The House Collective

american pride.

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Being someone that spends most of my days in another country, I’m not overflowing with American pride.

Last week I actually posted about our Canada Day celebration, but failed to take any photos of our July 4 party; so according to social media I look like I have more Canadian pride.

Either way, it is so odd the things that make me miss America. It creeps up on you, and I suddenly feel a mix of pride and sorrow.

Today, it was two things. First, this Sizzler commercial from 1991 that is apparently re-sweeping the American public. I found it on one blog and Stephen found it on a different blog, so that’s weird. Besides being hilarious, there is a girl leaning against a tree at the 20 second mark that…I don’t know, makes me want to be a little girl in America?

Ironically, I hadn’t heard of Sizzler until we moved to Thailand, where they are in most every shopping mall in the major cities. And since they serve salad, which is a rare and precious treasure here, we go pretty much every time we go to the city. So I somehow watch a commercial for a restaurant I’ve only eaten at in Thailand and associated entirely with Thailand, but miss America.

Also, someone wrote an off-handed comment about Walmart’s school supply aisle being set up this week.

I don’t shop at Walmart if I can help it because since we moved here it has been the location of many-a-breakdown. However, this makes me really, really want to go buy school supplies. A bouquet of newly-sharpened pencils, if you will, and a few composition notebooks. A new box of crayons! And a pencil case, because I do still live in Asia.

on hope, yet again.

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If I could choose one word that God is continually shaping in me, challenging me with, and defining my life by, it would be hope.

It’s a tricky concept. I first encountered it in my political science studies; politics and development is a bit of a depressing field. And then I ended up here…so I guess it’s all fitting.

I hold onto Romans 8 as if my life depends on it; because many days my faith does. I lean on the fact that I am no different from anyone else or anything else when I sense the groan for something different. I rest in the fact that we are waiting for our adoption as sons; that we are witnessing only the first fruits and this is actually bondage. I anticipate the fact that these sufferings will not even compare to the glory revealed, and that by nature & rule, I hope in what I cannot see.

This is where I am currently ruminating yet again: the idea of hoping for what I cannot see.

I was talking with a friend over lunch, discussing how we stay “balanced.” There is an equilibrium to be reached. On one side rests all the hopes for God to do incredible things here, rejoicing the little smiles and joys and relationships; celebrating the “successes.” The other side lies all the sorrows–fights and abusive relationships; death and sickness and suffering; poverty; human trafficking.

To state the obvious, we always fighting for equilibrium. I think this is why it’s so difficult, though: first, we work in a sad place. I think it’s safe to say the sadness is more prevalent than our lives previously, but also more likely to come to our front door–quite literally. When your goal is to reach out to the sad crevices of your little border town, you’re inevitably going to see it more. And then, most significantly, the sorrows are so tangible. They are so real. They are real people, real relationships, real blood, real hunger, real traffickers and those being trafficked. You can’t deny it when it’s right there in front of you, at your door.

The hopes, the joys that bring us to open our door day after day, they are less tangible. We hope that God is answering our prayers for our little house church each week. We hope that these relationships are bringing hope and change and goodness. We hope that marriages are healing and abuse is less and children’s futures are bright. We hope that love, trust, safety, goodness, grace, and peace surround us and this home and these relationships.

But we just don’t know. We innately can’t–because by definition we hope in what we cannot see. For hope that is seen is not hope.

So when I try to find my equilibrium, I’m dealing with these hopeful-can’t-be-seen bricks on one side and these very-real-very-messy bricks on the other.

Most days I do okay. Somehow hope comes out on top, as just a little taste of it being what it is: HOPE.

But I have noticed that once I question it–just the slightest, tiniest doubt that I am hoping for nothing–and one side comes tumbling down to nothing. If I couldn’t see them before, now they actually are absolutely nothing. And those messy realities win.

