the tea field process

"Tea is the taste of my land: it is bitter and warm, strong,and sharp with memory. It tastes of longing. It tastes of the distance between where you are and where you come from. Also it vanishes-the taste of it vanishes from your tongue while your lips are still hot from the cup. It disappears,like plantations stretching up into the mist."  Little Bee, Chris Cleave


i'm home and it's good.  i arrived to mikes arms at the airport and several hours later to the soft sleeping heads of my little ones. life resumed quickly as i headed into kampala early friday morning.  the car was full of kids and the road full of traffic- but it felt different- i felt different- not in a huge way- but small small. and i think i know why.

i spent each afternoon in kenya walking those tea fields.

i had come to the conference with a question.  what am i supposed to do in uganda?  i meant it specifically.  but pretty quickly the answer i got was that i was asking the wrong question.  what i'm to do is secondary.  it comes after, who i'm to be.  so i'd walk and walk and run a little and pray a lot.  i felt this blockade inside me that i couldn't get my head around- which probably should have made it obvious and clear that i needed to get my heart around it instead.  i felt something tethering me- some restriction- a pulling- an unidentified weight.  i asked for revelation.  i asked for illumination and transformation and all the other 'tions' i could think of.

the day before we left i walked the farthest. i wanted to walk until i'd reached clarity and conclusion, but i just heard the leaves moving.  i stretched out my arms to feel as much of the wind as i could, to be open, and i waited. but it was just the soft feeling of cool air and i was hungry so i headed back for dinner.

that night we had our last service- it was just songs and communion and we sat in groups by country.  there were about 10 of us in the uganda group- half ugandans and half expats.  one of the ugandan women asked us to each share our prayer requests. now usually i have a long laundry list of requests- usually i'm embarrassed by how much help i need and try hard to whittle the list down to one or two like everyone else.  but this night i couldn't think of any so when it came to my turn, i just said what i felt, "tonight i'm just thankful".  i don't really know where it came from- but there it was.

after we'd had communion, the ugandan self appointed leader of our group asked us to pray quietly for our requests, so i did.  i began to pray a prayer of thanks.  and that is when the clarity came.  because out of somewhere deep inside me i spoke words that i never thought i needed to speak- words i'd certainly never felt, words that snapped the cords and brought release- words of revelation, and transformation.

somewhere inside of me i thanked God for the suffering of having a child with disabilities.  i thanked God for the deep darkness of the days that she would hide under her desk at school until i came to get her.  thanked Him for the days of fear in not knowing how to help her- of wondering if she'd ever feel better- if her brain would settle.  thanked Him for allowing me to feel the pain of it, to go through years of living exposed and outside of 'normal'.  and then i cried.

because after i'd said 'thank you'- i realized that i completely meant it.  i was thankful because so much of life is learned in those hard hard spots.  because painful things shape us and change us and help us know each other better.  because you can't just eat the cake and cookies in life- you need the vegetables and proteins.  because it's all part of a process- you need cloudy rainy days for the flowers to bloom, not just sun.

i cried because 'thank you' is different than acceptance.

with zoe, i've spend years working on the accepting part.  i've had some therapy and tired the ears of many friends, in getting to a place of acquiescence.  i've spent a lot of time praying about zoe and for zoe and about me with zoe, mostly in the well known form of begging, of crying out 'help!' and mumbling, 'you'd better show up because i didn't ask for this!'   and i did reach acceptance and i did get help and God has shown up for me, over and over.

but this was different.  in those tea fields, unbeknownst to me, God was showing up in a different way.  He was softening me- letting me feel the tethering- waiting for me to be ready to move from 'break through' to 'break out'.   it never occurred to me during the week that i needed to give thanks for suffering.  it was never asked of me in a message or a sermon.  but somehow in those fields it surfaced and pushed its way out.

i'm sure this sounds like a whole lot of crazy to many of you.  you're thinking, 'now she's gone over the top - this whole missionary thing- giving thanks for painful stuff- what??'  and in truth it didn't used to make any sense to me either.  but it's about trust.  it's about full immersion in the trust.  when i can embrace the life that God has given me fully, in all the ugly of it as well as the pretty parts, when i can leave acceptance and offer thanks, then i'm trusting fully, then i can be useful on a deeper level, then i can begin to know the answer to what should i do? then i'm ready to take risks. then i'm ready to be in my life, then i'm not afraid, then there is freedom.

there was transformation.  but like most things- it's the beginning- it's a process that has started and it needs to be continued in the days of my life.  it needs to start each morning when my feet hit the ground.  i will try.  i will ask for help.  i will take whatever broken pieces i've got and i will begin with 'thank you'.