Words

Words are so incredibly powerful. I think they are way more powerful than I can fully grasp. I know it in my head but I don’t really believe it in my heart. Some people believe in the power of words better than others. Last week I was talking to one of our dear Kenyan friends here, and we were discussing the drought that has left so many of the people around us literally starving, and I cheerfully said something about how we had been given money to hand out food to so many people and build farms using drip irrigation and how wonderful that was (which I still think it is). He looked a little underwhelmed, which, I must admit, surprised me a little. I thought he would be just as happy as I was. He and his whole church had been fasting for 21 days together to pray for God to bring rain. He pointed out that, though we had fed many, there were still so many more left without food, and that only rain from heaven could bring true relief. Well, I sort of dismissed this conversation at first, but it came back to my mind later. My solutions always involve me or someone else doing something. His solutions involve prayer for God to intervene. Do I believe God is able to bring rain from heaven to water the earth and allow crops to grow? Absolutely. Do I believe that He will if we fast and pray for him to do so? I don’t know. I hate to say it, but I just don’t know. What I do know is that my friend puts a lot more faith in the power of prayer than I do, and I could probably stand to take a page out of his book. We still need to act and do what we can do to help God’s people, but we also need to pray and believe in the power of the words we are praying. The words we say to each other are powerful and the words we say to God are powerful.

Of course, God’s words are the most powerful of all. He spoke, and the world is. His words have their own creative abilities, literally. Then there is Jesus, who is also called the Word. The Word creates, the Word heals, the Word loves, the Word convicts, the Word gives hope, and so much more. So what are my words about? The best way to know what my words are doing is not to ask myself that question, but to direct that question at the people receiving my words. Truthfully, I don’t really know what my words are doing except when someone else chooses to tell me, either because my words were particularly helpful or hurtful to them. I can definitely look at my life and see the power of others’ words on me.

In the second grade I had a teacher that I loved so much. Her name was Mrs. Coats. One day, maybe at the end of the year, she gave each of her students a description of themselves and what she saw as that person’s strengths. What she chose to write about me were these words, “Sarah Jones, cool, calm, and collected.” That just struck a cord in me. I loved those words and wanted to be exactly that. The fact that I still remember those words all these years later just shows how much power they have had in my life. I remember in middle school, the darkest and saddest years of my life, my older brother David would tell me, “Sarah, you are the coolest girl in the youth group.” Those words, coming from my older brother in high school who I saw as the coolest person ever, gave me just enough courage to keep getting up in the morning and facing the misery at school day after day. Then there was grad school. At the very end I had to stand up in front of my fellow students, professors, friends and family, and my thesis committee and give a full description of what I had done in the last four years and convince them that I had done enough and knew enough to deserve a PhD. My mentor introduced me before I gave my talk, and, as my heart was pounding with anticipation, he spoke these words that I know I will never forget. He said something about how on the outside I appeared to be just a petite blonde-headed girl with a southern accent, but “inside her chest beats the heart of a lion.” I remember being so blown away by those words. I couldn’t believe he saw that in me. I have replayed those words in my mind in some of my dark moments to remind myself that there is strength and bravery at my core.

Unfortunately, negative words are equally powerful and leave lasting scars. I have been called things like “vanilla” and “Sarah, plain and not-so-tall.” Of course these words were spoken as a joke, but it isn’t funny if it’s not true, right? Deep down I let these words define me a little bit, too. A plain, boring, uninteresting person who is always predictable. During my second year of grad school I had to sit for my oral qualifying exams. This involves standing before a committee of 4 professors for two hours and, with a white board and dry erase marker in hand, answering any question they choose to ask me concerning genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry, and whatever else. I don’t think I have ever been so scared. When my two hours was over I left the room so they could talk about me and decide whether or not I passed. When I went back into the room, their faces were somber. They started with, “you passed” but went on to criticize every way in which I had responded and spoken and the one word I remember in all of it was “unimpressive.” So there you have it, Sarah, the plain, vanilla, boring, and unimpressive. And then of course there is the 1-10 ratings that guys like to give girls which tends to make it back around to the girl who got the rating. Each point that is deducted leaves me wondering, “ is it my face?” or “is this part too big and another part too small?”

