by Amy Peterson
“I told him, what about the first chapter of James? ‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, knowing that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. And perseverance must finish its work so that you may become mature and complete, children of God.’”
I nodded. We stayed awake for a while, talking about the promises of God. God doesn’t promise that life will be painless, only that we will never be alone in our trials.
The next month, our group of four began to grow. Nicole, who had read Luke and watched the Jesus film with Veronica, joined our Bible study. I talked about the truths of the gospel, and she said, “I really believe that. Since I read the Bible, I feel a new spirit that I never felt before. My mother has been reading it, too, and she wants to join us.” Her face was radiant, and I think mine was, too.
Then Sarah brought her friend Tessa, and it seemed that every day someone new was interested in the Bible. I gave the girls resources, Bible study sheets and song lyrics, new blank journals, and instructions about how to go on meeting together and studying the Bible without me while I was gone for the summer. We went to a coffee shop, an empty, expensive coffee shop, and there they practiced having Bible study without me leading it—singing praise songs softly, reading Scripture, and praying together.
They were prepared for a summer without me, and I fully expected to return to a flourishing baby church.
14
The Impossibility of Self-Care
She seldom had time to cook proper meals for herself, and she was short of sleep too. At last her health gave way, and she was very reluctantly compelled to give up her slum work and take a rest.
Nancy E. Robbins, God’s Madcap: The Story of Amy Carmichael
One of the secrets of going on is to get away. . . . Breathe sea air or mountain air or any kind of air that is pure and strong, and you come back refreshed.
Amy Carmichael, God’s Missionary
Self-care, they told us in training, was essential to staying healthy when working cross-culturally. Drink enough water, get enough sleep, do the things that give you life. Treat yourself every now and then. Read your Bible. Be with people or be alone, whatever you need; get out of town at least once a semester. It doesn’t sound like something the Heroes of the Faith would have done: they tended to work without ceasing, relying only on prayer to fill their wells, didn’t they? Despite this, I tried to follow the advice.
In the fall Lisa and I had taken an overnight retreat to the beach, twenty kilometers (around twelve miles) from the university. We’d stayed in a new hotel, painted a striking royal blue and hilariously named “The Green Hotel.” (No, it was not particularly eco-friendly, either. The local language used the same word for green and blue—I imagine the English title was simply a poor translation.) With gleaming white tile floors, fresh seafood served on the patio, and air conditioners in the rooms, it was glorious, and less than twenty dollars per night. We took walks on the beach, posing for pictures next to old fishing boats, and we rented lounge chairs and read books and journaled.
Near the end of the spring semester, I needed to get out of town again. I’d been with people so much that my introverted heart was drying up, and I felt mentally and emotionally unprepared to go back to the United States. I wanted a day of silence. I wanted to ride my motorbike alone, feeling the wind in my hair, feeling free.
Maybe my wanderlust was coming back. When I got homesick, I got homesick for roads—for a stretch of highway at night, dark and lonesome through Mississippi, where once I’d stopped at a run-down four-pump station to hear a black man preaching the gospel out front. I got homesick for the road grey into Atlanta, snaking down to watch the sunrise over Highway 1 in Florida, the exhausted arrival at an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet.
I missed the exhilaration of speeding down Long’s Peak when the stars were out, those summers I worked in Colorado. Leaning forward on the dash, getting dizzy from the height and the curves and the night air rushing through the windows.
I missed the road north through America’s heartland, erect grain silos staking the masculine territory, hand-painted signs calling down fire and brimstone on abortion doctors: a road so straight you could sleep and wake an hour later to the same wavy fields on either side, the same ribbon of black unswervingly stretching out in front of you. When the storms came, you could see them miles ahead—you’d watch the clouds gather and the color fade, you’d see the sheets of rain, like the curtain that was torn, long before you drove into them, drops plunking on your windshield. You saw through a glass dimly. You’d pull to the shoulder with your hazards on, listening to local radio, one station announcing which streets were closed, the other doing call-in song dedications, the voices so chummy you wondered if you belonged there, in that quiet town, two stoplights, eight hotels for the people halfway to Denver, halfway to someplace better.
