Cleared for Take Off!

The doctor gave me the green light today.  I'm on my way with our fantastic Team, heading to Thailand to visit our beautiful Thai family at Hot Springs.

Down to the wire, this was.  Glad for this, oh so glad!  I believe something good is about to happen, something important. 

Thanks for all the support and love and prayers.  Will keep you posted.

7 mm of Uncertainty

My ticket says I'm to get on a plane around lunch time on Tuesday and fly away to Thailand.

A 7 mm kidney stone that decided to 'journey to the light' starting last Thursday says, "We'll see about that."

After 15 months of completely symptom-free living with the diagnosis of kidney stones, and a mere 10 days before my next trip to Hot Springs, things have gotten dicey.  There's a Team of 10 of us from Highview all set to visit our Thai family and to partner with them in running an ESL Day Camp for neighbouring children.  We've be working hard for months.  We're basically all packed already.  Supplies are gathered and purchased.  Lessons are set to go.  Hearts are ready to both give and receive.  There's a mere three days until departure as I write this.

But when last seen via ultrasound last Monday, a 7 mm stone had not yet made its way all the way.  And due to the time it takes reports to get to a specialist and the rather demanding schedule of a specialist, I can't get in to see the specialist until the day before.  I'm not kidding.  The day before I'm set to lead a Team half way around the world is the day I'll know if I'm clear to fly - or not.

This presses every first-born-female, Type A, anal and structured button in me.  And believe me, I have a lot of those.   A last-minute, seat-of-your-pants decision on something like THIS?  Come on!  Yes, I have mellowed over the years.  Ministry and children and age and grandchildren and reality will do that to you.  But, come on!

And yet.

It occurs to me that I mean it when I sing those songs of utter surrender in church.  I'm very sure I mean it when I pray those Mary prayers of being His maidservant and letting it be unto me as He has said, in private.  I know that I mean it when I raise that white flag, and lay my palms upward, and step aside to get out of His way figuratively and actually.

I do.  Belong to Him.  I. Am.  His.

And I mean it.

So there's no wailing to be done here.  No questioning.  No begging.  Yes, I've been prayed over and I'm praying even now that the stone will be gone and I'll be released to do this unbelievably fabulous thing I get to do each year with these heroes that somehow call me friend.  I've 'let my requests be known' to the Father Healer.  I've laid out the desires of my heart to Yahweh, just like He asked me to.

But I'm not demanding.  I'm not freaking.  Instead I find myself in a new place of resting.  I think, I think I actually do trust Him on this.  Go or not go.  Even this, as important as it is to me.  It's up to Him.

Don't like the not knowing.  Don't like that 7 mm is causing all this uncertainty.  Don't like putting the Team in this place.

But God's got this.

So...my part right now is to drink and pee, pack and wait.

So will you hear from me next in Thailand?  I'll keep you posted.

Confidence

"What kind of leader is able to call people to wait on God in the face of real threat,

when all of their survival instincts are raging?  

What inner strength does a leader need to be able to access in order to stay calm, 

to quiet the primal instincts of others, 

and to create space for turning to God in the midst of such fierce human reactivity?  

Only a leader who has waited for God in the darkest moments of his own deep need.  

Only a leader who has stood still and waited for God's deliverance 

in the places where she feared for her very life.  

Only the leader with inner spiritual authority 

that comes from his own waiting can ask others to do the same."

Ruth Haley Barton 

Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership

So far 2013 has been all over the map for me.

It's been a time of huge adjustments on the home front as Ken and I settle in once again to what it means to be empty nesters, following the very good event of our daughter and two grandchildren being able to move into a home of their own just before Christmas.  Love the space.  Can't say I hate the quiet.  But I miss them still, very much, and it's February already.  Thought I might be done that by now.

Other relationships are in flux too.  Shifts and separations and deepenings and wanings.  I'm discovering new territories in my heart that I didn't know were there, and I haven't yet decided if I like the new landscape or not.  Feels weird inside of me right now.  Thought I might have figured out how to do relationships by now.

