LEARNING FROM KIM

I love this story from a La Arche community member:

"I learn a lot from Kim"

I learn a lot from Kim, whom I live with at L'Arche. When Kim was wished a Happy 41st Birthday she responded, nonchalantly, saying, "Thanks. I don’t look it." In that moment she ministered to me, teaching me what it means to be free, to be young in spirit, to tell your own story, to resist society's expectations of what it means to be a certain age or fit in a certain category. I was also touched when Kim announced her first home was here at L'Arche in Richmond Hill, her second home was in Markham (her family home) and, quite proudly, "My third home is in heaven." Although we couldn't help laughing about the mortgage on that third home, I realized a deeper theological truth--that she wasn't seeing past, present and future, but was truly living out God's vision, seeing beyond set time lines and seeing the bigger picture. When Kim was cutting tomatoes for dinner, rolling her eyes she exclaimed, "Ha! And, they thought I was handicapped!" She then went on to say how she's been proving people wrong and learning new things all along. In that moment, I realized that I too had bought into a hierarchy of people, that I had been competing and that I had been buying into "us and them" boundaries--none of which are part of true community.

Janna Payne, L'Arche Daybreak

LIFE SO FRAGILE

Last week we came face to face with this reality as Hannah, carrying our first grandchild, suffered a traumatic miscarriage in her 12th week of pregnancy. Why? Not yet known. Not sure it will ever be known. But "how" Hannah and Dirk have responded in their grief is inspiring as they indeed have had a glimpse of God surrounding them, carrying them, giving comfort and perspective through their pain. Through Hannah's writing she has been able to share that grace experienced.

Grieving is not finished in a week, however. Life returns to some semblance of normal but from time to time the grief can wash over us like a tidal wave like the tsunami that hit Japan this week...perhaps to remind us how fragile is life...to lead us to look to what is eternal.

I noted in my journal the day of the miscarriage these words from Psalm 139 The Message:

"Like an open book, You watch us grow from conception to birth. All the days of our lives are spread out before you, the days of our lives prepared before we even live one day."

Twelve weeks our little grandchild lived on this earth in his mother's womb but now in heaven for eternity. It causes me to wonder and acknowledge that God's ways are so often hard to fathom. But it also leads me to trust in God's perfect love; he is the potter and we are the clay. We have been shaped in new ways because of the brief coming and the sudden leaving of a little baby, a child of God, we had opened our hearts to and will never forget.

Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen | Video on TED.com

Evelyn Glennie shows how to listen | Video on TED.com

LISTENING

A friend recently said that he had been talking for 30 years and thought it was time he started listening. I was impressed by that resolve.

Today I ran onto a TED video of Evelyn Glennie, a deaf percussionist and composer, who challenged me to think outside the box. She also opened my mind to the greater potential of ourselves and others if we learn to listen with our whole being. She uses music/percussion to express deep truths.

I'm processing so much lately and want to really listen to hear truth about myself and life in general but specifically related to what I am experiencing these days. I desire to listen more profoundly to hear from God as he speaks through his word and through others. I want to listen so that I not only understand him, but myself and others and have a deeper compassion that comes from truly listening.

A question a dear counselor once repeatedly asked me during weeks of therapy was: What is reality? He would never answer the question for me. But always posed the question so from time to time 30 years later I continue to ask myself the same question which I think is answered when we seek to listen.

I especially want to listen and learn to walk through the reality of aging, now that my body is weakening, with grace and peace not succumbing to despair but staying present in love and life.

Probably most important,t I want to learn to listen to others to hear and understand rather than to always feel like I need to do something to fix "IT". So if you talk to me and I start to offer advice, please stop me and remind me to just simply listen.

Listen
by Author Unknown

When I ask you to listen to me
and you start giving advice,
you have not done what I asked.
When I ask you to listen to me
and you begin to tell me why I shouldn't feel that way,
you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me
and you feel you have to do something to solve my problem,
you have failed me, strange as that may seem.
Listen! All I asked was that you listen.
Not to talk or do-just hear me.
Advice is cheap. Ten cents will get you both Dear Abby and
Bill Graham in the same newspaper.
And I can do for myself. I'm not helpless.
Maybe discouraged and faltering, but not helpless.

When you do something for me that I can and need to do for myself,
you contribute to my fear and weakness.
But, when you accept as a single fact that I do feel what I feel,
no matter how irrational, then I can quit trying to convince
you and get to the business of understanding what's
behind this irrational feeling.
And when that's clear, the answers are obvious
and I don't need advice.
Irrational feelings make sense when we understand
what's behind them.

So, please listen and just hear me. And if you want to talk,
wait a minute for your turn;
and I'll listen to you.

PRESSING ON

As we come to the close of 2010, I’ve been reflecting on how it has proven to be one of the most puzzling and difficult years of our lives as Jeff’s brokenness, and mine, has precipitated the closing of a chapter of our lives in Africa and with our WorldVenture family.

