"I think that God is Mystery wrapped in tragically ordinary lives."

We gathered in the mountains of Colorado for our annual mission conference a few weeks ago. The following piece is a beautiful and gritty original shared while there by one of our missionaries. It speaks to the complexity, joys, and sorrows of a shared community with the displaced and those who seek to walk with them on their journey. It's a bit longer than our typical Resilience but I think you will find it worth reading to the end.

Human Life Wrapped In Mystery

H.

He is playing with a toy car on the tile floor.

He stops suddenly and screams.

No one is near him,

No one has touched him.

People tell me he is wild and out of control.

The YMCA kicked him out once.

I feel like we understand each other.

I scoop him into my arms.

His body goes limp, and he is silent.

He stays there for a long time.

A long time for a three-year-old is actually a short time.

But,

It is long enough for me to know that he is not out of control.

He is afraid.

And people who are afraid, fight to feel safe,

And people who fight to feel safe are often misunderstood.

Because if you close your eyes,

And imagine a boxing match,

You are probably not picturing something very tender.

And I wonder if this is actually the problem.

He needs someone to be near him.

He needs someone to touch him.

He gets up.

He kisses my cheek.

From this day forward, every time I walk into the house, he says my name.

S.

I get an email that says please call me.

Usually “please call me” emails do not come from people who are hoping to sing your praises.

So I am not thrilled,

But I am not deterred.

Actually I am deterred,

But it is my job to support volunteers.

So I call.

She starts to talk.

She is not pleased.

She is mad,

But not at me.

Actually she is a little mad at me.

She says it is wrong,

Unsafe,

Unjust,

That a pregnant woman

Should only have one prenatal appointment

And that she should have

No birth plan, and

No hospital to give birth at, and

No health insurance a month before giving birth.

She tells me it is irresponsible,

And dangerous.

I am not sure why this is my fault.

But I do not disagree.

So I nod silently.

Even though we are on the phone and she can’t see me.

I stay this way for 38 minutes,

Because she had 38 minutes worth of angry to get out.

I hang up the phone.

All the way home, I cry.

I did not wake up today hoping to be the depository for someone else’s fear and exhaustion.

I am tired, too.

And I hate being yelled at.

I wonder how it would be different,

If she could see me.

A.

Come, come she says.

She motions to the front door.

Do you need something, I ask.

No.

I just love you, she says.

I disappear into her small words that remind me

Of what has been slowly carved into my reflexes,

Like water eroding away rock,

To see every interaction

As an exchange of needs,

I think the culture

That says I love your presence

More than I need your time

Is lovely,

I think her culture is probably like that,

I think I should be more like that.

She grabs my hand and pulls me into the house.

She slaps a piece of mail on the kitchen table.

She did need something.

I start laughing.

If you knew her

You would laugh too.

You would not get too serious,

And tell me not to laugh in the face of real need,

Or to have grace for the patterns of thought that constant need roots deep into my mind

Instead,

You would imagine the way she cocks her head sideways,

And laughs when she knows she is schmoozing you.

You would see her dark brown eyes

Crinkled in a way that resembles your own grandma,

And Jesus.

You would hear her voice chuckling your name in the most perfectly un-American way.

You would feel her stained fingers resting on yours,

You would know it is not untrue that she loves you.

And it is not untrue that she needs something.

You would open her mail and read it to her.

Because you would feel the deep honor

Of being trusted in the place of someone else’s greatest vulnerability.

Her gesture would tell you that you belong here too.

You belong in the places I suffer.

You belong in the places I am weak.

And something inside of you would stop feeling afraid.

And then you would laugh again,

Because that is a lot of emotion over a piece of junk mail.

K.

If I don’t have a lawyer before my court case I will die.

My teeth clench shut.

Pressure wraps around my eyes and they widen.

The muscles in my chest flex tight and stay that way.

This is what my body does when it is getting ready to defend.

I have spent hours and hours and hours

Pestering every lawyer in the city of Minneapolis.

I feel that this requires me to violate my own preferences.

I am uncomfortable making requests that I know are not meetable.

It makes me feel stupid.

As if every time I call I am unaware that I am asking the impossible.

But I do it anyway.

The Research and

The Calls. Emails. Voice messages. Spreadsheets. Denials. Rejections.

“Sorry we can’t help you's”

I hold these things in my body.

So

I am angry that she brings this up as if I am blissfully unaware of her desperation.

Because it has not cost me nothing.

Which is maybe why I am actually frustrated.