What I had, though, was a twenty-kilometer stretch through rice fields, and little else. My backpack carried my laptop and journal, some pajamas, a clean pair of underwear, and two books to read. My bike was fully charged, and I left early in the morning, before it got too hot. Halfway to the beach another motorbike pulled up next to me.
“Hello!” said the smiling woman.
“Hi,” I replied with a plastic smile, trying to hide my annoyance. I was retreating, for crying out loud. I was trying to be alone, but everyone always wants to speak to the whiteskin blondhair.
“My name Leigh!” she exclaimed. “You American?” I answered yes, hoping the conversation would end quickly. And after another line or two, it did.
“Oh! That my house,” she said, slowing to turn, and pointing to a small wooden house on a cement slab in a sea of rice plants and palm trees. “I invite you to my home!” she said.
I waved good-bye.
At the beach, I checked into a different hotel, this one only fifteen dollars per night, then went to sit on the beach and read. The book I was reading—for a grad class on leadership—argued that the development of Christian leadership followed a set pattern of three phases: Sovereign Foundations, Inner-Life Growth, and Ministry Maturing. I was supposed to chart my life on this graph, figuring out which lessons I had learned in each phase, and where I was now. The concept was silly, I thought, forcing my spiritual life into a formula. And following the instructions landed me solidly in the third and final phase. At the age of twenty-two. Which even I knew couldn’t be right.
I sighed and put the book down, feeling restless. I had come here for spiritual renewal, for quiet time, but I felt fidgety, and God seemed too quiet. I tried to mentally prepare myself to go home, journaling answers to the questions people would ask me, making lists of the highs and lows of my year, lists of the things I was afraid of about the summer and the things I was looking forward to.
But I kept getting distracted, thinking about Jack. He had almost come to visit Lisa and me the previous weekend with his teammate Joanna, but ended up going camping with one of his classes instead. Joanna had come to visit, riding a slow train north to our town. It was enlightening to see our home through her eyes: she’d been shocked by how poor our area was.
Joanna taught with Jack and a young married couple at a university in the southern mountains, in a city that locals called the “city of love” because it was a popular honeymoon destination. They had nice restaurants, American food, a small expat community, lots of pine trees, even fields of strawberries (the rest of the country was too hot for growing berries). Our town was dusty and quiet, and our one western restaurant had just opened the week before Joanna arrived. We took her out to Halloween Pizza, where the walls were mint green and hung with crucifixes, and MTV Asia played in the corner. High school girls at the table next to ours giggled nervously as they picked up bites of spaghetti carbonara on chopsticks. They looked like I had when I tasted sushi for the first time.
Joanna’s visit lifted our spirits. She kept
telling us stories about the funny things Jack said, hilarious adventures they’d fallen into trying to learn their way around their town. I’d wanted her to keep telling us those stories, because I was developing a deep, deep crush. Though I had always been an emotionally controlled person, never boy crazy, never having had a true secret crush on anyone, this time I just decided to indulge it.
I sent a gift for Jack back with Joanna, a copy of a mix CD my sister had sent me, guessing that he was as hungry as I was for new music after nearly ten months overseas. Jack e-mailed me the very day Joanna got home. He loved the CD, he said, and hoped he’d be able to see me over the summer while we were back in the States. We began a bantering, friendly e-mail correspondence. Did he know that I’d broken up with Charley? I hadn’t said so; I didn’t want to throw myself at him. But surely Joanna had told him? Right?
It was close to dinner time. I left my beach chair and returned to my hotel. Using hand motions and a little language, I communicated to the family who owned the hotel that my motorbike needed to be plugged in overnight. They nodded and nodded, and plugged it in. I went upstairs and tried to meditate on the Psalms in my room. Finally I put a DVD in my laptop and watched it in bed.
