Why I Love Living In China :: A Book. A New Year

I just finished reading The City of Tranquil Light by Bo Caldwell. It’s a novel about an American couple serving as missionaries in inland China during the early 20^th century. It’s a somewhat prosaic story about their love, longevity, loss, and the lessons they learned as well as the difficult things that still remained a mystery for them at the end of their lives. In many ways the story is far removed from the China of today and the way we experience life here. But there was a spirit about it that was compelling, or at least had hints of a camaraderie in it to me… like that red silk thread that adoption families talk about, an invisible connection that ties them to their son or daughter in an inexplicable but very real way.

It made me think about the powerful influence of Time in our lives. How it can bind you in a slow, rhythmic way over days and months and years to a place, or a people. To many people, there may be very little on the face of living in China that is attractive. To the naked eye, comparing it to other places in the world, this city is dirty, polluted, frustrating and difficult. In many ways the stories and lives around us are maddening, sometimes horrifying, or just plain depressing. For all appearances, it's not a great place to raise kids. And I read all of this in The City of Tranquil Light too, though to a much greater degree. Life was so different back then, far harder, far more isolating and much more physically demanding. The sacrifices were incredible and seemed never to let up.  Yet in time, as the years swept over them like the dust storms that covered the land, this ordinary couple was molded by those long stretches of time, and the shape of those years gave form to love. The hardships and people, the relationships and experiences shaped their growing love like a baby that forms slowly in the womb and one day you look upon it’s face, seeing with your eyes what has all these months been blossoming by it’s taking from your own flesh and blood.

Time gives birth to love it seems. As does hardship. And weaving in and out of these two is every relationship, great and small that you make along the way. Relationships on every level are the ribbon of light that brings a wonder of luminescence to the fabric of time and hardship. It’s the part of life that keeps you keeping on, and that sometimes makes you feel as though all the world is breaking apart. In the book, it’s the relationships that make it hardest to leave China in the end. And though my family is not leaving, as I read it I felt the pull that is always there for us, the tension that rides under the surface of emotions almost all the time: the people we love and “lose” every day in a sense because we are not a part of their lives anymore, living way over on the other side of the world, but at the same time growing ever more grateful and attached to the people we have the gift of knowing here.

Sometimes I wonder if it makes any sense that we give up knowing cousins and aunties and uncles and grandparents, so that we can instead share life with the young woman, the student, the couple. These are things I can’t weigh in the balance. I can’t see what the worth of anything really is. And I have to put it all in the hands of my Lord who feels the weight of things correctly, and simply asks me to keep seeing with eyes of faith.

It is the start of another Lunar New Year today, chu yi the first day of the first month, and the most important holiday of the year. Everywhere are fireworks and families gathering. Red chinese lanterns are strung along the streets and in windows. The doors are covered with traditional banners declaring good fortune and well wishes over the household for the coming year. It is another mysterious sort of gift to me, this sharing in a tradition that is not ours by birth or rite. We are foreign to it and at most take part in a surface sort of way. But this too was something that struck me as I read, how joining in these festivities ties you to a place as well.  And without making too much of it, I think in some small but perhaps important ways, our family has been graced with good things that we otherwise may have missed were we not able to every year celebrate the Chinese New Year.

As is the tradition, on the Eve of the New Year, we made jiaozi, meat filled dumplings representing abundance and good fortune. As I sat with all four of my children and husband at our table, the plate heaped full with steaming, crunchy jiaozi that we all love with an almost improper ferocity, I did indeed feel fortunate. I knew and know that we are blessed.

It is perhaps easiest to look around and see the physical blessings, but as I have been pondering lately from the words of Jesus, as we work not for food that spoils but for food that endures to eternal life, our eyes are ever opened more and more to the unseen realities that our ours in Christ. He who gives the food and the rain and the house and the clothes also gives the joy and faith and love. You can have joy and faith and love without house or clothes. But to have house or clothes without joy and faith and love is no life at all. This is the life that is worth living… and it is a life that is learned over time, through hardship, in the midst of relationship. This is the essence of the good life that the couple in The City of Tranquil Light knew. And in this, and their love for China,  and the slow years that grew them, I feel I too one day may, in some distant way know a part of their story.