To survive, I learn to dance with desperation.

Not so close that you get burned,

Not so far that you disengage.

Don’t dismiss. Don’t drown.

Still, I am blissfully unaware of her desperation.

Which makes me feel guilty.

All of this is because I actually feel helpless.

So I take a quiet moment.

I breathe.

I remind myself that what I feel is normal.

That trauma stings.

But actually I don’t do any of that.

I get in the car.

I honk at another car on my way home.

I hate driving in the city.

I feel tired a lot.

Sometimes I dread these meetings.

D.

You don’t give me enough money for food.

The food at the food shelf is rotten.

Drive me home, I don’t want to be here any more.

I don’t want that car seat.

My bed is too small.

These words scroll through my mind when I lay in bed.

And it is not because I feel bad.

It is because I think something quite different.

And wasn’t I just lamenting?

That when you are the flexible one

It is always assumed you are happy with the worst option.

And didn’t I say,

You are not.

I know she has lost everything.

That she is pregnant

And alone

In a foreign land

Where she doesn’t speak the language

With no husband

And seven kids under fourteen

Taking care of themselves

In a country at war

Where she cannot be

And where violence kills

And militias heat up metal pipes

And beat people

Who are innocent,

I know.

But I cannot understand.

And when someone makes choices that crash your mind's ability to use imagination,

You know it is because they have lived through things you were not meant to imagine.

And that maybe they aren’t making choices at all.

So you insist to yourself that it is you that cannot see.

Like when God seems violent.

And there must be something else going on.

So I insist.

I force myself to look.

Like that weird optical illusion

Where you can only see a bunny,

And everyone else sees a duck.

I power down my defenses.

I tell myself this is not about me.

But it is, I am human too.

I am allowed that.

Maybe it is the blind leading the blind.

I force myself to do with her

What every psychiatrist tells you to do with your childhood self,

Have compassion,

Something happened to you,

It was not your fault.

But trauma doesn’t justify poor treatment.

But what if like you and your children,

Your consciousness and your body don’t live in the same place anymore?

No one tells you flailing is the wrong way to drown when you can’t swim.

But it’s not my job to be a doormat.

But it’s not my job to need to be justified.

That price has already been paid.

I fight with myself.

With who I am

And with who I wish I was.

Sometimes, I win.

Sometimes, I don’t.

If that felt chaotic,

It’s because it was.

U.

I sit here writing.

I think of the men and women who have introduced me as

their sister,

their daughter,

their mother.

I laugh at the one time I was told I was like a father.

I think of the ICE agent who told me it is not the way of things,

That I could be a service provider and a friend.

I think of my friend the police officer,

Who arrested gang members.

I think of my friend the engineer,

Who refused to design non-civilian drones.

I think of my friend the social worker,

Who took care of all the women and children in the camp.

How are these reasons to torture someone?

I think of the time I sat,

Knees on the living room floor,

Asking God to heal,

And he did.

Right there in front of me.

I think of the time I sat,

Knees on the hospital floor,

Asking God to heal,

And he did.

In a place that is already and not yet,

So I attended a funeral.

I think of the sound of a grown man crying

And the sound of fifteen women seated around a table laughing.

I think of the first time I saw an Ethiopian woman

Sit half-naked in a river

Pouring water over her skin

As the sun shone on her face

And she laughed

And she looked the kind of free you only are when you feel at home.

I think of girls and their moms dancing at weddings.

I think of men standing in my living room deciding how to move a couch upstairs

In English and Lingala and Tigrinya

As if the language of their shared determination were the mother tongue of them all.

I think that I still don’t know what the word “manatish” means,

Even though I hear it every day.

I think about how low someone's head can hang in sorrow,

And how high they can jump when they receive their green card.

I think of the silence that follows stories that swallow up words,

And of the time I answered the phone to a high pitched shriek,

And I cried.

Because that is the sound of a woman who has won asylum.

I think of the roads people have traveled,

And the lives that have been rerouted for them,

And the places that have been prepared for them,

Both seen and unseen.

I think that God is Mystery

Wrapped in tragically ordinary lives

Like a package wrapped by a child

Messy, but sweet.

I think that God sets bounds for me as he sets them for the skies,

And the waters,

And the animals.

So I suffer with people to the extent that I can.

And to the extent that I cannot,

Christ suffers for them.

There are moments of doing right.

And moments of doing wrong.

And all of them are the places I become more acquainted with

The God who listens and the God who speaks.

With the God who is beyond knowledge,

And God who allows himself to be known.