In the morning my feelings of restlessness and distraction continued. This retreat was a bust. No matter how many times I repeated words from Psalm 131 (“I have calmed and quieted my soul . . . like a weaned child is my soul within me”), my soul was disquieted. I hopped on my motorbike and headed back to the university.
Halfway home, I started losing speed. Soon I was crawling along at no more than 4 kilometers per hour, and I realized that the hotel proprietors had not, in fact, left my motorbike plugged in all night. It was out of juice. I cursed my lack of language skills and the local propensity to say yes when you meant no. Why hadn’t they just asked for more money? I would have paid them to plug it in, if that’s what they needed!
As my motorbike began to fail, I looked around. There was not another person in sight, just mosquitos and green, green heat. I was ten kilometers from town, and even if another person came by, it’s not like they could bring me a gallon of gas. I didn’t need gas, I needed an outlet.
And then I realized something: at the very moment my motorbike was dying, I was driving past Leigh’s house. The woman who had introduced herself to me the day before lived right where I was, in the middle of this very rice field. I turned down the dirt path toward the home of the exuberant stranger I’d met briefly.
Leigh was happy to see me, and happy to let me plug into an outlet on the side of her house. Now that I saw her off of her motorbike, I realized she was pregnant, nearly full-term. She was probably only a few years older than I was. Leigh invited me to sit down, and pulled out a hairy coconut and a machete. Fascinated, and a little scared, I watched as this petite pregnant woman split the coconut in half and poured its juice into two glasses. She offered me one, and joined me at the table.
In broken English, Leigh told me what she could about her life. She’d married her high school “darling,” who was traveling for his business now. She missed—no, not him—she missed the big city where they used to live, where she went to university. Her friends from college married foreigners and wrote her letters from Sweden and Canada. I gathered that she felt more like an exile than they did, sitting alone in this palm tree farm paradise. I worried about her, about what in my culture we would call depression, a disease that remained unnamed and undiagnosed in this country. I prayed silently for her.
After an hour, we’d exhausted our limited language capabilities. I thanked her profusely and hoped an hour of charging would get me the rest of the way home. But just within the city limits, still a kilometer or two from the university, my bike started to die again. I was ready to give up, praying, “Really, God?” As I puttered into town at slower and slower speeds, John, the freshman class monitor, rode up next to me. “Hello, teacher!” he said.
“John!” I was so relieved to see him. He was unfailingly cheerful and competent. “My battery is dying. What should I do?”
“Take my hand,” he said, looking around for police. “I’ll pull you.” A couple of his buddies drove up on either side of us, blocking view of our illegal action from anyone who might be watching.
John pulled me all the way home.
“Self-care is not really working for me,” I told Lisa later that night. We sat in our “kitchen,” which consisted of an oven and a hot plate in the extra apartment on our floor. I scooped a last bit of scrambled eggs onto a bite of biscuit.
“What, you don’t feel rested and refreshed after running out of battery power in the middle of a deserted road on a hot day?” she joked. We placed our dirty dishes into a large plastic tub and took it into the shower in the back where we would wash them later.
“I wish I could take care of myself,” I said. “I’ve always been independent.”
“A little too independent,” she observed. “Independence doesn’t really translate here, though, does it?”
For our new friends, there was little concept of an individual apart from community. I couldn’t imagine anyone emphasizing self-care to them. They wouldn’t call it self-care; they’d call it community-care, maybe, if they named things like that. It would be about how understanding your place within a group can help you lead a healthy, happy life.
“I mean, self-care makes sense,” I said. “I have to drink enough water and get enough sleep.”
“But that’s not really enough,” Lisa said. “You wouldn’t have made it home without Leigh or John.”
As Lisa and I settled into our respective rooms for the night, I relished the quiet, my privacy, and my personal space. But I reconsidered my sense of my own self-sufficiency. Maybe that was an American cultural value that I had baptized in my mind as equal to responsibility or maturity. Though my culture praised independence, this culture valued interdependence, and I began to wonder if that wasn’t actually the more Christian value.