I was thinking about some of the relics that mark that passage. Especially, I was thinking of the Lotuko spear and shield which Jeff was given after 2 months dwelling among those tribal people back in 1982 and how a few years later he may have participated in one of the last great hunts with the Lotuko warrior/hunters across the great savannah land near Torit, Southern Sudan… I recall Jeff’s story of walking for miles in the hot sun with hundreds of men hunting only with spears and bows and arrows resulting in his heat exhaustion and being carried out of the bush on a contrived stretcher with a procession of warriors forming a happy parade accompanying him back to his abode. Then later the next day going to the feast which followed such a hunt and running into SPLA rebels who took him hostage and threatened his life which would have been forfeit except for God and his Lotuko brothers who loved him and surrounded him, the chief arguing for his release which was eventually secured.

Twenty years later Jeff’s heart for Sudan took us back to try to help the repatriation of Sudanese who had been refugees in Uganda during the 2 decades of war preceding. I watched him pour himself out body, mind and soul for the Ugandan and Sudanese people never taking into account that his body was no longer that young buck who had gone hunting with that warrior class in 1982… Having a total hip replacement (due to the diseased disintegration of his right hip) followed by a heart valve transplant (because of the faulty valve he was born with) in 2007 which marked the opening door to Sudan with the signing of the peace agreement in Sudan and cessation of hostilities of war with the Ugandan rebels among whom we’d been dwelling since moving into Northern Uganda in 2002.

I am distressed by people who look at Jeff’s breakdown this past year as somehow being his fault…this strong, noble hearted man who never thought of himself these past decades spent in loving the destitute and poor of Africa. Some look at his body and think he must have chosen this path to brokenness by the things he ate or did not eat. When they look at him with that kind of judgment, it breaks my heart because they fail to see the great heart of a warrior, God’s warrior who spent the best years of his life offering compassion and presence to broken people.

This past year we’ve seen him raging against the devastation of his dreams and his own broken health. He did not choose to leave Africa. I dragged him off that Dark Continent to try to preserve him alive before we buried him there as he wanted.

Now we are turning a corner, hoping for renewed vision and life even as he continues to wrestle with his personal demons of PTSD and diabetes resulting from his Vietnam service with the Marine Corps over forty years ago which have so colored our lives all these decades.

Personally, I am taking Philippians 3:12-14 as my theme for 2011 pressing on, don’tcha know, as I trust God still has more life in store for us.

I am profoundly grateful for the great adventure life has been to this point.

CHRISTMAS WISH

The past couple of years the Theisen family has begun sharing Christmas wish lists to make our gift giving more meaningful to the receivers.

I find myself giving God my Christmas wish list this year as I contemplate how Jesus, the one we celebrate at this time of year, walked this earth, ie. John 8:1-11, in his gentle fashion loving a woman caught in adultery, loving those accusing her, those seeking to discredit him as a religious leader.

Rather than judging the woman or turning and accusing those men who dragged the poor woman into his presence demanding that she be stoned for her transgression as the law prescribed, he simply stooped and silently drew in the sand at their feet. What message or picture we are not told. Perhaps he did so to hide his tears over their brokenness, their unbelief, their misunderstanding of what he was about. The commentator I was reading pointed out that this event must have wounded Jesus deeply seeing the fear and enmity that drove all of that ugly scene. Jesus then simply responded:

"Let he who has no sin be the first to throw a stone at her."

My wish at this Advent/Christmas time is that the Imago Dei as seen in Christ Jesus, his heart for forgiveness, reconciliation and peace, would show up in our families, communities and the world, disarming fear and enmities, the love of Jesus covering a multitude of sins. I truly believe peace and reconciliation begin in our own hearts as we experience being forgiven and discovering peace within our own selves impacting first of all our own senses, then grace and peace rippling out covering our immediate families, then into our communities and the world.

Anticipating Christmas morning when the waiting is over and desire fulfilled. I can only believe that my wish is going to be granted.

THINKING OF ADVENT

Born to Hunger

Christ was born not because there was joy in the world, but because there was suffering in it. He was born not to riches, but to poverty; not to satiety, but to hunger and thirst; not to security, but to danger, exile, homelessness, destitution, and crucifixion.

His Incarnation now, in us, is in the suffering world as it is. It is not reserved for a utopia that will never be; it does not differ from his first coming in Bethlehem, his birth in squalor, in dire poverty, in a strange city. It is the same birth here and now. There is Incarnation always, everywhere.

The law of growth is rest. We must be content in winter to wait patiently through the long bleak season in which we experience nothing whatever of the sweetness or realization of the Divine Presence, believing the truth that these seasons, which seem to be the most empty, are the most pregnant with life. It is in them that the Christ-life is growing in us, laying hold of our soil with strong roots that thrust deeper and deeper; drawing down the blessed rain of mercy and the sun of eternal love through our darkness and heaviness and hardness, to irrigate and warm those roots.

The soil must not be disturbed.

~Caryll Houselander