Lavish Birthday Love

Today is my birthday. 34 years old, I am. That sounds rather middle aged to me, which I will probably be thinking and feeling for another good fifteen years or so until I hit 50, at which point it seems you turn "old." Birthdays in this house are rather understated, but special. We don't do a lot of flashy parties or huge surprises, but the groove we seem to have settled into is to pour on a whole lot of "you're special" and even more "we love you." I woke up today to both of those things.

Yesterday was the last day of school for 2 weeks and the start of our Chun Jie vacation (which is the Chinese New Year, or more literally, the Spring Festival holiday and the number one holiday of the year for this nation). The day felt appropriately filled with little ways to share in the celebrating that is starting to happen all over the city and country.

• Josh and the kids performed Chinese songs at school for the Chun Jie concert. They rocked it, and I was so proud of them. Listening to them practice the tongue twisting Chinese lyrics over the past several weeks has kept me awake too many nights with the tune playing like a broken record in my head. 
• We put up Chinese decorations, just a few of our regulars, the paper cuttings in the windows and the banners over the door. 
• The kids went out in the afternoon and ended up playing some version of a basketball game with some neighborhood Chinese boys. They came in celebrating that they were able to understand and communicate with their new friends. My boy was particularly pleased, saying that one of the boys was someone who earlier this fall had been part of a small run-in that had occurred between all the boys playing outside. It was one of those miscommunication battles that can happen when you don't understand them and they don't understand you, someone reads a gesture wrong that you made or the way you waved your stick, and suddenly a war is on. But today, they played together and he felt like a bridge had formed and the 9 year old bad blood had been wiped away.
• We went out for dinner with friends at a local Chinese restaurant, something we don't brave too often no matter what country we live in, mostly because of the age and amount of children underfoot. But the food was good and the place festively hong ran, loud and noisy, just the way the Chinese like it. Afterwards we set off a few fireworks in the concrete park next to our apartment, dodging the dancing grandmas and men practicing their top-spinning with giant whips.

As we often do during times like this, on certain days that mark our time here, we reflected a little on our years here, our strangely blessed lives that can at one and the same time feel hard and less than what you would "dream of" for your life, but at the same time abundantly good and beyond what you deserve. The facts don't always add up if you tally the positives and negatives in neat little columns. It's like the weight of an intangible goodness that we sense like a giant blanket over all the pieces of our life here.

Then today was my birthday. Another day that inevitably brings on a little reflection. I sat alone with a cup of coffee and my Book of books, and read about what a gift my life is. What a gift my life in Christ is. I read Ephesians 2 and it read like a Giant Heavenly Birthday card, pouring out all the measure of God's great love for us, the extensive lavishness of his gifts, and the kindness that he showed and shows towards me each and every day, lifting me up out of who I was and who I am and setting me on the Rock. So that I can't help but think on the fact that I don't have enough goodness in me, and that is usually quite depressing, but He makes me good because He gives his goodness to me. And I can't make my life worth living, which can be less than inspiring, but He makes my life worthwhile because He says that the life I live by faith in the Son of God is a life of eternal value, with its weight and worth reaching down even to the dirt of this earth. It was by far the sweetest thing I read all day, and I felt all loved and special all over again.

Those sweet notes and cards and extra hugs and "I love you, you're the greatest mom" from my kids were pretty wonderful too. And the depth of devotion and love and committed thoughtfulness that exudes from My Man is something I feel moved by so many moments and so many days it is hardly fair to think that a birthday should need any extra effort. But he makes it. And I blunder through my appreciation,  all the time I like the girl who sits under the Ephesians 2 chapter, being lavished with love and barely knowing how to understand the greatness of it.

A Few Good Books for the New Year

The beginning again. Here we are. 

Even though the rush to lament over how we fail at our yearly resolve to better ourselves begins just as soon as the new year dawns,  I am still grateful for the freshness of it. The cycle of being given the opportunity to begin again, or to at least look out on the vista of days before you and hope. For transformation, for change, for growth.

My current state of resolutions is a bit hodgepodge. I relish the idea of self-reflection, but I also get pretty gun-shy and worry that I don't see myself clearly enough to know what needs working on and what doesn't. So I go about this tender-footed dance between what I have been thinking, feeling, sensing in my spirit, and an all out begging/searching/throw-myself at the the feet of Jesus session where I hope for a divine encounter with This is What We'll Work on This Year My Dear.