Every day I have to choose what words will define me. If they really are so powerful, which I am more and more convinced that they are, I have to choose which ones I let in and which ones go out very carefully. I also need to direct a few more to God, and I need to let a few more of HIs words ruminate in my mind. You are loved, you are valued, you are precious, you are worthy, you are enough, you are beautiful. I pray that God gives me the right words to offer others who are hurting, and I pray that He strengthens my mind to define myself by His words and the words of other people that originated in Him.

Adventure

Everyday is a new battle of the mind for me. Some days I feel it more than others. What will I allow my thoughts to focus on today? How can I keep it positive. I am a realist by nature (this is what pessimists call themselves because they don’t want to label themselves pessimistic). I have to say I inherited this from my father, and please don’t hear me being at all critical of my father. His and my ability to think through a possible scenario completely and thoroughly is, like most things in life, both a weakness and a strength. We each married our own personal ray of sunshine to balance us out. I cannot let this topic go by without telling a story about my dad that passes through my mind every single time I catch myself being a little too “realistic”. One time when my 3 siblings and I were all young and living at home we were going on a road trip to somewhere. As you can imagine, with 4 children in a minivan for an extended period of time, junk started accumulating on the floor of said minivan. My dad, who, much like me, does not like chaos, opened the door to the van to let us out and found a cassette tape case lying right where we would all need to pass to exit the van. He then proceeded to explain how hazardous this situation was, and it went something like this:


“You know, someone could step on this tape case, causing them to slip and fall, which could lead to a broken arm, in which case we would all have to go to the hospital, and since we don’t know our way around we would have to stop and ask someone for directions to the hospital, and since people don’t usually give good directions we would probably end up lost, and then it would be getting late, so we would just have to sleep on the side of the road, and then the police would find us sitting there, which is probably illegal, and he would have to take us to prison, and the one with a broken arm surely wouldn’t get any help there, and one of you would end up with an amputated arm and the rest of us in jail.”


I’m sure the years since this has happened have probably exaggerated this story just a little in my mind, but we all laughed and said something like, “oh, dad”, and it has become one of those iconic stories that always gives me a good chuckle. What’s great about my dad is that he has lead the way for me in teaching his negative leaning mind to think positively, and here is one of many things I have learned from him. One of the best ways to fight the blues is this: adventure.


This may seem like an unlikely solution, and the reality of it has only just now occurred to me, but I believe that some of the times I feel the most alive, the most connected with God, are when I feel that I am on an adventure. I am sure that my love of adventure came from both my parents, who used to read the Chronicles of Narnia to me and push me to do the things I felt scared to do. Long hikes and camping trips with my dad always felt like adventures to me. Any time I felt nervous (especially when my parents were dropping me off at college for the first time and I was scared to death) my mom would say, “You’re off on an adventure!” And that somehow tipped the scales from the feeling that I am facing a mountain that I will never be able to climb to the feeling of hopeful expectation of what I will see on the other side when I reach the top.


Sometimes the adventure is more apparent than others. Setting off with my three siblings on a trek down a creek that we don’t know very well to find a destination we aren’t very sure of: definite adventure. Going to college in another state at a school where I know very few people: adventure. Going to grad school with very little research experience in a new huge city that I don’t know and trying to figure out life on my own at the same time: adventure. Leaving everyone and everything that I know to start a new life with my husband in Africa: adventure. But what about now? Am I still on an adventure waking up everyday to feed my children breakfast, take them to school, and come home to care for my two-year-old? Don’t forget the almost daily trip to the supermarket (and sometimes that is more of an adventure than I would care to admit). I really can see now why some people experience a midlife crisis. We are driven by a desire for adventure. It keeps our minds sharp and spirits high. But adventure is all around us. Adventure is all around me. It is not a specific situation, it is a state of mind. Right now my adventure is not the “make a movie out of her life” kind, but it is there. I am challenging myself spiritually, because no matter how much I know about God, He remains a mystery to be discovered. No matter how many cool people I meet, there are more cool people out there doing amazing things that I have never heard of before. No matter how many times I look at the beauty of the ocean, I can always look again, and be awe-struck. Every day my children do something new that amazes me. I never tire of their kisses. And life could change in a second, so I can’t afford to put my life into cruise control. Maybe I need someone like Steve Martin in The Pink Panther who constantly “surprise” attacks his partner to keep him sharp. I need it both as a warning and because that is what I was made for. Maybe God put this need for adventure in my life because it keeps me alive and it brings me LIFE! So let me go and see what adventure waits for me today. After all, “zee wezzer eez very mild right now, don’t you seenk?”

