Mutuality in The Moon

Do you ever step outside on nights when the weather carries with it that specific temperature or that specific smell that strikes something inside of your heart that sends your heart whirling and tingles radiating from your chest to the tips of your fingers? Something in the air, whether it's the smell, the temperature, the moisture...sparks something in your spirit.
I stepped outside tonight after being in a stuffy room and was hit by the crispness of the air and the clarity of the sky. I poised myself on my tiptoes and looked straight up and noticed (albeit too briefly) each star in the sky that was sparkling so bright I could make out the defined edges of each sparkle. Then I turned on my toes getting ready to do a quick spin (because that's what I do when I feel all warm and fuzzy inside) and as I turned my head I noticed the moon.

I work at a missions organization that is very injustice focused. I hear A LOT about injustice. It pains me to say I might be slightly numb to all the pictures of babies with swollen bellies and flies around their heads, but when you see the pictures and hear the stats time and time again, they lose their punch, and I think we can all relate to that. But I've recently learned about the plight of North Korea and it has been sticking with me like no injustice ever has. Ever since I heard a firsthand account from a co-founder of a US North Korean advocacy center, it's been like a splinter in my heart that's continually aching. My heart aches for the North Koreans. And it's for this reason--yes, they're starving, they're cold, they're subjected to forced labor. But what resonates as the greatest injustice of North Korea is this: they are stripped of freedom of thought. They're subjected to mental manipulation and trauma that cannot simply be relieved by giving them food or shelter. It takes years of therapy and counseling to undo the lies that are intentionally planted in the mind of North Koreans by the Kim dynasty. This video is a great glimpse into the life of a North Korean labor camp defector. But pay attention specifically to  34:34-35:21 and you can see that even escaping the worst conditions in the world and living well in society cannot alleviate years of brainwashing and emotional torture.

Watching this video and seeing the weight that Shin will carry the rest of his life, simply because he was born into the country of North Korea, makes me want to kayak the entire Pacific ocean all the way to Kim Jung-Il's palace and take matters and justice into my own hands. Someone STOP this succession of crazed dictators, in the name of Jesus. 

The entire crisis just feels hopeless, sometimes.

But tonight, as I was looking at the moon, it was impressed up on my heart that the North Koreans, thousands of miles away, look at the exact same moon that I do. And that may sound cheesy, but think about how cool that is. At night, no matter where I am...I see the same moon, in all it's splendor, as the North Koreans. I found such mutuality with these people I've never met simply from looking at this moon. Sometimes injustice seems so far away, but in looking at the moon, it makes me feel like it's up close. Tangible.  It hits me that people in North Korea, in labor camps, starving and eating kernels of corn or bits of grass to stay alive can look up in their desperation and see the beauty of the moon, a chunk of rock floating in space that each of us on planet earth can see...and I wonder if God didn't create it just for that reason--to bring us all to a place of mutuality with one another. Amidst pain, struggle and suffering, when we feel stuck, insignificant and useless, we can see something like the moon and be reminded that the world is big, God is bigger, and there's something Other than whatever it is we're in. That is hopeful.

Is Sentimentality Reliable?

    So, if I'm romantic and I'm motherly I would say that probably means I'm also pretty sentimental. I mean if I tear up when I see one of my students, I would say "sentimental" describes that condition pretty well. That or "weep-tastic".
    So, ok, I'm sentimental.
    I think I can accept that. Maybe even enjoy that. Some of the people I most admire are very sentimental, tearing up at tiny things, getting moved by hallmark commercials...
    But I'm not sentimental with everything. Cheesy worship services, I hate. Excessive hugs and 'how-are-you's' make me want to punch people. My sentimentality mostly comes down to relationships. There are some friends in my life that I just love. It's hard for me to be super friendly and loving and sappy with strangers, but once I get to know someone and become fond of them--I love them. Sometimes so much that I almost have to contain myself when I see them. Because otherwise I would be jumping up and down and being squealy and teasing them and poking them and being all around obnoxious.
    As someone who tends to see being stoic as being strong (which is NOT true, but I still find myself thinking that way), I notice that I subconsciously define my sentimentality as weakness. Maybe not just weakness, but unreliable feelings that really have no weight or bearing on outcomes. Because sentiment is fleeting. Choices are eternal. Right? I don't know, what's the balance between sentiment and love?
    If there's one thing in my life that causes me torture, it's asking too many damn questions. Too many why's. Why's don't matter that much. They matter a little. But I'm watching myself ask why, and I'm watching my students ask why and I'm watching us all think ourselves to death with nothing left but empty hands and disappointment at unanswered questions that never mattered much in the first place. I think what we all really want to know is that we're okay. So I guess when I start asking a bunch of why's about all this, what I really am asking is if all of it is okay. I'm reminded of the verse from Philippians, "He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus." And if I'm romantic, if I'm motherly, if I'm sentimental, if he's placed it in me, then it doesn't matter right now why it's there or the details of how it's being played out. What matters is that, if God is bringing it up now, more than any other time, that I trust Him to finish what he has started--that hopefully I can turn all these lovey-dovey feelings from foreign to familiar. And nurture them and use them to care for others and offer love to those who need it. Maybe these are the first signs of God transforming me in a way I so desperately want him to--moving me from being inward focused to outward. It feels silly and weird and sappy and girly, but...I don't know, I guess I'm cool with it.