Aside from that, I do believe we are what we read (or quite a bit of it) and that what you soak in is what you exude in word and deed and thought, which means I have eagerly started on my current fare of book fodder and am hoping as it goes in, the coming out will bring with it a humbler, more aware, more gracious me than I was in 2013.

It is pretty obvious that there is a similar theme running through these books. I am okay with that, though it means the content is not as varied as I sometimes like my reading to be. Themes can be good for percolating and meditation, for a time. There are some things that need thinking on, and it strikes me how at times a book pile will gather that I did not purposely arrange, but seems suited to the current need of my soul. I love how a few good books can feed your spirit like that.

The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: an English professor's journey into the Christian Faith
by Rosaria Butterfield.

Home: a Novel
by Marilynne Robinson

When I Was a Child I Read Books
by Marilynne Robinson

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith
by Anne Lamott

City of Tranquil Light: a novel
by Bo Caldwell

The Shaping of a Christian Family
by Elisabeth Elliot

The {In}Comparable Advent

The last days leading up to Christmas, I feel so keenly the hardness of the road to Bethlehem.

It seems easier to identify with the realities of their situation, that venerated but simple couple, than to gloss over it with sentimentality. This is because my life has little gloss and sentimentality. I pursue it of course, with candlelight and delicious smells in the kitchen and having the kids gather round for readings, but daily we hit the wall of arguing and misunderstanding, the surprise of loneliness and the battles against disappointment, the frustrations of pollution and a city in a foreign country and the fact that in all our meager efforts to create unity and contentment, we just can't make it happen.

I find it easy to compare. When you think about all the actualities of the birth of Jesus, it is everything our lives are today: ordinary, humbling, frustrating, fraught with challenges, filled with situations that make you wonder, really, Lord? Is this the way you care for those who follow you? Surely Mary must have wondered that as the doors shut in their faces just when the baby she had born the shame of misunderstanding for, the filling and breaking of her body for, the burden of her whole long life of piercing for, was about to enter the world.

My little girl, in her five year old way of questioning, has asked me a few times in recent days, Mom, do you really believe God is taking care of you? I say yes. And we list the ways we see it. But in my heart, I know if I was really honest, that sometimes I too wonder. Lord, are you sure you got this?

That is when I lose the grip on comparing myself with Mary. And I think I want to. The gift of the Advent of Jesus is that something mysterious and incomparable, incomprehensible and impossible, happened on our earth in real space and time and history. What I need most in my hardest moments, in the day to day grind and the failure of my family, my friendships, my broken and dying world, is for God to step in. I need him to take care of things. To take care of my sinful and wayward heart. To take care of all the wrongs that are being done to innocent children and defenseless people. To turn the hearts of everyone to their Creator, to pour out love on us in such a way that we can do nothing but love him and everyone around us in return. To make me see the earth and all that inhabits it in the way that he does. To fill me with joy.

We all need something entirely outside ourselves to break in and rescue us.

When I think about Mary listening to Gabriel speak unfathomable words, the Shepherds surrounded by the glory of God on the hard ground of the rough earth they trod every day, Joseph gazing at a baby that looked like any other baby but that he knew beyond what would have been very reasonable doubt, was really God, I cannot put myself in that story anymore. This kind of thing doesn't happen to me. In fact, it just plain doesn't happen. It's the most unimaginable story, nestled in the most ordinary, relatable circumstances.

This is our life every day. Ordinary and difficult, humbling and fraught with disappointment. It's the old curse at work, Adam toiling and Eve in pain. But God steps in. He makes a way. Jesus really was born and lived a real exemplary life and died a real sacrificial death and rose in miraculous glory the way only a real God could. And He is really here, taking care of things right now.

So we can join with Mary and Joseph, Zechariah and Elizabeth, the Shepherds and Simeon, and all the millions who have followed along in their steps, believing and worshiping. Immanuel! God is with us.

The {Im}Possible Thing About Advent

I just want to be free of it, is what I keep thinking to myself.

Free of the weight of this baggage of self I carry around all through my days. It's Advent for crying out loud and I love my dark early mornings with the cold and my coffee and the Word both sharp and lovely, but these last few days as the light of dawn breaks through the windows, my own heart seems to slide into its own kind of darkness. I weary of the struggle with my emotions and the battle with my attitude.