Mix Matched

Life is such a funny thing, isn’t it? Today I find myself pondering the huge problems of the world, like the people right around us who are starving, the people losing their homes, lives, everything in Syria, the people living in the US who fear the direction the country is headed will leave them on the outside. These things weigh me down and steal my joy. At the same time, I am annoyed that our spoons keep going missing. And why is it always the spoons, by the way? Thank goodness we don’t live in a climate that requires socks because Lord knows we would be losing those, too! I’m ashamed to express these sentiments in the same paragraph, but they all go through my mind in the course of one morning. I don’t understand myself.

Here are the most extremely petty problems of Sarah Nicholson:

-half the ornaments on our Christmas tree are broken and glued back together
-my favorite tea pot that was a gift from my mom is broken and glued back together
-half of our spoons from the silverware we got when we were married are gone
-every Willow Tree piece I have ever gotten has been somehow broken- EVERY ONE (no matter how high a shelf I try to put it on to prevent breakage)
-our really nice kitchen knives have been used to cut fruit on concrete
-many of my clothes and linens have bleach stains because of the univseral use of bleach to clean everything here
-many of our precious books were rained on and ruined because the truck that moved our stuff had a leaky tarp covering it -has anyone ever heard of a complete set of matching glasses? I don’t think they even sell them that way in the store
-I won’t mention the list of things we have had stollen from us, but it’s long… and very expensive
-and last but not least, I now only have one bra insert for my swimsuit because the other was used to scrub the bathroom

That’s the thing with things, they just don’t hold up very well. Which is exactly why Jesus warned us about getting too attached. Then I think about God looking at his beloved creation, infinitely more valuable and precious than any of these “things.” How grieved He must be at the hurt that He witnesses. But you know what is so beautiful about God? He is able to redeem… anything… everything. And He has promised that He will. Actually, He already is. In an attempt to understand what God is doing at the God level, I can try to do it at the Sarah level. I can take the broken ornaments, glue them back together, put them up on my tree, and find them beautiful, because they are mine. God never intended for us to be broken, but He is all about the work of mending, and, I believe, He looks at us afterward, scars and all, and finds us beautiful, because we are His. I can take the few spoons I have left from my first set and mix them with others… a mix matched set of silverware. This is not what I wanted at the beginning, but it can be a beautiful thing. And when God takes people who do not match and puts them together, it’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? One that needs a home with one who needs their worldview expanded, one who needs parents with those who need children, one who needs food with one who needs to learn dependence on God. And, just like that, God has mix matched us, and we are beautiful. Mix matched, broken, and beautiful.

And so, Sarah, do not despair at the state of your silverware, and do not despair at the state of your world or your country. Everything that is broken, God is redeeming, and everything that is lost, God is finding. And you get to be a part of that. Go find someone who is broken and be a part of God putting the pieces of their heart back together. Sometimes just a genuine smile can add a little glue to the cracks. Go find someone who doesn’t match you and offer them your friendship. Imagine the beauty that God sees in the two of you together. And remember that when you feed someone that’s hungry or give someone a drink that’s thirsty or put clothes on someone that needs clothes, you are doing these things for Jesus, even if the hungry, thirsty, naked people are your own children.