Mama

What is it with girls and wanting to reject what's naturally in them? I'm talking about femininity. A couple posts ago I wrote about how I'm a romantic and I can't really help it. Today I'm going to talk about how I'm motherly and I can't really help that either.
I'm staffing a DTS right now, which means I'm walking alongside other adolescents, most of them younger than me, who feel they have a call to missions, want to grow more and be discipled in the truths of Christ so they can be more equipped take the Good News to the world. I wanted to staff a DTS because I know that I love seeing transformation. It's one of my favorite things. Watching something or someone go from old to new, dead to alive is fascinating to me and moreso, I love being a part of the process. So walking into this, I knew I would see lots of transformation and it would be great. But I've been surprised lately at how great it's actually been. Like, how much I genuinely love and care about these students. I was expecting to love and care about them obviously, but not this much. I'm noticing silly things like, if I'm walking around on campus and I see one of them waving to me from a distance, my heart leaps a little bit and I get an overwhelming sense of pride for who they are. Or I'll be in class and hear one of them ask our speaker a brilliant question and get teary eyed from how far they've come since day one. Or I'll watch one of them start falling in love with another person and my mother hen feathers will rustle up and I'll just want to protect them from the inevitable hurt and risk that comes with loving someone else.
It's weird.
Another example, the other day we did the ropes course. The ropes course is all about team building and unity. It's all what you make it. If you want to be lousy and reject teamwork, it will be a hard day for you on ropes. But if you hold others above yourself and decide to devote yourself to being a team, the day is everything it possibly could be. And that day, my team.... was SO great. Selfless, sacrificial and serving. Each challenge we went through, I noticed each one of them moving form the mindset of 'individual' to a mindset of 'team', which, if you've experienced the shift of that mindset, is a very powerful thing. The whole time I was just observing them, and my heart was bursting with pride and love for how great they were doing. I didn't care that my feet were throbbing or that my harness was giving me bruises under my butt. I was just silently praising God in my heart that his Holy Spirit has been transforming the hearts of these people, these people that I love dearly, these people that make me so proud.

So, GREAT, now I'm not only a romantic, I'm also a freaking mom.
There goes all my plans for being an independent hard-ass.

Here's some pictures of people in this DTS. Try not to tear up.

Seven Storey Mountain

     "On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God and yet hating Him; born to love Him, living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers.
     Not many hundreds of miles away from the house where I was born, they were picking up the men who rotted in the rainy ditches among the dead horses and the ruined seventy-fives, in a forest of trees without branches along the river Marne.
     My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world and not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists. The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.
     My father painted like Cezanne and understood the southern French landscape the way Cezanne did. His vision of the world was sane, full of balance, full of veneration for structure, for the relations of the masses and for all the circumstances that impres an individual identity on each created thing. His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decorations or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself. My father was a very good artist.
     Neither of my parents suffered from the little spooky prejudices that devour the people who know nothing but automobiles and movies and what's in the ice-box and what's in the papers and which neighbors are getting a divorce.
     I inherited from my father his way of looking at things and some of his integrity and from my other some of her dissatisfaction with the mess the world is in, and some of her versatility. From both I got capacities for work and vision and enjoyment and expression that ought to have made me some kind of a King, if the standards the world lives by were the real ones. Not that we ever had any money: but any fool knows that you don't need money to get enjoyment out of life.
     If what most people take for granted were really true--if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now.
     If happiness were merely a matter of natural gifts, I would have never entered a Trappist monastery when I came to the age of a man."

--Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pg. 1



Page one, guys. Page ONE. I just got this book in the mail today. There are 400 pages left. YES. Praise God for brilliant minds that choose to write honest things on paper that make the rest of us feel sane.