———————————————

Perhaps a month ago, we were headed to the tea shop for our usual Sunday morning snacks & tea. As one of the women climbed out of the car at the market, she (and perhaps a few more) noticed that her zipper had split on her sarong. Just for a cultural context; you have a long sarong that you wrap around in front of you, and some of us “cheat” and get them sewn into a more proper skirt with a zipper. It is less risky for it falling off…until the zipper splits, I suppose. She was clearly embarrassed, as culturally this is a very, very big deal. I tried to search for a safety pin with no luck; I attempted a bobby pin, with clearly no luck (because it was an obviously bad idea). And then she resorted to carrying her friends little handbag on her hip to cover the spot.

It was awkward. Imagine having a button open on your shirt and carrying a small coin purse right in front of it to hide the gap, perhaps drawing more attention than if you just walked by with skin exposed.

A few minutes of this and I had another idea: my purse slings across my shoulder. While it generally hits her 4’10” frame at her knees, I could adjust it shorter to fit just over the split zipper.

I described my idea and we sorted it out on the side of the road while the other ladies blocked everyone’s view. And of course Stephen stood off to the side as if he didn’t know what was going on to make her feel the least uncomfortable.

Why do I tell you this story, in the midst of some jabber about hope?

Because I am holding on to this story, weeks later. She carried my purse all day; we giggled as we tried to communicate over the whole mess. Every time my phone would ring or buzz, we’d have to sort it out. Every time I needed money, she was required to know what i needed. We laughed and miscommunicated and stayed by each others’ side.

And it required trust in a new way: her trust for me to help her in an awkward situation, and my trust for her to have all of my valuables right by her side all day. We trusted each other.

I had hope for where these relationships might go and how God might use all the unseens bring such great glory to His name.

It’s a weird story. There are a lot of cultural implications that can’t be communicated. And maybe the idea that the day one of my neighbors’ skirts split was suddenly a deep connection point for us just seems odd to communicate. Almost as odd as the way I feel connected to the woman I helped to clean and shower after she was bloody and beaten up by her husband.

It’s not that we are living here waiting for weird situations, which might be what it looks like.

Instead, it’s trying to put tangibility into these complicated concepts of hope and trust and grace. Sometimes it feels like I am holding up these weird stories, trying to put a story, a feeling, or a moment of reality into so many unseen dreams and prayers and hopes.

Maybe it is a bit like the wind that we can’t see, but can see the effects of it (John 3:8). Or as Lu Xun wrote, “Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally, there is nothing–but as people walk this way again and again, a path appears.”

As we go over the stories and the faces again and again; a path appears to show us the unseen hope that pushes us forward.

my husband is awesome.

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A few weeks ago, Stephen offhandedly said he might create a new face for his Pebble watch that would use Burmese. It seemed a little ambitious.

A few days after that, on one of our Sabbath afternoons, he said he was going to work on this. Again, it seemed a little far-fetched to me: write your own coded system to have your little watch tell you the time in Burmese? There are so many things in this sentence I don’t really understand…

And then a few hours later, he showed me this!

img_0233

What?! I have no idea how he did it. But I’m pretty impressed.

Oh, and we are eating ice cream because the shop in town had mint chocolate chip as their June flavor-of-the-month! What?! Unfortunately, we don’t go there that often, so we didn’t learn this until 15 June, at which point we began significantly increasing our visits. Pretty sure we went more times in the last two weeks than we have since the shop opened a couple years ago…

But, hey, my husband is awesome. He deserves it 😉

i wanna go to school.

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We came across short film today and appreciated it for a few reasons. First, it’s a Burmese cartoonist, and we love local art! Second, this is a great depiction of why we do what we do. We live among this community in hopes of seeing the children stay in school & the parents working and providing healthy homes. Take a few minutes to support {our} local art and watch this short cartoon!

planting seeds & touring mansions.

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So we started a little home church in our community a little over a month ago. We’ve been sharing Bible stories and connecting them into the larger story of the Bible; sharing what we learn from them and different aspects of the character of God. We pray together, ask for prayer requests, and share a snack.

There are a lot of kids coming week after week, and we have some regular adults coming. We have a few new adults that come and check it out on occasion. We have some that just come for snacks.

Each week, we write out a new lesson. We write it out word for word, including passages taken from the Young Readers’ Version of the Bible. On Wednesday night we go to a local children’s home, where three high school-aged boys go over it with us, asking questions and working to understand it. They come to our house on Thursdays and take turns translating it and explaining the Scriptures and stories to our neighbors.

