Every Courageous Journey

"Every courageous journey has its setbacks."

I wrote those words to someone this week, to encourage them to keep going with something that was hard and important.  But tonight I find myself in need of them.

I am embarking, ever so slowly, onto sad and needful territory in my personal understandings of relationships.  Big changes that shake up long held thinking.  Choosing a completely different direction than the persistent course I've pursued for over 25 years.  Never expected I'd be stepping out this way.  Couldn't have imagined I'd be the one to let what's gone go.

It was a courageous thing I did today.  Feels magnificent and awful all at the same time.  But right.  Let the dead thing die.  Being honest with myself for the first time in a long time, and I don't like it, but it's true, but it hurts still.

So I need that courage.  And that truth about the setbacks.  It's okay.  Keep going.

Someone told me this week, "You're wonderful."  I choose that.

And anyways, what I let go of today, wasn't ever really mine in the first place. 

God Bless My Slug

I've been foraging around in languages of late.  Most of the time I feel I can hardly speak or write English, let alone the Hebrew and Thai I mess with.

Still, I'm fascinated.  All this coding and decoding.  Nuances and verb forms and completely 'other' ways of drawing the letters that come together to form the words that communicate the message.  Sentences that go from left to right instead of right to left.  Sentencesthatprovidenowordbreakssoyoucan'ttellwhenoneendsand anotherbegins.  Oy!  (An expression that works in both Hebrew and Thai, by the way.)

It's a slow and tedious study.  At least it is for my 55-and-counting grey matter.  Retention is low.  I feel as if I'm relearning the basic vocabulary all the time.  My pronunciation is poor and my speed excruciatingly slow.  When I read out loud I get those flashback memories of grade 1.  Not the good ones.

But.... both these languages - Hebrew and Thai - are bridges for me to something wild and wonderful and so worth the effort.

With my Hebrew studies I can dig deeper into the body of work I count as my Scripture.  Christians fully accept and embrace the Hebrew Bible as the revealed Word of God.  And laying down in the grass of that, as it were, is a sweet, intimate place for my soul to rest and contemplate and be startled and wrestle with the complexities.  There's something about pulling apart the ancient words that pulls together my contemporary life.

With my Thai studies, the bridge is to a community that has become yet another family for me.  It's simple.  I learn their language so I can speak with my friends.  I want to be able to ask each child how they are doing, to talk about their joys, what's bothering them, to express my deep love for them.  I want to reach into their world and understand their lives.  I want to talk with Pastor Suradet and his wife Yupa colleague to colleague, to gain perspective on what it means to serve the kingdom in a land so far away from home.  Knowing at least a little means a lot to them.  We bond. They are very patient.  And diving into that pool, as it were, is also sweet and intimate, and a place for my soul to be renewed.

This morning our communication went to a new level.  Suradet has recently connected to Facebook and for the first time today he and I were messaging back and forth.   Real time. 

It's an interesting process because our words are a combination of the little we can type in each other's language, the little we understand of the other, and some that we grab off of Google Translate.

Doesn't always work.  This morning Suradet wrote "I Yupa God bless me and my slug."  Suradet is crazy about his wife, so I'm fairly certain he didn't actually intend to refer to her as his slug.  Made me laugh.  And made me wonder what crazy things I've actually written to him this morning.  But what a gift!  I was actually communicating with a friend in another language from half way around the world. 


Who knew?

Honestly, the language study drives me nuts.  It's hard.  My brain won't bend that way so easily anymore.  But....so worth it.

And actually, I'm not so sure God doesn't bless slugs anyways.