Enough

Throughout our time in Asia, God reminded me of a verse from Psalm 16:5, "Lord, you have assigned me my portion and my cup." I took that to mean that whatever came my way, He was in control of it, and it was good for me and my growth in Christlikeness.

I can't tell you how many times it didn't feel like that was true. When you're standing on the street corner with your 3 month old strapped to your chest and three consecutive cabs that you hail get snaked by other people, you can tell yourself, "This is assigned, this is assigned, this assigned" but it's not easy to rest in. I'd rather have the ride to the hospital than a lesson in patience and forgiveness, thank you very much.

Lately, though, I've been looking at this verse differently (and not because I'm hoping it means I get to skirt tough situations). When I read it in the ESV, it says, "Lord, YOU are my chosen portion and my cup." Huh. That takes me out of my circumstances altogether.

Over and over through these last few months, God has brought me back to this truth: He is enough for me. He is all that I need. He is what satisfies.

Our hearts are wily beasts. They hunger and thirst and desire and want. I don't think that's necessarily wrong. But I know that when I hunger and thirst and desire and want things outside of God, I will inevitable be disappointed. They will become idols, idols who cannot satisfy.

So He calls me back to Him, to desiring Him. He calls me back to see that He is enough. He is what I truly want. He is exactly all I need.

He is enough.

40 by 40

A friend of mine recently posted about her list of 40 things to do before the age of 40. At first I thought, "Hey, that's a great idea!" and then I thought, "I have seven hours." Oh well.

Instead, I thought I'd make a list of things I'm glad I did before the age of 40. Maybe things I'm glad I've learned. I'm not sure. Suddenly 40 seems like a lot and until I actually make this list I'm not sure what it will contain. So here goes:

40 Things I'm Glad I've Done/Learned: 

1.     I've followed God

2.     Learned that God loves me. A lot.

3.     Married a great man

4.     Became a mom

5.     Learned that you can’t be a perfect mom, but you can be a great one with God’s help.

6.     Lived in other countries

7.     Learned that God is bigger and stronger and wiser and basically more of everything than we believe He is. And the more you trust that, the better off you are

8.     Climbed the Great Wall (and therefore am now a true Han Chinese)

9.     Wrote a book (wait, what? Yes, but it's for a limited audience)

10.   Ran two half-marathons

11.   Learned that when taking up running you should have good shoes and take extra iron or you will hurt your feet and get anemic

12.   Preached in a church in Trinidad ("preach it sista!")

13.   Learned another language

14.   Used my degree – take that all you humanities haters.

15.   Learned how to take good photos

16.   Homeschooled my kids

17.   Rode a unicycle

18.   Played several musical instruments with varying degrees of competency

19.   Learned that as much as I don't like trials, I need them to be who God wants me to be (and who I want to be)

20.   Had cheap massages on the beach in Thailand, which is the best way to get a massage in the world

21.   Stayed healthy

22.   Learned that being healthy is as much about giving yourself grace as it is about eating well and exercising

23.   Had hard conversations where I had to be vulnerable and saw how it deepened my relationships

24.   Wrote a blog

25.   Consistently sought opportunities to share with others what God is doing in my life (i.e. through this blog)

26.   Tried to be as generous as possible with my resources

27.   Read extensively

28.   Made friendships a priority

29.   Learned to apologize often

30.   Went to LEAF (leadership development time) and purposed to apply what I learned there

31.   Became a LEAF coach

32.   Prayed. A lot.

33.   Learned that my value comes solely from my position as a child of God

34.   Kept my sense of humor

35.   Made keeping tabs on my own heart a value

36.   Learned that to keep an open, soft heart requires a willingness to bear pain

37.   Learned that my depravity is deeper than I could have imagined, but His redemption is far deeper

38.   Learned that our parents are a lot smarter than we give them credit for (and so are kids)

39.   Made mistakes

40.   Learned that I still have a lot more to learn

Don't blame location

When Erik first told me we were moving to Singapore in 2004, I had to look it up on a map. I had an idea that it was near Fiji.

It is not near Fiji.

I quickly learned more about our new tropical island home than its location, just short of the equator and connected by bridges to Malaysia. I learned that it was the cleanest, safest, most efficient, most affluent, and most beautiful place I've ever been. What's not to love about Singapore?