In some ways, it’s a dream coming true. We have gotten to know these three boys and helped them to understand their Bibles more than they have before. We get an opportunity each week to sit down with them and study each word, discussing the meaning and value of each story.

And then these boys help us to share these stories, share our hearts, and share our love to our neighbors. We are able to answer questions and share prayer requests. The neighbors can hear us pray for them each week as our prayers for them are translated.

And for us, we get to see Scripture in a new way; we get to pray for our neighbors with a new perspective.

In some ways, this is the loveliest thing we have done in the community. It embodies so much of what we love, from the discipleship opportunity with three teenage boys living in a children’s home to sharing our faith in an applicable way to our neighbors; even down to the soy milk that we buy from a local migrant school. The migrant school teaches the students to make the fresh soy milk, and it’s sold to make the programs sustainable. And it’s only $8 for 17 liters of something healthy for the community, alongside fruit from a little stand down our road.

This is so much of what I value, guys. It’s faith, walking itself out in community, in life, in stories, in sustainability, in health, in breaking fruit open together.

And yet, I find myself week after week, knowing that this is exactly where we are supposed to be, and yet knowing that it will take exactly something miraculous for anything to come of it.

We are trading off and on with Kelvin & Laura to share the load, and as each of us travel. Even when it’s one of “our” weeks, Stephen speaks more than I do; I often lead the prayer time. And while he speaks, I find myself just pulled to pray. I often just look around the room and pray for the individuals and families; I pray for their stories. I pray for the Bible stories being told to somehow relate to them. And really what I’m praying for are miracles.

These stories that I am so familiar with, that are in board books & puzzles in the community space, the verses on our walls, the books that line our shelves–they encompass our lives here. And they are…weird. They feel bizarre. They feel unbelievable. It feels almost absurd to express how much we believe this and base our lives on it; how much we love the Lord and have trekked over here just live life with them and tell them this.

Yes, this feels absolutely absurd. It might be.

We were sharing with some visiting friends about our work here last week, and someone asked about how we share our faith in the community and conversions.

I was reminded of the tents & mansions word picture that I feel like God gave me a few years ago and I wrote a little about previously. In short, while I experience the mansion of my faith–discovering Him at every turn, basking in him, experiencing the Gospels every day–I don’t want to show someone a tent. I want them to see the mansion & experience the mansion; and ultimately, I hope that they will choose it, not for a moment, but with all that they are.

And I guess this home church each week feels like we are touring the mansion we call our faith. It is exploring different aspects of who God is and what he means to us. It is telling a little story that is a part of bigger story. But it’s also personal: it’s our story as a part of this bigger story; it’s letting them into this mansion that we have given everything up for.  I think that is why I have found the feeling of vulnerability hasn’t gone away, but I still feel it week after week. Opening up the doors to the mansion that is my life and faith is turning out to be much more difficult for me than opening up the doors to my home and letting the kids wipe chicken grease on my walls or wiping up blood off the floor.

Perhaps because I’m afraid all of the chicken grease and blood {and the long list that includes being away from family} wasn’t worth it? What if they accept the open door but reject the mansion?

And on some level, I also feel helpless. I feel like I can plant & water–day after day, year after year; another hospital visit after another memory game after another bible study after another community meal; and prayer upon prayer upon prayer–but only God can make it grow.

Is He making it grow?

I think of all of our supporters who give to us month after month. It is a lot of money. After five years, it is starting to add up to thousands of dollars from friends of ours, planting and watering with us. “…Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one…” (1 Corinthians 3:6-8)

Oh, Lord, please give growth.

“Imagine yourself as being deeply convinced that your love…
your kindness to your friends, and your generosity to the poor
are little mustard seeds that will become strong trees in which many birds can build their nests!”
Henri Nouwen in Life of the Beloved

our jaguar.