I'm doing the work of Advent, the hint of an impatient thought showed its underbelly today as I battled the thoughts that plagued me. I'm paring back and meditating and slowing down and trying to open my heart to the wonder that God could speak into it. I wish that meant less struggle with personal, ugly darkness. 

So here, apparently is my wish for a successful Christmas Season. A tranquil heart. Unburdened by want or need or any sort of pining. Simply content. Happily pouring out and into everyone around me. In short, it seems I ought to become a Buddhist. Just get rid of all that desire, and find the way to inner peace through annihilation and emptiness.

This is where the heart of Advent stepped into my world again today. Our Christmas card this year reads Peace on Earth. Celebrating Emmanuel in China. When we took the picture for the card there was anything but Peace on that part of the Earth. But we like to think of it as a hope for the future peace that will only come when our Savior returns. In that picture taking moment, and in most moments of our days, we are waiting with hopeful longing for that peace.

And in the meantime, we are celebrating the fact that Emmanuel, God with us, is ever true way over here in China. And that is what I need to know and walk in more than ever these days. The gift of the first Advent was the arrival of God putting on flesh, our very flesh, so that he could be with us. And not just with us to hang out, but to understand, to empathize, to relate in the most humbling and of ways. Beyond even that though, the first Advent meant God put on flesh so that he could die in the flesh and make God with us a forever possibility. Or rather, us with God an eternal reality.

As I walked through my day, talking with the Lord in my head, pouring out my heart and my battles, my confessions and my questions, my thanks and my worship, I was struck by how precious it is that He walks with me. My struggle with sin doesn't stop because of Advent or any other special time with the Lord. But this special time of reflecting and thinking upon His Birth and His breaking into our world makes me more keenly aware of my need and His meeting of it. For what are we without God? Phantoms, wraiths, walking souls with insatiable desires that go unmet and grow greedy with the consumption of what does not satisfy. But with God? God with us? We are like springs of living water, whose well will never run dry.

A true celebration of Advent seems impossible sometimes. It is too plagued by real life and real people. Even when you do all you think you can do (and even the things the books tell you to do) to put yourself in the position to really value and experience the true meaning of this beautiful, weighty, all-important holiday season, the truth is that any Advent is impossible from our side of things. Real Advent is all about God being with us. It's the central message of the gospel truth all over again. You can't get to him on your own merit.

The Possible thing about Advent from our end is worship. God is with us, and plagued by the darkness of the world and our own hearts, we cling to His Light all the more. The shepherds came humbly, the magi came adoring, we come thankful, in awe, needy and leaning in close to the God and Savior who is no distant idea or statement of Four Truths or cold, lifeless statue with a fat belly. He is Spirit, who put on flesh. He has a name and he knows each of ours.

If it feels impossible to get yourself all cleaned up and heart-ready for the celebration of the first Advent, you are just about right. With man this is impossible, but not with God. All things are possible with God.

The {Un}Interesting Thing About Who Gets Picked for Advent

If the season of Advent is all about waiting and watching, and slowing down enough to enter into the story of the Birth of our Savior, so that you can be changed and renewed again by the words of the Word who became flesh, then you have to wonder...

Who are the ones who hear that Word? 

Who gets spoken to during Advent? 

What kind of person do you have to be to hear His voice and feel the weight of the story anew in all its grime and glory?

There was Mary of course, penitent and willing, sublime and submissive. But even she asked, "How can this be?" 

Joseph, stalwart and self-righteous, careful and caring. Did he bend his ear to God or was he bent by the Word that bore down on him?

Zechariah, pious and prayerful, set in his ways and waylaid by the message that jarred him from his righteous slumber. He thought he was ready to hear from God, but was he?

The Shepherds, alert and eager, responsive and rejoicing. They did nothing glorious, but the glory came to them and shone all around them. Were they prepared? And yet they received it like the gift it was.

Simeon, devout and desiring, filled and foretelling. He was ready, as ready as one can ever be. Was he any more blessed than the surprised shepherds?

Anna, old and graying, worshiping and praying. 

The Men from the East, wise and generous, seeking and relentless.