And yet, through our time there, I met plenty of women who hated Singapore. Couldn't find a thing to like about it. Really? How is that possible? It's a tropical island for Pete's sake. You live where people dream of vacationing.

The reason was that it wasn't Singapore they hated. It was their circumstances. Singapore just happened to be the unlucky backdrop. These women generally were expat women in transition, uprooted from all they loved, their homes, their families, and dropped into a lifestyle quite unlike what they'd ever known. They were lost, lonely, bored. They probably would have been lost, lonely, and bored in whatever country God dropped them, but they happened to be in Singapore and so it was at fault.

I learned two things from those women - first, that every place has its ups and downs, and you have to make a choice to focus on the ups. Second, and more importantly (because truthfully, some places do have fewer ups) I have to separate how I'm doing internally from where I am or I will miss growth.

People have started asking me how we like living in Orlando, and I have to remind myself to stop and take away the lens of transition that colors our first six months there. Though Orlando has been the context for some tough moments, it is not the cause of them. When I do that, I can say that yes, we really do enjoy living there.


Blaming location misses the real issues. It's easy to say "I just don't like this place. Life would be better somewhere else" rather than to acknowledge and deal with what our circumstances are doing to our hearts. The great news is that sometimes we can't change location, but we can always change how we look at them.

Being Human

So I'm in this women's group about shame. Yep, shame. Sounds fun right?And not at all awkward.

We're talking about it because it's the topic of a book we're reading by Brene Brown, and if you don't know who she is you should go find out. Wow. Just wow. Anyway, the book we're reading is called I Thought it was Just Me (But it Isn't). It's about recognizing shame and building shame resilience. Shame the fear of disconnection. It is the feeling that there is something about us that is wrong, and that wrongness separates us from others. It sends us into hiding.

What I keep coming back to as we talk about this topic is that so much shame comes from the fact that we all have a hard time just being human. Shame pokes us and outright sucker punches us when we buy into the messages all around us about what we should be, what we should do, what we should have. The expectations are huge and conflicting and impossible, but we try with everything we have to meet them so that we don't ever have to feel like we're the ones left out. Shame tells us that it's not ok to just be who we are, to be human.

I have a friend who says we all vacillate between believing that we are superhuman or subhuman. When we're superhuman, we think we can do it all, that if we try just a little harder we can achieve that ideal. We refuse to accept that we have needs or limits. Or we decide we can't do it, we're not good enough, we're less than, and we put ourselves in the subhuman category. We vote ourselves off the island. Either way it's shame at work.

I'm realizing through this group that shame doesn't have to win. We can all just be our imperfect, struggling, up and down, awesome and less than awesome selves. But to do that, we have to take a hard look at those expectations. We have to stop listening to them. But more than that - we need to talk about what they do to us. We've been doing that in this group, because the cure for shame is empathy. We share our stories and we listen and try to enter in and say "you're not alone." At times it feels awkward and uncomfortable because we want so much to do it well but more and more it brings the greatest sense of relief and acceptance. It's a joy to be able to say, "This is me being human" and to have others say, "Yeah, I'm human too."

Why can't we all just be human?

My Anchor

I have this picture in my head today of me in a tiny rowboat on a vast ocean. I know I've talked about boats a lot through our transition, but it's fitting - we are on a journey. So back to my rowboat - imagine me in a tiny rowboat, riding the waves, and as I look around I see nothing recognizable in any direction. In fact, forget the boat - it's actually more like a raft, Castaway style. Except unlike Tom Hanks I have not, at any point of this move, made a disemboweled volleyball my best friend and confidante. I am, thankfully, still far from that. Praise be to God.

I think we generally try to move toward life in a swimming pool. We want something manageable, something with defined edges, something with a dimension that doesn't wear us out. The walls of the pool are the roles and relationships we form that give boundaries to who we are. We can stretch out on an inner tube and enjoy.

Any kind of transition - getting married, becoming a parent, changing jobs, kids leaving home, moving across town - will affect the roles and relationships we have. They stretch our boundaries - maybe to an Olympic size pool, maybe a lake, maybe the whole big ocean. We have to learn to renavigate, to manage this different shape. We need to find those places where we can rest, to become familiar with the edges again.

And so there's me, imagining the ocean around me with no land in sight. I long for the edges, the boundaries, the things that make me go, "Oh right, this is where I am, where I belong, who I am, what I'm capable of." My temptation is to look around, paddle frantically, screaming, "WILSON!!" I find myself looking to others to tell me "here's land." I seek affirmation, acknowledgement, value, to make me feel solid again.

