Some of you readers may know that we lived overseas in a developing-world setting for a number of years – most of my adult life, actually. (If you didn’t know that already, well there you go. Now you do.) We came back to the States to settle a little over two-and-a-half years ago. People who haven’t lived that life tend to romanticize it, imagine it to be exciting and exotic. But that life was far from the idyllic paradise you might imagine – quite honestly it was incredibly stressful. Fifteen years of trying to live that life left me pretty broken. But one thing that it had going for it was a much, much slower pace of life. We weren’t ever frantically busy, running from one event or activity to another. Everything took a long time to do, and so we moseyed along from one thing to the next. There wasn’t any other way to do it.
Fast forward to now. One day last fall, my husband and I were both lamenting how busy we’d become. I joked that we had successfully re-assimilated back into American culture, now being busier than we knew what to do with like everyone else we know. Truth be told, I was pretty proud of the fact. I never did manage cross-cultural stress very well in our overseas years, but hey! Look at me! I can manage this American life. I sort of took pleasure in having to postpone items d, e, and f on my to-do list because items a, b, and c were more time sensitive. I’ve arrived!
But, really, I should have known better. Whenever one begins to think that perhaps they have arrived, one really ought to watch out because as the saying goes: “pride goeth before a fall.”
At the beginning of that week I was flashing my badge of busy-ness with pride, and by the end I found myself completely and utterly spent. My son fell and fractured his leg (not badly, but enough to put him on crutches for the next five weeks). Hurricane Irma wreaked havoc on the Caribbean, Florida, and other parts of the southeast…and came on right on the heels of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, horrible wildfires in the Northeast, and an earthquake in Mexico. And then I received news that a dear friend lost her baby 10 weeks into an unexpected pregnancy – the latest in a string of crises her family had weathered over the past year.
Why, God? Why?
The night after the edges of Irma blew through our part of the world, we woke up to cancelled vacation plans (don’t plan a beach trip the week a Hurricane strikes) and no internet service. And in the quiet space of an internet-less morning with no plans, the thought came to me: Maybe, just maybe I’ve been too much caught up in my own affairs, dashing from one thing to the next. My eyes have been on my life, my stress, the next thing that I have to do. They’ve slipped away from seeking the face of God. My times of reading and of prayer have been sporadic and half-hearted at best. Maybe all these tragedies are a moment of dark grace designed to pull my eyes away from self and put them back on the needs of others and the source of grace and strength to carry all of us along in this fallen world.
My life hasn’t gotten any less busy since those reflections last fall. But I am no longer taking pride in how well I am handling the pressure. Truth be told, I’m feeling the weariness. Rather than letting that be a discouragement, I am learning (at least trying to learn) to lean in to His strength in those weary moments. When I am weak, He is strong.
Faithfully Ordinary 