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Oh, Zuk. This car is a constant blessing to us and sometimes…more than a blessing. It needs to make a run to the shop in the big city soon, but until then, we are putting up a few quirks, such as:

– We only have one windshield wiper. It took us three months to find the right 12″ blades, because apparently no cars require this anymore. Once we finally found the blades, we realized we were missing one of the arms. So we just use one for now, and choose to be thankful that its on the driver’s side!
– The radio is somewhat possessed. It turns on randomly, which really disturbs some of our neighbors.
– A broken windshield, still. The kids really like to repeatedly point to this and say, “No good.”
– A broken roll-your-own-window-down-handle. This means that at every police check we wait until the last possible moment to see if they’ll require us to roll down our window. They don’t understand that it will take us another ten minutes to get it back up.

Anyway, it gives us a lot of humor. And it keeps us thankful that we have a great way to get people to the hospital, and it’s great that we don’t mind if soy milk is spilled it every week and blood more often than I’m comfortable with admitting.

And then today, we offered our car to someone to borrow, and Stephen described it this way, “It drives…like a jaguar. Not like a Jaguar car, but like an actual jaguar. Imagine if you tried to drive an animal; it’s about like that.”

identity crisis.

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Sometime last year, I was sitting with a few friends in our living room. In a conversation, I remember one of the girls referring to my “blonde” hair. I gave her an odd look and asked her if she would consider me a blonde. Really?

She was confident. She responded with an astoundingly confident yes, while my face became more confused.

I looked to the other girl with us for solidarity. She wouldn’t consider me a blonde, would she?

She agreed. Confidently.

So, naturally, I decided they were both wrong. I have always been a brunette, or at least I thought so! I always checked the box: Caucasian, brown hair, blue eyes. Wouldn’t my parents have told me if I was checking the wrong box? 

Fast forward to just a few weeks ago, as nearly the exact same scenario took place. One girl said something about two of us being blondes, to which I asked if I was blonde. This question itself illicited an odd look, as if I should know myself. Well, I thought I did, friends. I thought I did.

Again, everyone in the conversation agreed I was blonde.

And this time, I was a little shaken. I know my hair is lighter, since we’re in the sun day after day.

But I didn’t think it changed it. I would still call my hair brown, just lighter.

So I brought it up with a sensible friend over lunch. She declared me blonde; Stephen & I both, in fact.

What?!?!

Honestly, I don’t care what color my hair is. I didn’t care much for doing my hair in the States, and its only gone downhill from there. And here, my hair rarely dries from one shower before I’m taking another, or sweating enough that I can’t tell anymore. I don’t have a preference of blonde or brunette; I simply don’t care.

What I do care about is this: which box do I check on the form?

And now I can’t even remember what form they’ll ask that on, but it just seems like I should know my answer. What if it comes up in a game? I get embarrassed when I can’t remember Stephen’s eye color or how he likes his butter on his toast, but what if I don’t know my own hair color?

It seems like something you just look into the mirror for, but I’m finding it’s not that simple.

Perhaps this is what my friend felt like when he went to renew his driver’s license and the lady made him change his hair color to gray. The shift to adulthood (or older-adulthood in his case) that you just didn’t see coming. At least she told him; did they look at my checkbox and just think I was delusional?

Despite the paradox, I’m know I’m not a very self-aware person. I learned this early on in dating Stephen, to whom this was quite evident. And while I have been improving in recent years, this blonde-brunette question has me asking so many more.

If I wrote down a description of myself–physically, personality, quirks–and a friend did, how much would they vary? If it was a friend in the States or a friend in Mae Sot, how much would that vary? The fact that we might all write down different hair colors has me a little worried…

falling lizards.

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When we volunteered along the border in 2009, I asked Stephen about the lizards on the ceiling & walls. They made me nervous. He assured me they have very sticky grips and don’t fall.

I now know that was a lie, whether intentional or unintentional, for my benefit or not.

Within weeks of being there one fell on my foot and attached itself securely–something it couldn’t manage to do to the ceiling, mind you–as I danced around trying to shake him off.

Today at 6am, I was barely awake–and thus barely balancing on the squatty potty–as one fell off the bathroom ceiling onto my shoulder. My shoulder, folks. That’s much closer to my head. Despite jumping off to the side, I didn’t scream, so maybe that’s an improvement?

