Guatemalan Goodness
I've been pretty sad lately, paralyzed with missing the life I left behind to move to a foreign country, stewing in a sense of what I've lost, instead of soaking in the good, the gifts.But today I choose to see the good, to bite off the tasty fruit of this life, this fruit, this place He has given me. To rejoice in what is, not pine after what isn't. I will choose to, as Jason Todd recently wrote in an article for Relevant Magazine, "taste daily, deeply and constantly of the goodness of God."My new blogger friend, Elizabeth at Taking Shape Slowly, very eloquently wrote about this challenge to finding Home wherever we are,
"The challenge is to make ourselves at home, to live the life that is, rather than the one we had always dreamed. Praying over tender roots still unsure that they were meant to live in soil, unaware that the burlap was just the transition."
I want to let these roots of goodness grow. I will not plant bad days. I will plant hope and gratitude and grace for myself in this transition, this oh-why-is-it-taking-so-long-to-feel-at-home transition.Today I offer up a smorgasbord of the goodness of God in my life here in Guatemala, my life now, the life that is not exactly the life I dreamed, but is the life I have before me.The goodness of God is..
- a run to a cross on a hill, sweat shining, heart pounding, lungs and legs and life alive.
- a warm breeze, a volcano view, and a green picnic table turned outside office
- being walked home after a night of salsa dancing, delivered safely to my doorstep, no moves made, no disrespect, just a friend looking after a friend
- friends and family who put up with my snotty, crying homesick skype calls
- promises to flank me if I'm seen getting too friendly with a creepy guy, or a very cute, non-creepy guy that I still shouldn't be getting so friendly with. . .
- learning new salsa moves
- being challenged to give a blog training workshop in Spanish to my Guatemalan and Salvadoran coworkers--and enjoying it!
- being trusted to polish people's words, to tell their story on their behalf
- freshly folded laundry and a laundry lady who knows me by name
- a purring cat curled in my lap
- stringing together syllables of Guatemalan slang
- spontaneous cafecitos with friends I just happen to see in the park
- the anticipation of sharing this place and this life with my family when they visit in just three days!
What are you grateful for today? Where do you see the goodness of God?
Our Daily Fruit
In particular, Lewis presents a fascinating discussion on the act of choosing gratitude, choosing joy, as a sign of walking in step with the Creator.
Ransom, one of Lewis' characters, reflects on human's desire to taste and taste again things that are good, that bring joy and pleasure. To not just enjoy the gift the first time, but to want it over and over. To want it in place of lesser gifts, lesser pleasures, that are offered. To scheme and cheat and kill to experience it again. And to sulk and stew when the desire is not satisfied.
Ransom reflects:
"This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards...was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself-perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defense against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of unresting the unrolling of the film."
The "Green Woman," the innocent Eve of the pre-fall planet of Perelandra, doesn't understand this human feeling of discontent, disillusion, disappointment. Of wanting something that wasn't given.
She asks, "But how can one wish any of those waves not to reach us which Maleldil (God) is rolling toward us?"
How could we not accept His will and his offerings with joy and trust? It seems obvious in writing, when it's staring at you from the page, from the theology books, but we don't.
Ransom tries and tries to explain to her this sense of thwarted expectations, of wanting what we were not given, of mourning what we cannot have.
After awhile of back and forth discussion, the Green Woman, with the dawn of recognition, paints a simply profound metaphor for rejecting joy.
" 'What you have made me see,' answered the Lady, 'is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet is has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, may it be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before--that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished--if it were possible to wish--you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.' "
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| Admittedly, it's easier to rejoice in fruit when it's mango and covered in chocolate. |
So often we "send our souls" after what we had expected, even hoped and prayed for, while the real fruit, the real gift, rots before us.
The Green Woman had never known she was choosing this joy. In her Edenic world, she has taken each fruit as it came, each wave as it came, with gratitude and trust because she had known no sour fruit, no death, no pain.
She recounts, astonished,
"I thought I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent me drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when going swimming."
Even in our fallen world of sin and betrayal and despair, we can choose to dive in, with abandon. Taking, accepting, rejoicing in the wave. Or we can choose to watch it pass us by.
We can choose to set our soul on the fruit He has given THIS day. Or we can choose to yearn for the fruit we had wanted with bitter wishing as the fruit we were given sours in our mouths.
I've adapted from The Lord's Prayer a new phrase, my new morning prayer:
When I awake to the bright, solemn morning, when peanut butter melts into toast, crunchy along the edges and coffee steams from a white polished cup, when I see the clouds smudged across a volcano sky and my hands open in surrender, I will pray,
"Give us this day our daily fruit. And may we take and eat and rejoice in it."
*Be forewarned this blog may see a proliferation of book reflections because of my newly acquired, two hour/three day a week reading time slot, I mean bus ride, into Guatemala City.
T.S. Tuesday: Stairway to Joy
In T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday, he describes the climbing of a spiral staircase: climbing, spinning, revisiting the same space, the same struggles, over and over again on a never ending journey up and up.
The figure steps. Climbs. Rounds the corner.
“At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.”
Like Eliot’s figure, I've rounded a corner. I’m here in Guatemala. I've stepped out (or up?) in faith.
I’m working to relinquish burnout. I’m learning to trust the spark. I believe that God will restore my JOY. Not just the joy of his presence, but the joy of participating in work that brings me LIFE. I've been itching, waiting, squirming for joy.
I wanted it the easy way.
I bought a gratitude journal over a month ago. The lines remain blank.
I’ll write them when something really big happens, I reasoned. When joy is restored. When the feelings come rushing back.
I wanted to get whacked with Joy. I wanted healing to be quick. I wanted a big Kaboom. I wanted it big and vivid and unmistakable. And I didn't want to work for it.
God’s big enough, isn't He?
Now, rounding the corner, I pause in the stairwell. I glance back at the familiar figures of discontent, unease, despair.
I've played the woe-is-me-game, and I've won. Which actually means I lose.
It’s a lesson I've learned a thousands times.
As Ann Voskamp writes, “Eucharisteo—thanksgiving—always precedes the miracle.” ― One Thousand Gifts: A Dare To Live Fully Right Where You Are
How do I not know this yet?
I blogged about it all last year. I reaped the fruit of faithful gift charting, joy stacking.
And yet I got here to Guatemala and thought the gifts would be as vivid as the woven scarves and blatant as the bold buildings all around me so I wouldn't need to write them or convince myself of their gift-worthiness.
How could I forget the stacking of gifts, the cataloging of daily delights, is what brings Joy in all its glory?
Not the other way around.
And so I recommit to stacking joy. To stepping forward in gratitude. To building my life on thanks. As I round the corner, pause for a moment on the stairwell, I take a deep breath, grab my journal and pen, and begin to climb again this spiraled stairway to joy.