After all, I couldn’t take care of myself, especially in a place where I couldn’t speak the local language. I was dependent on the kindness of both strangers and friends. I needed other people.
15
High Places (Mistakes Were Made)
She wept many bitter tears and endured endless questionings as to whether everything had been taken from her because of unfaithfulness on her part.
Henrietta Soltau, head of theWomen’s Department of the China Inland Mission
And the high places of God’s field call today for the love, and the zeal, and the daring of those who will jeopardize their lives for higher ends.
W. H. Aldis, in a note sent out by the China Inland Mission in 1930
On my last night in the city, I crept out of my apartment after dark. We lived on the top floor of the building, but I’d noticed that where the staircase ended, there were iron rungs attached to the wall, leading up to a hole in the roof. I could climb onto the top of the building. Campus was mostly quiet, and I turned off the stairwell light before swiftly ascending.
I’ve always been attracted to heights. As a small child, I’d climb from my bed to the top of my four-foot chest of drawers, sitting up there until my mom found and reprimanded me. In the backyard, I claimed a tree as my own, nailing an empty tin high up its trunk, keeping my secret papers inside. At summer camp, at the age of eight, I used to rappel down the tallest towers, thrilled by the rush of adrenaline I’d feel as I jumped out, suspended over nothing. I’d flip and spin, doing tricks to impress the counselors.
In high school, I went to Haiti for a week. On our last morning in the country, my best friend, Mollie, and I woke up before daybreak and climbed out of our hotel window onto the roof. We took a box of dry cereal and a guitar, and watched Venus fade as a hazy, unspectacular sun rose over the colorful hills of Port-au-Prince. It wasn’t really about seeing a sunrise, though; it was about sucking the marrow out of life, le
aving conventionality and the plague of the mundane far behind. Those were very important things to do in the summer after tenth grade, when we were beginning to realize that pixie dust and feathers were no match for gravity, that carpets and elephants would never be able to fly.
In college I used to illegally climb the rusted iron fire escape on the side of Francis Hall, the building where my French classes met. I’d swing over the ledge and land lightly on the roof, then watch the stars, pray, and memorize Bible verses, rewarding myself with M&Ms.
I’d been wanting to get up on the roof of this building all year, but “unconventional” wasn’t culturally lauded here the way it was back home. I had a sneaking suspicion that the university would not look favorably upon me hanging out on the roof. This was my last night, though. Up I went.
It was nearly midnight. The moon had been full earlier in the week, but was still big and yellow, hung low in the sky. I could see most of town: the student hostel across the street from my building, where many of my students lived; the lights of the bridge that led toward the ocean; the single light at the top of the mountain I’d climbed with Anne and Darcy, joking about finding boyfriends at the end; the hotel where Lisa and I ate seafood for Christmas dinner; the statue honoring the country’s founder.
Summer lightning struck in the distance. I found the Big Dipper in the sky. But mostly I looked across the city, wondering what it would be like to go back to the States. Would it feel like home? Or would I feel like a flower picked from a garden and moved to a vase for ten months, then taken back to the garden and planted again, unable to re-root? I spun and spun on the roof, trying to memorize every sight as if I would never see it again. Ten weeks seemed too long to be away from this sweet place.
I had no idea, that night, that I would never come back. My motorbike would remain locked in storage, my clothes and books would languish in an empty room. I would never sing “Sweet Adoration” with Veronica, Sarah, and Cecilia again. I would never crack crab legs at our beach or fry cubes of pork in oil over a hot plate at a student’s cement block apartment. I’d never again see Tina’s laughing eyes as she mocked the way I used chopsticks. I wouldn’t be there when Anne and Darcy found the love they were searching for. I’d never read another of Henry’s poems, or have another conversation with Avril about punk rock.