Herod, devious and envious, murdering and scattering.

You think of all the ones He came to. Was he really that picky, that concerned with a correct posture towards himself, coming only to those who were ready and willing to accept Him and his messengers? Or was it all an act of pure grace? To some who were looking and ready, he was received with gladness, but others with doubt and surprise. To some who were not looking nor ready, he was received with gladness, but others with doubt and dismay. 

Is the posture we take all that interesting to him? Or is He the interesting one, the arresting one, the one to be reckoned with, coming in a humbling and generous act of grace to each and every one of his choosing, not because they were ready-- but simply because He wanted them to know Him.

The Inconvenient Advent

Having a house full of sickness was not my plan for the first couple weeks of December. It set back plans I had for a December Photo Project (after three days of pictures with me on the couch, knitting needles, and a sad kid face in the frame, I gave up), it scaled down preparations I was making towards hosting and all put an immediate stop to any kind of shopping. It meant our daily advent plans have many days gone unattended, and my own personal reading has been sporadic in its rhythm. But as I wrote yesterday, it has created quiet and space in a different way than I had envisioned, and that has been its own kind of gift.

There is an Advent discipline that I have heard encouraged, where you try to place yourself within the Nativity Story. In this way, there is the hope that you can experience anew some of the realities that may have become old hat, or rote and sterile after so many years of hearing the words read in church and sung at Christmas concerts.

Last night my oldest boy was expressing some sadness as he thought about all his grandparents and extended family never being able to be with us at Christmas. We realized we could relate somewhat to Mary and Joseph being far from their families during one of the most important moments of their lives, the birth of their first child. Were they better able to wonder and worship because they were alone? And anyone who has had a surprise pregnancy, perhaps at what appeared the most inconvenient time, can (albeit to a much smaller degree, but a degree just the same) feel the tremor in Mary's question, "How can this be?"

I want to share the following chapter from a book I have lying around my house and like to read now and then during these Advent days. I share it in honor of someone near and dear to me, who just told me yesterday she is very unexpectedly expecting her fourth child, and is feeling more the burden than the joy of it just now.

---------------------------
"A Plan Behind the Pain"
(excerpt from A Christmas Longing by Joni Eareckson Tada)

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world... And everyone went to his own town to register.

"So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born..." (Luke 2:1, 3-6).

The distance between Nazareth and Bethlehem is no Girl Scout hike. It spans over sixty miles of rough and rugged terrain.

We can imagine Joseph packing a few belongings and beginning that journey on foot or donkey-back with Mary-- well into her ninth month of pregnancy. Talk about unpleasant circumstances! How Mary must have suffered on that journey. Joseph, too, may have been gripped by anxiety over the situation. Can you imagine his thoughts as they traveled toward Bethlehem?

Why did this census have to happen now? Of all times! What if the baby comes while we're traveling? Where will we stay when we get to Bethlehem? What if the inns are full? When the time comes, what if there is no one to help? Will I be able to assist Mary? Will it be terribly hard on her? Will the child be in danger?

But it was necessary to make that several-day journey to Bethlehem-- for more reasons than one. Hundreds of years before, God prompted His prophet to name the town of the future Messiah's birth. The city of David. God used external circumstance, the Roman census, to have His Son born in His ancestral city.

Now, certainly, it was a great inconvenience to both Mary and Joseph. But unpleasant circumstances often have a way of becoming the best part of God's magnificent design. Despite the heachache and hardship, the inconvenience and discomfort, God's sovereign timetable was ticking off right on schedule.

This Christmas story has a lesson for us today, because sometimes you and I make the mistake of thinking that only the "right" things or comfortable things are a part of God's design. A good job, robust health, close friends, a comfortable house, money in a savings account-- all give us the impression that we must be doing something "right." Then, when the inconvenience or discomfort or hardship hits, we wonder what "went wrong."

Maybe nothing went wrong.

Maybe we simply need to realize that our most unpleasant circumstances, much like Mary and Joseph's, often have a way of becoming a beautiful portion of God's magnificent design.

God's sovereign timetable is working in the life of your family, too, hard as that may be to accept at times. Despite the hardship, despite the inconvenience, despite our lack of understanding, God has something in mind. He is in control, and He has a design for your life this Christmas season... and through all the seasons of your life.

------------------