When helping others hurts me

Chris and I work with orphans, sick people, and generally people in need. We do what we can to help. Okay, mostly it is Chris doing it because I am home with the kids, but I join in when I can. There is a book that has been popular for a while in the circle of humanitarian groups and other aid organizations. This book, called, "When Helping Hurts," describes the phenomenon that happens when people with very good intentions try to help in the best way they know how, but that help actually ends up doing a lot of damage, usually in the way of causing a dependence in someone that needs to learn independence. We have seen this happen many times, and, unfortunately, we have been on the causing end of it a time or two (unfortunately, we have not yet perfected the art of helping people). But what I want to write about is a little different twist on that; something else we have also experienced. Sometimes, when you try to help other people, you are the one that ends up getting hurt. I'm not talking about the sacrifices that we are called to make as Christians to lift others up: things like living with less money, or less personal space, or less "me" time. I'm talking about when someone genuinely and purposefully hurts you after you have done your very best to help them. This doesn't happen often, but when it does, it feels like, as Steve Carrel says in Get Smart, a sucker punch to the gonads. It's just plain hard to get over, because no matter how many dollars or tears or sleepless hours you have spent on that person, to them, you are only as good as the last "yes" or "no" you gave in response to a request for help. And since "no's" are bound to come sooner or later, you are destined for failure in that person's eyes. To use another movie quote, "you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." Thank you, Harvey Dent. Again, I want to say that many people we work with are very appreciative and we feel so honored to be doing the work we are doing, but those things don't take away the sting of these burns. So what do I do with these moments of extreme discouragement? When God says to love Him and love others above anything else I do with my life, but that love leads me into pain, how do I continue to let love guide me? Sometimes, I have to let it guide me not only to people who need it, but to people who have it to offer. Sometimes I have to let love guide me to the people that love me the most, so that I can experience something closer to the love that God has for me. Sometimes I have to think about not only how to build sustainable works that will provide for people in need, but also about how to build a life that I can sustain myself. If my life here is not sustainable for me, then I will end up going home, and no one here will receive my help anymore. I never ever want to turn my back on anyone, because God is always able to redeem. I just have to recognize that one drowning person cannot rescue another. Let me get on the life boat that is being offered by people who love me, and when the drowning person is interested in being saved, and not just causing others to drown, I will be available to offer my hand.

having a daughter

I wouldn't generally call myself a fearful person, but lately, I have encountered something that truly scares me. I have a 4-year-old daughter that I love with more intensity than the flames on the surface of the sun. I think she is beautiful and brilliant and talented and everything else. But recently, it has dawned on me that there very likely will come a day when she looks in the mirror and doesn't like what she sees; either the way she looks or the way she thinks or the way she acts or any of a million other things will seem not-good-enough. I guess it's possible for a girl to grow up never feeling any of those things, but the odds of that are statistically very small. When I think of that moment, my heart stops. And then I want to vomit. I would give my life to stop this from happening, but me losing my life wouldn't help her at all. So I have been thinking a lot about what to do and how I can best equip her for these moments (because there will likely be more than one). Why does the prospect of her insecurity frighten me so much? Because I know that if left unchecked, the world can use that insecurity to take her to the worst places she could go... places that promise love but only offer hate. No, no, NO, those are not the places for my children. I have had my own moments of self-dislike, and I won't say they don't continue to come from time to time. My parents did a lot in the way of helping me navigate those emotions. Of course it always helps to hear the truth spoken over you, "you are beautiful, you are loved, you are talented, you have a special place in this world, you are a daughter of the King." But I think it has to go beyond that, too. My mom warned me that the self-doubt was coming. Not in a way that made me scared before I should be, but in a way that when it came, I didn't feel too surprised. It's kind of like childbirth, you can never know what it's like until you go through it, but knowledge of how it will go beforehand helps so much. I realize that for a long time I thought that if I spoke words of love over my daughter enough, I could keep her from facing self-dislike, but I am coming to grips with the fact that I can't keep her from harm all her life. All I can do is give her a toolbox full of tools to use when these problems crop up. Or is it weapons she needs more than tools? I think I will stick with the idea of tools. She is in a fight against evil, but she will need constant maintenance on her thought patterns. The first tool I can give her is the knowledge that she is a child of God, that He has made her, that He loves her EXACTLY the way she is. The world is broken, which results in her own brokenness as well, but the person she is meant to be and that she CAN be is exactly what God wants. She is His favorite! The second tool is warning of what's to come. I don't want her to be caught off guard one day when destructive thought patterns start to pop up. Last night I was talking to her about what it means to be beautiful, and I said that one day people might tell her that other things are beautiful, but they will be lying. I asked her what she thought those things might be, and she said, "make-up, hair, and dresses." Yes! I think she is onto something. Don't get me wrong, she loves to get a new dress and play with my make-up and put bows in her hair. I just need her to know that isn't where true beauty comes from. The third tool, and this is the HARDEST one, is to have a mother who doesn't listen to the destructive self-talk or the destructive lies from outside (or the inside). This means a little less time in front of the mirror, Sarah, and a little less complaining about a bad hair cut or my soft belly. One of the best things I can do for her is to look in the mirror and love myself. I'm trying... I'm really trying. I know she is going to need all the tools she can get, so I will keep trying to add them into her box. In the end, it will be up to her to put them to use. Dear God, is this how you feel? Just a fraction of how you feel? You love me more than I love my children, and you give me what I need to have life to the fullest, but I have to receive your gifts. I have to open the box, pull out the tools, and put them to work. My thought patterns need constant work. Some problems are recurring, but some are new and I need new tools to fix them. I didn't know I would be a stay-at-home mom and yet not feel completely fulfilled in that role. I didn't know I would get a PhD and feel that it still just isn't enough. I didn't know that I would go through a time of searching for my faith, find my faith, but still find myself searching. Lord, please provide me with the tools I need to get my thoughts back where they should be and give me the courage to open up my toolbox and get to work.