But the fact is, those things we think give us definition are ultimately not what define us at all. They are merely temporary boundaries, these roles and relationships God gives us for seasons. What we need, what I need, to remember, is that regardless of the size of my current situation, my identity comes from Him. He is the anchor who tells me, "I know you. I see you. You are mine. That is all you need."

And in this, transition is a gift. It's an opportunity to have all that I might depend on be stripped away, and to be called back (more frequently than I usually need) to who I am in Him. The truth of who I am in Him is a constant, grounding me regardless of the depth of water or the distance from land.

All Things for Good

I wasn't supposed to see my grandma at Thanksgiving.

We had plans to drive to Wisconsin, but because our shipment had been delayed repeatedly, Erik had to go to Orlando to receive it. My parents were going to visit my grandma at the nursing home, and I decided to go with them because it might be the last time I saw her.

It was.

So often decisions we make, or things that happen to us beyond our control, upon reflection appear to be the orchestration of God. Her funeral could have been last Wednesday, but because of some family issues they scheduled it for Saturday. I probably couldn't have gone on Wednesday because Erik just got back on Wednesday morning from his trip. I found frequent flyer tickets. Erik had a couple days off of work to stay back with the kids. All these things added up to me being present for my first family funeral since 1999.

He works all things for good. I look back on my life and there are some events in my life - Ethan's birth, the last semester in China (the first time around), our move to Singapore, our move back to China - where, on paper, it didn't look the way I would have planned it. Circumstances I wouldn't have chosen, seemingly ordinary decisions, plus God's impecable timing - they all interwove to create something better than I imagined.

I might not have said it at the time, but afterward I can look back and see a God who is tender hearted, who cares about the details, who does indeed work all things for good.

If I can see it so clearly in these circumstances, how many other times have there been when He did work and I just didn't recognize it? And how many more will there yet be?

Word of the Year

Recently I was invited to a "word of the year" party. When I explained to Erik that this means we need to choose a word to focus on for the year, he decided his word is "beef."

Ok then. So I am excited to go purely for the fact that a) there will be other women there and b) we will be talking about something meaningful. These two things alone will get me almost anywhere. But before I go, I need to decide on my word.

My friend suggested thinking of something I feel like I need in 2013, or a word that maybe God keeps bringing to mind, something that won't get out of my head. Well, the word most often in my head is "overwhelmed" which is certainly not something I need. Maybe I need the opposite. What is that? Underwhelmed? Just whelmed?

I'm tempted to think that what I need is lots of warm fuzzy words like safe, comfortable. Chocolate. Who doesn't need chocolate? I feel like what I need is to not look around my house and see a million things to do. I feel like I need to be known, on top of things, competent, in a routine, loved, needed. And also, chocolate.

I've tried a lot of words on for size, but like most of my clothes shopping, something's always just a little off. I blame my hips. Well, for the clothing at least. But for the words, I realized that I go back and forth between wanting some word that will make me not feel messy or undone, and my strategy for that is either to go great guns and "get 'er done-ish" about life, or, if I feel it's insurmountable, I retreat to something like "rooted" or "fetal position." Or chocolate.

But can I be in between? Can I be in the midst of the mess and the undoneness with a whole heart? And what would that look like?

Content. It would look like being content. So that is my word. I want to be able to look fully in the face of my circumstances and say "yes" to what God has for me this year, whether my house be decorated to my satisfaction or no, whether I am known or not, whether I get into my groove or live one disheveled day after another. I want to receive what He gives me each day, each moment, with a contented heart.

Right after this word came to mind, I opened a Dove chocolate wrapper (that could be the framework for a lot of my sentences, "After I ____________, I ate chocolate") and the message inside said, "Take this moment. Enjoy it." and I thought, "That sounds a lot like contentedness to me."
Interestingly, this is not the first time God has spoken to me through a Dove chocolate wrapper. I guess He just plays the odds, "At some point today this girl is going to eat chocolate. That's when I'll get her."

I'm excited to see how God will use this word in my life this year. I hope at some point He chooses to use chocolate again to speak to me. I listen well when He does.

So if you had a word for the year, what would it be?

The Slow Boat From China

Anyone else remember this book? I didn't read it, maybe because I never had trouble getting my locker open.

