try not to waste food at a restaurant, it is not the poor that I am thinking about. I am thinking about Niva. Niva is a sixteen-year-old girl who lived a couple miles down the road from me in Haiti. Niva is very shy and sometimes covers her mouth and hides her face when she talks to me, which means I can’t hear what she says. I have to ask her to repeat herself often. When she repeats herse...

I often wonder if St. Therese was insecure. I don’t mean that as an insult to her. I mean it as a vulnerable window into my own soul. I connect with St. Therese because I love when she talks about her littleness. And I think, “Gosh, I thought I was the only one who feels this way almost every day.” Now I am beginning to wonder if it’s not all of us, or most of us at least. Or maybe it is the youngest child syndrome. In any case, the way St. Therese turned her littleness into a reason to have confidence in God rather than herself helps me to give meaning too to my own feelings of smallness. If I think, “I can’t do it,” well then, I know that I am right. But God in His infinite goodness, power, and might CAN do it, and will do it in me. Therese’s weakness becomes her strength, and I hope this will prove true in my life also. Today, I was reading about how St. Therese became the patroness of missionaries in 1927. I found myself in a moment of panic as I realized that I am not techn...