Ultimate Workout- India 2008

Forgive the loooong delay. So much has happened I last wrote. I'll have to go back to retrace my steps. I'm in Kazakhstan now, substitute teaching at an English language institute for a week and a half. Wow! Life is so weird. I'll have to write more about my adventures in both Kazakhstan and Kyrgizstan next time. Below is a little meditation on Maranatha's recent Ultimate Workout India project. For those of you who don't know, UW is short term mission trip designed to challenge teenagers in the areas of spirituality and leadership. It had an enormous impact on me throughout my teen years. I mean, ENORMOUS. Anyway, here's what I wrote for Maranatha's magazine-- it'll help you understand where my heart has been this summer. I don't know what it will look like after they edit and publish it:

We just had an Ultimate Workout. It was rigorous and real: that’s what made it a workout. And it broke even my most wild expectations. After years of advising other fellow Ultimate Workout participants not to box in God with narrow hopes and calculated plans for personal growth, I still find myself falling for the game. God graciously smashed my dreams this year, delivering a truth more lasting—more ultimate—than any short-term spiritual high I could have asked for.

Two days after the project I am left sitting here in an air-conditioned room tracing the face of each participant in the jumbo-glossy group photo we had taken in front of the Taj Mahal. Each teen came with a story and went home with an added chapter unique to their own. 17 year-old ______ signed up from ____ because of her fascination with Indian culture and her desire to make a difference in the lives of others. Recently the idea of studying theology after high school entered her mind. Ultimate Workout gave her the opportunity to think that possibility through in a compelling environment. _______, 18, challenged me with his boyish energy and generous laughter, but most of all, with his genuine pursuit of a loving and compassionate God. ___ hopes to return to India as a school teacher one day.

I will never forget these people, and I don’t think they will soon forget Ultimate Workout-India, either.

Ultimate Workout-India introduced its first annual project last year in Orissa. The target volunteer group has been teens with past mission trip experience—particularly Ultimate Workout experience—and those young people seeking the most intense leadership and spiritual growth opportunities. We came to the project this year with lofty ideals. But by the grace of God, we fast found ourselves confronted with the reality of our human brokenness. The project scope was to help prepare for the opening of the Kadapa Adventist School in Andhra Pradesh, a new facility working closely with a program called Adventist Child India (ACI). ACI provides sponsorships for Adventist village children whose families make less than two dollars a day to come and study as borders at the Kadapa School. Our work for this UW-India had five components: interaction with the children at the school, construction of a wall around the compound, landscaping and beautifying of the campus, sanding of the new 3-child bunk beds for the dormitories, and prayer and visitation in the local villages.

We hit day one hard, mastering the art of block-laying and bogenvelia-bush planting in short order. The teamwork and group camaraderie was terrific and I remember being extremely grateful for the teens God had brought to India this year. But warm fuzzy feelings get stretched on mission trips where the sun shines hot, personalities grate, and unfamiliar living conditions strip away the comfortable borders we build for ourselves at home. One particularly sobering setback came on day three of our project: a wave of the stomach flu washed through our group, knocking two-thirds of the participants down flat on their backs. Discouragement threatened as we watched our newly-planted bogenvelias wither away under the hot sun.

Though undesirable from a human standpoint, these circumstances gave us a hard, honest look at ourselves. We struggled to comprehend how as individuals we deal with discomfort, heat, illness, and the reality of life and death in something as simple as a flowering tree. Sometimes the revelations were disappointing. We found ourselves to be complainers. We were tempted by exhaustion and apathy and the weight of our shattered expectations. Other times found us deeply humbled at what God was able to accomplish even through our limitations. After the sickness passed we made our way back to regroup by the bogenvelias. Brokenness begs teachability, and day by day—through trial and error—we learned how to keep our plants alive. First we regulated our watering times. Next we tried manure. Finally the school children taught us to build little circular walls around the bushes so that they could retain moisture better. The work we did was not grand or earth-shattering, but it was truth-telling in that it required such virtues as patience, discernment, consistency, and faithfulness. For me the plant nursery was a marvelous parable of how we nurture people, indeed, how God nurtured our group bit by bit in spite of our incredible resistance. His hand prevailed.

Generosity is God’s response to our clenched fists. It pours over us whether or not we receive, because it is his initiative. We saw it at work so many times this year. It came through in glorious sunsets watched from rooftops with new friends. It poured from the hearts of villagers who invited us into their homes for prayer and shelter from monsoon rains. The girls on our team slept in the same building as the young students of the Kadapa school. One morning I was feeling particularly grumpy— a trio of girls came up wanting to know if I could remember their names. I was incensed. With hundreds of children swarming the grounds of the Kadapa school, how could they actually expect me to remember each of their names? I brushed past them with obvious annoyance, seeking a room where I could close the door to their pushy demands. But before I could reach such mock security I was ambushed by twenty little girls who pulled my bewildered face down to their level and showered me with kisses.

The holiness of these moments pressed upon me with final clarity during the last Friday night worship our group shared together. We organized a communion service and decorated a rooftop with candles for special ambiance. But that evening was particularly windy, and even our best efforts couldn’t stop the lights from blowing out. We were angry and disappointed until we looked up into the night sky and saw the stars. They shone much greater and more luminous than the silly wax candles we were trying so hard to keep lit. God must have been laughing.