receive

For the last 6 months or so I've really been trying to focus on this idea of "RECEIVE." I somehow came to the understanding that God wants us not only to find joy in giving to others but to also find joy in receiving from Him, which I am not very good at. I am a striver. I strive towards goals and dreams and wishes and obligations until I'm exhausted and not much fun to be around or very good to the people I love and who need me the most. I really want to stop striving, but I find it so hard to balance meeting goals (which I am extremely hard wired for) with "rejoicing in the Lord," which requires me to just say thanks and have fun with the presents God gives me. I never seem to have time to just have fun. Like, "God, thanks for giving me this awesome family, I'm just going to have fun hanging out with them and not try to pick up the house or figure out what it is I can do that will make me feel like I'm doing something really awesome with my life." I also have some obsessive tendencies that keep me from "RECEIVING." Just ask my husband what they are and he can tell you. I can't stand to lose things, like, in an unhealthy, obsessive way. I find myself asking my two-year-old where her little teddy bear toy is and I realize, "if she doesn't care about it, why do I?" I obsess about clutter. I think Chris's heart starts beating faster every time I open a drawer because he is anticipating the inevitable question, "What is this for, and do we need it or can I get rid of it?" My mind goes to whatever thing I have lost last or whatever closet needs to be cleaned out or whatever stain on my girls' clothes I need to get out, and I am not present with my kids. WHO CARES ABOUT ALL THAT STUFF ANYWAY?! I know that in my heart but my mind goes back to those things. And I know these are really strange things to obsess about, but it's just me. If I don't have any of those things to obsess about then I revert back to my life. Why don't I have a career? I am fully qualified to. What would I do if something happened to Chris? How would I support my family? What will I do with myself when my kids don't need me as much as they do now? I just don't know how to define myself or measure myself, and this bothers me. But neither defining myself or measuring myself are required for the act of receiving. I just have to open my hands. When someone offers to help me, I am now trying to say, "okay, sure, thanks!" instead of my mind thinking "accepting this person's help is undermining my ability to do (whatever thing we are talking about) and my ability to do (whatever thing we are talking about) might be a good way to define myself so I had better hang onto it and do it myself, hoping to get a little bit of praise and make myself feel better for a while." I think that, before now, receiving help or gifts had subconsciously made me feel weak or less than because I needed or appreciated whatever I was receiving. But I now see that only through receiving the good gifts God offers can I become a stronger, better person. And not only that, but receiving is also a humbling experience, and we could all use a little more humility, right? Even something as simple as a complement can be hard to receive. I'm tempted to somehow deflect it, like saying "well I'm not really that great," "someone else really did most of this," "it almost never turns out this good" or some other remark that makes the compliment less valid. But now I try to just say, "thank you!" when someone has something nice to say, which actually takes more humility than my old way of responding. When someone comes to visit us in our home, and that is almost a constant, they often ask if there is anything they can do to help. I used to say "no" automatically because I wanted to feel like I had everything under control. I can take care of my kids and keep the house picked up and cook supper (not). But that resulted in a lot of stress for me, and the stress would lead to bitterness or jealousy or resentment or all kinds of other negative feelings that stress brings on. Now I say "yes" before I have even thought of something for the person to do because there is always some way they can help and I'm slowly tearing down this idol I have made of myself in my own heart. If God really wants to open the flood gates of heaven and rain down His blessings on me, I'm not putting my umbrella up!