We've actually had winter this year, and my people are feeling it, and I, their pastor, feel it with them.  Several, over-the-top life situations in our faith community all chose February as their arrival date. Highview herself, now 15 plus years old, is experiencing her own brand of teenage angst, with changes and morphings and new faces around the table and a brand new world of understandings and relevance and theological reflection.  New dynamics.  New ways of doing things.  Being pushed on my values at almost every turn.

I feel stretched, yet again, in my ability to lead in love through what is very much another sort of brand new territory.  Why is it the older you get the more you realize that what you know only opens you to what you don't know?  Thought I might know a bit more than this by now.

It's not exactly a time of intensive threat, as Barton describes above.  She's comparing Moses' experience standing in front of the Red Sea just before it parted, to what leaders often feel in the midst of a ministry crisis.  There are no Egyptians bearing down on us, on me, right now, at least not that I'm aware of.

Still, I needed this reminder today.  I am comforted again by the truth that the courage to navigate new territories doesn't come from having lived life lightly.   Looking back on the times when 'real threat' was , well, really threatening, and remembering the more-than-adequate guts that God provided me in each and every situation, I know that I have already been well prepared for any next steps He leads me to take.

I can do this.
All of it.
The relationships.
The ministry challenges.
The next steps.

Boldly.  With great calm and confidence.

Not by my own devices.
But in the power of a God who just keeps on showing up.

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.

Still Not Used To It

This tiny woman gave birth to me.  I know. 

It occurred to me today that I've seen more Christmases with this woman than with any other single person in my life.  (Dad left for Home in February 2010.)

Ken and I celebrated a mini Christmas with Mom today in Lakefield where she lives now.  Only the third Christmas of my entire life where an early visit in a very understated few hours actually counts as 'it'.  I don't like it.  I don't like that she moved away and that it takes 3 hours to get there.  I don't like that Christmas is so very different for us now.

But I'm glad she seemed so delighted with her gift - a set of small and delicate porcelain birds, perched on a tree branch.  She loves birds.  I'm glad we could bring a small centerpiece of Christmas greens to decorate her room for the season.  I'm glad we could eat together, even if it was only the 'festive special' at Swiss Chalet.  I'm grateful for the time we have, when we have it.

Just....still getting used to it.

Were I've Been

 מַה־נִּמְלְצ֣וּ לְ֭חִכִּי אִמְרָתֶ֗ךָ מִדְּבַ֥שׁ לְפִֽי׃

 How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!      Psalm 119:103

It's been a barest-minimum kind of fall in my blog world, so I just wanted to write something quickly to explain.  Since September 13, exactly four months ago, I have had the excruciating privilege of studying Hebrew, the original text of about two thirds of the writings I hold to as my Scripture.  This is all part of my ongoing academic efforts towards a Masters of Divinity.  Hebrew Exegesis was both the title and intent of the course, and it involved more than just translation, as challenging as that is all on its own.  We dug deep, did word studies, learned to ask interpretive questions and did a pull-it-apart-at-the-seams paper on one specific text.  Today was the final exam

 

I am spent.  This particular run at my schooling included a transfer to Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, an hour and 15 minute commute, on a good day, one way.  I do not like to drive to Toronto.  I actually don't like to drive.   It was hard to give up an entire day during the week for this.  It was brutal doing the work

But even now, right now, as I lay my exhausted self down to sleep, I know a deep sense of gratitude for how this has made me love my Bible more.    Like honey.  Even, and maybe especially, the humility-gift it brings along with it.  There's nothing like digging into the original language and trying to wrap your brain around the author's cultural perspective to make you realize, yet again, just how very little you know about anything.   It's a sweet humility, a gentle dismantling of my soul even as I dismantled each verb and syntax 

I do hope to be able to write a bit more in the next few days before Christmas.  There's so much worship and love to be had in Advent, the beauty of it is unmissable

But that's where I've been. And now to bed