So no matter what anybody tells you, they do fall. And yet, for some reason they don’t fall on Stephen? But they’ll probably fall on you.

miracles.

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I was sitting in our community home church last Thursday evening, watching a group of twenty or so children on one side and ten adults on the other; we were listening to Stephen share the story of Noah.

Like everything else we do and encounter here, it’s a different experience. He is telling the story of Noah as if they’ve never heard it before, because most haven’t. So we discuss the details: how many people went into the boat? How many days did it rain? Did you know it hadn’t rained before this? We remembered the flooding in our neighborhood and what that might have been like if it had lasted 150 days instead of two. Or we imagined water rising up over the mountains in Burma just beyond our backyard.

In that sense, it is childlike, as we share a Bible story in all its detail.

But then Stephen talks about what we learn from Noah: we see God’s justice in a world that isn’t just. We talked about the injustice we see around us every day, as we are all treated differently because of our skin color, our ethnicity, or our economic status. We talked about how real these injustices are, and when God flooded the earth, he showed us that he is a God of justice.

But also, he is a God of mercy & forgiveness. Stephen talked about how Noah was a friend of God, and that is why God saved his family. That is how Noah heard God’s instructions for building a boat that seemed crazy to everyone else. But he was God’s friend and God saved him; and we want to know God and be his friend, so that he will save us.

Suddenly, it isn’t a children’s story and it doesn’t feel childlike; it feels shockingly paralleled to the story of the cross and the story of the coming Kingdom.

In the middle of these stories each week I see the stories I have grown up listening to, reading, and believing from a new perspective. They feel a little absurd. They feel far-fetched.

They feel miraculous. Miraculous that this is the God we serve and have given our lives for. This is the story that has sent me around the world. This is the story of the grace that changes us every day.

And while I see the miracle of the story, I am praying for a miracle in the story. As I look at the adults, raised in a different cultural religion, living in poverty, growing up in suffering: I am praying for them to see the miracle of these stories. The miracle of our God. I am praying that God will show himself.

Each week they ask us to pray for health & money. And, oh, are we praying. We are praying for God to answer; for God to show himself in little prayers and little blessings and little tastes of his miracles.

And while I pray for miracles, I see the miracles. Our lives here are a miracle, and nothing less. I don’t know how we got here. I don’t know how we came to love these families in this way. I don’t know why it’s these families and this neighborhood.

I do know that we are always praying for miracles: in communication, in friendships, over meals, in hospital visits, in sitting on someone’s floor, over a puzzle, and in the middle of a Bingo game. We are praying that they know the love of Christ in a miraculous way. We are praying that we know what to do in a miraculous way. We are praying that God creates opportunities in a miraculous way.

He is and He does.

So while we sit among miracles, we pray for more, and we trust that we will experience more, I’m never sure how to share them all. I wish I could. I wish I could capture how encouraging our tea shop visit was yesterday. I wish I could tell you how connected we felt with the people with us.

I wish I could tell you how sweet it was to run into the elderly couple in our community at the market; the leaders, if you will. They invited us to have mohingya (a fish & noodle soup) at a little stall and bought our dinner.

I wish I could capture what it meant to pick up a little family of four at the clinic today after a five-day stay with dengue fever. One of the little girls has a difficult story, and she’s often mistreated and made fun of; she climbed into the backseat with me and cuddled up next to me for the ride home. To hold her, to love her, to stroke her hand and pray for her: this is a miracle. This is an answered prayer, on an average Monday morning.

Our lives are full of prayer after prayer, answered prayer after answered prayer, and miracle after miracle. Sometimes it feels like we are walking through the Gospels day after day, just watching the stories of Jesus unfold right in front of us.

Sometimes it also feels like we are walking through hell, too. Sometimes the tangibility of evil is terrifyingly present. But my hope is that we don’t forget the goodness, the beauty, and the miracles.

A few weeks ago we spent a couple weeks in a nearby village for a training. Before each meal, the staff & students would sing this prayer–

Oh, the Lord is good to me
And so I thank the Lord
For giving me the things I need
The sun & the rain & the mango seed
The Lord is good to me

Stephen & I have been humming it on the motorbike ever since. The Lord is good to us!