He sees

I think that as a human, one of the hardest things to do is to look at someone else’s pain, to truly witness their hurt, and not do anything about it. Sometimes we don’t want to do anything about it, sometimes we can’t do anything about it, and other times we could do something about it but we know we shouldn’t. I feel like I face these situations almost everyday. At times the pain becomes too much so I try to avoid it. I don’t look at the crippled old woman on the side of the road begging for change. I don’t make eye contact with the blind man being led around by a young boy who should obviously be in school but is instead serving as the eyes of someone else. Then comes all the self-talk that tries to make me feel better about it. “If you give to beggars, they will just keep begging.” “The better way to help is to build infrastructure that can actually build up the community as a whole so that they can help their own out of poverty.” And there’s always the old favorite “If I give her money I don’t really know what she will use it on.” These ideas are true to a certain extent in many cases, but for some reason I feel every bone in my body telling me, “just look her in the eyes.” I don’t want to do it, but I just feel like I should, and my conviction is strong enough that I finally turn and look her in the eyes. Then I think, “oh she’s got me now, I made the classic eye-contact mistake.” She comes over with her small child and asks me to buy her a sack of flour. Why did I do it? Why did I turn and look in her eyes? Once I looked into her eyes I saw a soul that was just like mine and I just couldn’t bear to see that soul suffering. I believe that whether I am talking about beggars on the street, or people that live around me and earn about a dollar a day, or people who feel rejected by society and rejected by church, I can’t make a decision about how to treat them until I have turned my eyes directly into their eyes and witnessed their pain, as much as possible. Not only does this witnessing help me to show them love in a better way, I think that the act of witnessing, in and of itself, is a loving thing to do. No one wants to suffer alone. A few weeks ago I went to the hospital after all the doctors and nurses had left on strike and there was a woman laying on the bed in the empty ward. One other woman was there with her, but other than that they were alone. The sick woman was groaning with every breath and clearly in so much pain. I could hear her groans as I approached the ward. What could I do? I am not a doctor, and I have no idea what’s wrong with her. I just sat by her bed and held her hand and prayed. I felt like I had just found someone left on the sinking Titanic but I had no way of getting her off. Do I turn around and walk away because it’s too painful to watch? Or do I hold her hand as she sinks into the water? Then there is the person who I could help but know that I shouldn’t. Well, I don’t really KNOW that I shouldn’t. Who knows these kinds of things anyway? It’s just a matter of accounting. If you give out money to everyone who comes along and asks you for it, there will one day not be any money left. On top of that, if you give to one person every time he or she asks that person will learn to depend totally on you and not make their own way in life. These facts are obvious. But when it comes to putting these things into practice, the lines become VERY blurry. How hungry is too hungry? How uneducated is too uneducated? How sick is too sick? How much financial burden and debt is too much burden? We are constantly making these decisions and it is exhausting. Wait a minute, this is my privilege. You either have enough to face these decisions, or you have so little that you are at the mercy of someone else’s decisions. I’m thankful, but it’s still so hard. So whether I decide to help or I decide not to, I will do the hard thing: I will watch. I will watch as they rise above and find their wings, or I will watch as they sink under the weight of the burdens life puts on them. But I will NOT walk away. I will NOT turn around or hide my eyes. Jesus didn’t come to earth and solve everyone’s problems. He solved a lot of them, but there were many many more that he left. If he hadn’t come to earth, maybe he wouldn’t have had to see it all and feel the heaviness of a world full of pain. But he came and he saw. This Christmas when I think about Jesus coming to earth, I am going to know that His coming means he has looked at me in the eyes and has seen my pain, every single time I hurt. He doesn’t always fix it or take it away, but he always, ALWAYS sees. No one is suffering alone.