Today, my book is titled, "If God Loves Me, Why Can't We Get Our Stuff Off the Slow Boat From China?"

I'm guessing that sweet 70's era book might have a good answer for me, so now I'm kicking myself for not pulling it off the church library shelf, but I have a pretty good idea what it would say.

I think it might tell me to give thanks in the midst of circumstances so that's what I'm going to do. I'm thankful that:
1. Our stuff did not fall in the ocean.
2. We are not like those people we met who shipped their stuff to the US and didn't get it for a year (Oh  Lord, please don't let us become those people).
3. We have had a place to stay while our stuff has been sailing the seven seas
4. Erik has been able to do other things to get our house ready, so these two trips haven't been wasted
5. We have things to ship. Lots of things. A lot of people don't have anything.
6. This is a light and momentary trial, especially compared to what so many are going through.
7. It's kept us on our knees.
8. God is still God, and He is still good.

It's this last one that I wrestle with in times like this, and I think that's good. It's good because it makes me think about what goodness to us really is - not our comfort or our happiness, but something much bigger and better. It's good because it reminds me that God is not our vending machine, our Santa Claus, our butler, who does what we ask. when we ask. It's good because it puts me in my place, a place of being very small and insignificant, which is why the fact that He loves me still is even greater.

I think I know what to do if I can't get my locker open.

Learning

The garbage disposal in my parents' kitchen clogged two nights ago. This was inconvenient on a number of levels, such as: my parents were gone, my husband was gone, I am not good with tools, and oh yeah, after 13 years overseas I lack certain skills most people have gained by this point. In other words, I haven't interacted with a garbage disposal since I was a teenager.

Spending most of my adult life outside of the States has left me strangely imbalanced in my abilities. Sure, I can help you bargain for something in Chinese and get the local price, but I did not know that potato peels shouldn't go in a garbage disposal (but for the record, that wasn't what caused the clogging). I may have mad chopstick skillz, but I don't have a clue how to unclog a disposal, or when or how to call a plumber.

To make it more fun and challenging, one of the pipes below the bathroom simultaneously began dripping in the basement, and both dogs decided the moment needed to be punctuated by excessive barking. "This is exciting! It's a big mess! You're clueless!" I think is how it translated.

So I called some family friends, and was immediately cheered by their voices, especially the one that said, "Why don't I come over and check on it?"

Half an hour, a messy kitchen floor and an unintentionally wet friend later (there was a lot of water trapped in there!) I had a working disposal again. Not only that, but I think if it happened again I might be able to fix it myself. We're all going to pray it doesn't come to that, but it encouraged me to think, "I might be sorely lacking in some basic adult skills for life in America, but they are not unlearnable."

Which is good, because last night I got to practice, "What to do when your mini-fridge was set too cold and caused a can of soda to explode, bursting the door open." Opportunities to be an adult abound!

Vulnerability

One of the greatest lessons I feel God began teaching me in China and I'm sure will continue to teach me until I die is the power of vulnerability. Not just transparency - I think many of us are good at that - but vulnerability. A friend once explained the difference as this, "Transparency is putting all your junk in a window display for others to see. Vulnerability is letting others go into the storeroom and pull things out to be on display." It's a whole lot more frightening when you don't have control over what is shown.

So when I saw the following quote about vulnerability from an article (see full article here) recently I was encouraged because it resonates so much with what I've been learning:

"Vulnerability is not weakness, nor is it optional. We can't opt out of the uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks that are woven through our daily experiences. Like it or not, vulnerability is coming, and we have to decide if we’re going to open up to it or push it away.

The only choice we really have is how we're going to respond to feeling vulnerable. And contrary to popular belief, our shields don't protect us. They simply keep us from being seen, heard, and known.
If there's anything I've learned over the past decade and experienced firsthand over the last year, it's this: Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose. 

Even if letting ourselves be seen and opening ourselves up to judgment or disappointment feels terrifying, the alternatives are worse: Choosing to feel nothing -- numbing. Choosing to perfect, perform, and please our way out of vulnerability. Choosing rage, cruelty, or criticism. Choosing shame and blame. Like most of you reading this, I have some experience with all of these alternatives, and they all lead to same thing: disengagement and disconnection.

One of my favorite quotes is from theologian Howard Thurman. He writes, "Don’t ask what the world needs; ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive." Vulnerability is not easy, but it’s the surest sign that we’ve come alive"
Brene Brown