Has God ever given you what you asked for—and then you wonder if you asked for the right thing in the first place? Have you ever felt punished…by prayer?
Last Sunday afternoon, while on his bicycle, my eleven-year-old was hit by a motorcycle.
While he was applying his brakes, sliding on rust-colored mud into the intersection, I was at home, deciding I would take a Sunday nap. I’d barely closed my eyes when one of my children called my name. This happens quite frequently, as one might imagine, and my husband has lightly chided me on contributing to our children’s entitlement with my jumpiness to their needs. So I waited to see if they’d come get me. I don’t remember what finally tipped me off that this was not the typical, “She won’t share the biiiike!”
We weren’t clearly “called” to Africa. That I know of.
Maybe God will correct my thinking in the future. But there my husband and I were in Little Rock, with four little kids (youngest two and a half), contemplating whether or not to, you know, sell 70% of our stuff and wheel our bags to a continent I was sure was just buzzing with malaria and typhoid. I say that—but honestly, I was thrilled. Africa is a dream come true, one I’d put on the shelf in the “maybe God will explain why” category of my mental Dewey decimal system. And as we discussed it, I don’t think I’ll forget what my husband said one night.
This week, my parents are arrived in Africa! Though this is their third trip since we’ve lived here, it’s still fraught with so much giddiness and anticipation. Rather than living life together as we hoped, our time together seems scrunched into the few weeks every 18 months or so where we live in the same place, same continent.
I’m crazy-blessed with wise, gracious, sold-out parents who pour their lives out for Jesus. But I’m sure it mystifies them, as it does me, that their success as parents means their dreams of closeness to their kids are stacked together with their hopes for eternity. I wrote this post for everthinehome.com awhile back, and it is gratefully used with permission.
I’ve written before about this whole idea of our opportunities versus whether we’re actually called to do something. Oh—and about the true cost of my overcommitment.
And I’m happy to report that I have proudly mastered these concepts in full. And it seems I’ve still got a looooong. Long. Way. To go.
Maybe it was the most obvious with the guy who showed up at my gate a couple of years back. When I (um, naively) requested our guard open the gate for him, the guard respectfully bowed his head, an unspoken “no.” Maybe I should have been tipped off by the sweat beading on our visitor’s forehead, or the darting of his eyes as he presented me with the medical bill for his daughter, being treated for typhoid.
I remember praying fitfully while I listened to him, for wisdom from the God who actually knew this guy’s story. From what I know about African ways with money, Super White Woman! swooping in to save the day seemed to disintegrate what his community did actually have to offer. I declined his offer for cash. He turned away, angry and possibly hopeless (I thought) that he was no closer to a solution for his daughter.
It’s strange being back here, in this place.
I can still see the Nile directly out the window, though my husband and I actually stayed in the banda next door that night. They still leave in triplicate the same brand of packaged soap in the bathroom. I remember how the Nile had stretched before us in the morning, pink sunlight pooling on its surface while men fished from canoes hollowed from logs. On the banks, monkeys leapt like kamikazes from limb to limb. The scene is the same four years later. I remember crying, weeping, actually, from this very porch that night after dark under a spangled sky. I had been so very excited; so very afraid.
I was a brand, spanking-new junior in a high school far from my former Yankee home. So new, in fact, that my parents hadn’t even moved down yet; I bunked with friends of my parents, previously unknown by me, so I could be present at the start of the new school year. Marveling at the slow drawls, Wranglers, and racial tensions around school, I’d now written my first pre-AP English paper. We’d circled our desks and traded papers with another student. The student—bless his heart, as they would say in the South—was actually remarkably kind to me, er, my paper.
My English teacher was not.
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