Looking back now, again, on the faces of this year’s participants, I am filled with wonder and gratitude over the joy that is available to those who recognize their inadequacy. Hardships invite broken people to stop and recognize the active and unchanging presence of God in all circumstances. This is the greatness of our weakness—the kind we boast in. And I do boast now, two days after this UW- India. I boast in the God of surprises—the God who showed us the truth that he is greater than our weakness. Indeed, it is in our weak places that he is most strong.

Landscapes

What I'm doing in life right now is the hardest thing I've ever done (besides VGA). Harder than Kolkata. Harder than UW. Those other things may have felt just as hard or even harder, but that's only because I had less spiritual tools to work with at the time. Its encouraging to remind myself that I never would have survived even one week in my current situation prior to this year. Its a good thing we grow.

It is remarkable how easily we are influenced by the thoughts, words, and lifestyles of others. And it is disappointing to realize how very vulnerable and weak we are in the face of all this. For so long I was convinced that if I could only choose belief, then I would be unstoppable. I was sure (though I never would have admitted it) that I had all the wisdom and skill necessary for ministry. All I lacked was the will and the heart.

In the months preceding this new "vocation" of mine, these certainties were exactly reversed. After L'Abri and Taize I had a deep desire to touch people with compassion (it burned in me). I loved and yearned for people in a way I hadn't experienced since my conversion. But I also had a new and strange distrust of my ability. If I found myself tongue-tied pre-Europe, post-Europe found my feet and hands tied instead. It was all about waiting, waiting, waiting for the opportunity. Waiting for my call. Waiting for God's "go ahead."

I had a lot of hope for the Corinthian texts: "My strength is made perfect in weakness...," "God has chosen the weak things...," etc. I held to the old quip, "God does not call the qualified, but qualifies the called." Well, now that all of me is unstuck (tongue, hands, and feet,) something is still not quite right. Why am I still not conquering the world? After all, I'm not waiting for anything anymore. I am completely free in my faith, in my adulthood, and in my calling. So why do I still get lazy? Why am I still powerless over my gluttony? Why fearful? (So, so fearful.) Why undisciplined? Unloving? Sometimes depressed?

And why, with my new "commitment" to obedience, did God have to first send me to this most difficult post of all? When it makes me tremble with doubt, when it draws out even my deepest, most hidden fears, why does he leave me in this space? When will I ever be able to move past myself so that life can be less about me and more about others?

Who am I blessing right now? How is this "ministry"?

I am so afraid of going back to what was, of loosing my joy and my New Life. What happened in Europe gave me so much hope. It filled my life with wonder, such promise, and so much love. I felt energized and alive in a way I'd nearly given up on ever feeling again. Forgive me for beating this thing to death: tender, whole, deliberate, and so, so deeply beautiful... that's how it was. How can one-time children of Light settle for this New Age pandering of Yin and Yang and the acceptance of a death called "balance"? Oh, there is indeed a very healthy form of death, I know. And though I've struggled to welcome it, I have at least now let it in the front door of my heart. But this Christian kind of death is meant as the passage to Eternal Life. Can shadows of the spiritual life really serve this end? Oh, what am I thinking? Of course they can! They always have. In the life of every saint, in creation, in the history of God, they have. Why does this truth keep elluding me?

As I sit here on the couch I am gazing through the window at the ocean. A few days ago I discovered a secret trail leading down through a neighbor's yard towards the beach. Most everyone I know will be appalled to learn how unenthusiastic I usually am about the sea. I'm sorry about that. Truth be told, I've never really been a "beachy" kind of girl. I prefer wheat fields to run in, and the ever-present sky with its lights and stars and sun. Recently I heard about a book that parallels landscapes with our spiritual journeys (no, I haven't read the book yet). This was not a new idea to me. It is clear why I like the wild freedom of these open spaces. God has always spoken to me through their gold: gold beams streaming through golden clouds on golden fields. And all of this moving, rolling on, forever.

Unfortunately, during times of spiritual dryness I have at times approached God brazenly in these, his symbols. I have raged at sunsets and worn ugly yellows, as if somehow I could induce God's presence in my life. In Kolkata I finally learned to accept Absence (thank you, Mother Teresa and Martin Marty). Like the quail-stuffed children of Israel on their way to the Promised Land, I finally got sick from my impetuous spiritual appetite. "God sent leanness" just in time, and thereafter I experienced a period of much needed "winterfallow." (Check out Marty's book, "A Cry of Absence," and you'll pick up my allusions-- if you haven't already.)

In Kolkata I learned to accept the greyness. The external imagery of the place matched perfectly the way I felt inside: smoggy, dead, and numbed with noise. By the time I arrived back in the United States I could hardly stand to look at a sunset. (Was it shame? Embarrassment? Disappointment?) What I felt, distinctly, was that sunsets were somehow just too rich for my new spiritual diet.

Coming to the west side, now, I am finding myself confronted with a new spiritual scape in the sea. I actually enjoyed myself at the beach this week. Immensely. The tide was out and the cold grey rocks were draped in green seaweed. Smooth sandbars sunk beneath my feet and disappeared beneath water. I watched seagulls; I stuck my fingers into giant barnacles and hopped over driftwood. And most beautiful of all? As I stood gazing into the distance I finally saw the setting sun as a brand new gift. It did not come to me streaming over summer wheat fields. It came in stillness, trembling over little golden waves.

And this was the great grey sea.