Response to a beautiful comment...

Anonymous said...Bess Anne - YOu don't know me, I read your blog that was sent to me by a friend and I was touched by your life. The last time I read it, you were on your last day away from home. I wondered then how you would adjust to life once you got back home. Some might say once you got back to reality. I would say that the problem is reality is where you were. Mother Teresa had a hard time visiting the United States and other places of wealth. Once you've been touched by the compassion of Christ in helping the poor it's hard to go back to where you were before. I'm not sure you're meant to go back. God puts us in places because we need to change. We pray to be more like him. I think you have come closer to his goal. Because of this, you will never be the same and may never be able to settle for the more quieter life. God has put in you a spirit of service. I think you will only find peace when you are truly serving in his name again. I'm not writing you this to discourage you, but to encourage you. Mother Teresa knew where her true calling was and tried not to get distracted from it. And when she was, the yearning in her reminded her. I think you are feeling that yearning. There is a place where you are needed to serve. There are many, many places here in the states that need people to serve. I think that God has prepared your heart for that place. Trust God to lead you to it. I'm sure Mother Teresa had the same questions as you. But you can't let the questions hinder your service. You have to trust God that he is answering those prayers thru people like you. I thank God that he called you and I thank you for answering that call.

This was a wonderful comment, and I am continually amazed by the amount of "strangers" that write me with kind thoughts and encouragement. I agree with this comment on a number of levels. I absolutely know that under the questions, concerns, and conflicts that I feel in this season is a "calling", if you will, to love. My heart beats for the poor, the orphan, and the outcast. This is very, very true.
Once, while in India my dear friend Michaela's mother came for a visit from Canada. This woman was a breath of fresh air. Death was not a stranger for us in the government maternity hospital, in fact, we saw it almost daily. However, there seemed to be a weight that came with maternal death that didn't seem as heavy with the death of a baby. I was in Admissions one day when a girl my age was rushed in, transfered from another hospital with a breathing tube, and unconscious. I raced for my blood pressure cuff and took her blood pressure. I could not read it. I asked the doctor for a second opinion and she could not find it either. We began to search for a pulse, we found one, but it was faint. Slowly it went from faint beats to nothing. I stood there watching as a pregnant woman my own age passed on without a thing I could do. The baby was gone as well. Her father came in, a small man, barefoot, wearing old white fabric draped around his waist, an old, stretched out stained t-shirt, and material wrapped around his head, crowned with gray hair. At the sight of his daughter he began to weep. Turning towards her, then away, then towards her again, he began to sing out hysterical Hindu prayers. He touched her feet, then turned away. I removed her breathing tube, wiped her face, pulled up her sari, and closed her eyes. Soon after, it was time for lunch... I went into the doctor's room and took off my coat, put my stethoscope and BP cuff away, and stood there silent as my tutor spoke with us about what had just happened. Michaela's mom happened to be in the doctor's room, just passing through on her tour of the hospital. She looked at my stoic, silent face and said, "Are you a burden bearer?" "I don't know," I responded. "You are," the she hugged me, and held me for a long moment. I left for lunch that day with a slightly greater understanding of myself. I was a "burden bearer".
I understand that this blog is a tremendously vulnerable statement that I am choosing to make. To be honest some days I wish I could have come back to the states and written about how I'd been volunteering at the local soup kitchen, or that I was going back to Africa to teach women about Mother and Child Health Care. I wish that I could continue to share stories about delivering babies on distant shores, or about rescuing orphans, bathing them, feeding them, loving them... However for me, these are not just stories. This is reality, real people, real blood, real pain, and real poverty. Over the last few months I have wondered why I have not even been able to think about "serving" in the way I've always done it--with my hands, getting dirty, having nothing, giving everything... I have wondered why I have questioned the One I have loved and trusted the most. I have questioned the state of the world, and the hope that I cling to. I have questioned the sincerity of the American church, and the motives in which we function out of. I have wanted the questions and the sadness and the weariness to fade out. I have wanted to be the positive "missionary" I feel that I have to be, the role I've been given to play. However, the more I ask, the more I understand that this place I am in is beautiful. I would be much more worried if I had seen all of these things and come home with out questions. You see because these things, poverty, injustice, death, destruction, corruption, hatred, sickness, disease... are things that can not, and should not be recovered from easily. I worry for those who continue on as if it was just a stubbed toe that they had seen, and not a macerated still born.
I am quite thankful for my "middle-class-Caucasian-Californian-American" roots. However the brutality of "reality", as you call it, can be quite over whelming in comparison. There are so many things that I simply don't understand. To be honest, I feel as though I'm carrying questions about drugs, overdoses, homelessness, mental illness, and family injustice with me from when I lived with the inner city ministry in San Diego. I can still see the faces of children, or people that died while I was there, or those run by addiction, or those with broken homes so broken your stomach turns with the injustice of it all. I still carry questions about theology stirred by my time in Connecticut. I still carry questions with me about orphans of prostitutes, and the sickness of the sex-slave industry from my first two trips to India. I still wonder about the animal sacrifices I have seen, or the children bathing in muddy, bloody water, believing it was holy in Nepal. I still wonder about the "Christian evangelists" that spend have of a seminar talking about money. I still have questions about violence, the oppression of women world wide, female genital mutilation, abuse... I still have questions about the genocide and war all over Africa. I have questions about rape and pillage, and molestation... For me, these were not just situations that are common place in the inner city, or in the third world, or in a consumer driven society they are an opposition to the hope that I have, or had for the world.
I am in a place where I have to reconcile the "reality" of the world to my hope that I have for it. We were never intended to see, or experience such atrocities, and for me, they are not easily wiped away. I would like to think that I envy those who can see such things and move on. But then again, I want to feel. I need to feel, I need to ask God "why?" I need to be angry, I need to be stirred, I need to be broken. I need to wrestle with darkness and conquer it. If I do not, I fear that it will consume me, and my "calling", or my "ministry" will be utterly lost and abandoned.
This season is alright. I am not leaving the faith, I'm not leaving the "mission field", I am not leaving the church. But I am questioning all of it. Absolutely. I need to. I need to step back, breath, speak, know that it's okay to feel broken for every situation of injustice I've witnessed. I am beginning to understand what it means to be a burden barer, to carry the weight of injustice, to wrestle with God for answers, to truly feel the "wrongness" that is penetrating our world. I truly believe that only then will I be able to understand the gift and the weight of this thing called "HOPE". For so long those words have been romantic. I feel as though at the end of this they will truly be real.
A dear friend of mine, and a staff on the Birth Attendant School always spoke of the "groaning of the world". Romans 8 was one of her favorite chapters in the bible, and as a group of midwives we read it often.
"For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words." vs 22-26
This blog is my groaning. I am some how, for some reason joining with creation in her birthing pains, in her panting, in her desire to be delivered from the injustice of her nations. I know, and I believe that this season, and this labour will not give birth to wind, but to "HOPE". I am giving myself, and hopefully other burden bearers like myself, the freedom, and the time to groan. Even when there are no words, or no actions, when all I can do is be in my home town, working part time as a nanny, I am joining with creation in a labour far more important than the type I've done for so long. For a burden barer, for a midwife, this is by far the most exciting and courageous task I've taken on yet. To just be. To groan, to ask, to question, to cry, to grow...
He was a burden bearer as well. And I love that He often went away, to groan under the weight of the burden, and await deliverance.
I suppose in many ways He is still awaiting. As am I.

So, thank you stranger for your kind encouragement, it lead me to many thoughts and contemplations, none I'm sure of which you had intended, but important none the less. I am reading Mother Teressa's personal writings now, actually.
And I wonder...