A few years ago, a good friend of mine, Angela, had made a statement that really pissed me off. This was when I was in my early twenties, and I had never really been out of the country. She’d said it in a time where as a church we were rounding the corner onto Summer, and for those of you who grew up in church, you know what this means…

Summer Missions Trips.

Yep, every kid knows that if you really love Jesus, you give up your Summer Break, Spring Break or Christmas break to bring the word of God to some poor and dilapidated part of the world. Usually this takes the form of Children’s Vacation Bible Schools in Tijuana, along with some soccer games with street kids.

As a young christian, you go, you spend your week. You struggle with the language, experiment with the food and dont drink the water. You are shocked at how people who have so much less than us and still have joy, and you are convicted of how selfish you are. You come home re-connected to God, and all fired up to throw or give away all of your things. I don’t know if that was true for all of you, but it was completely true for me. Made me feel altruistic and good that I gave up my time to help poor people.

So, that one day in my early twenties, you can see why it made me so mad when Angela said “Short term missions trips don’t really do any good. In fact, they are really more for the good of the people going than the people receiving them. They really are more trouble than they are worth when you think about it.”

Whoa Angela. You clearly don’t know what you are talking about. When I went on summer mission, all of the street kids were glad to have me. I played soccer with them, and I was Jesus to them. How could you ever say that I was an inconvenience to them? Ang, you’re bogus.

Then a funny thing happened….I lived overseas for a time. I spent some time in Thailand, working with children from the Hill tribes of the northern mountains. I was their English teacher for 3 months. And after being there as a constant volunteer for several weeks, I really began to see what she was talking about. People would show up, completely and obviously proud that they were going to be giving their time for a whole week!…And I found myself rolling my eyes. It even got to the place where I wasn’t even interesting in knowing their names…”What was the point? They are leaving in a few days anyway.” I began to become annoyed when I had to take THREE WHOLE DAYS out of my teaching schedule to train people that were only going to be around for a total of 5 days anyway. I wanted to just give them mindless crap work, like photocopying paper, or cutting out shapes for me.

Ok, so the point of this blog is not just to rag on Short Term Missions…

Where I am going with this thought is this: I was sitting in church this week, and this gal gets up and begins to talk about this small church in the heart of Peru called La Perla. She goes on to tell this amazing story about how she had volunteered there for a few years, and how the church was really in dire need of direction within the community. She’d indicated that they existed there, but had no impact in reaching out to the real needs within the city. She began to pray that God would show the community how to be His hands and feet within their their own city. When she returned years later, she was overjoyed to see that they had caught the vision – they had transformed their community around them by recognizing local needs and reaching out to those around them.

What really hooked me about her story was this; she’d said

Even if I had been a missionary in Peru for five years, I could have never done what the local people were able to do in a few short years. It is when people reach out to their own community that real differences can be made.

So this gets me thinking. I, like half of America, saw The Dark Knight this past week. And to be honest, I was fairly impressed with some of the depth for a comic book movie. What I found really interesting was the writing really spoke about the makings of heroes, and society as a whole. I loved the ending, where they are talking about “The Hero the World Wants,” and one of the characters is being puppeted as a hero, even though it was no where near reality, and simply because it was what Gothem needed to believe. And in contrast, the real hero, Batman, was slandered, made to be the scape goat, all because he was the hero that Gotham needed and didn’t want. I found it incredibly deep and telling about who we are as people in society.

Ok, so all of this comes together for me like this: We want heroes to be a certain way. We want them to be people who swoop in from other places in the world and fix all of our problems. And in conjunction, we want to be heroes in that same way – to fly around the world to people that we don’t know, or they have no knowledge of us, and we want to be their heroes. I think that there is a real sense of ambiguity in that – a real sense of evasion.

But in contrast, what does it mean to be the person that rises from within the ranks to heroism?

How much more does it mean to society, to a people group, to a culture to be a person who has all of the insight of that town, and to rise above and simply say “I will be the one to be different.” Yes, there is complete vulnerability in this. It isn’t like being Batman, where you get to be a hero that runs by night, covered by a mask and cape. Instead, there you are – fully human – flaws and flesh.

I think this gal really captured it when she pointed out that these Peruvian individuals did more for La Perla than she could have ever accomplished in years. They knew their own people – their hearts, and their ways. They were brave and stepped up in small, visible and practical ways. Handing out dinner to the hungry, making after hours classes for adults to further education, providing practical needs to those in the town.

These are heroes. These are the people that make a difference in their immediate worlds. It starts in the immediate world. I think in alot of ways, being a hero is simply concentric circles of vulnerability; being vulnerable in that you are the one to stick out your neck to meet an immediate need. And through that, the circles and needs progressively get larger and larger, effecting more and more people.  We don’t change the world over night. Its a bit harder than that. Its a bit more real than that.

I do love the idea of being able to fly to a place where no one knows my name, and save them from themselves. But I think this isn’t nearly as powerful as it could be. I think I am beginging to see the value of being available to the world around me.  To walk around with my eyes open, looking for chances. Maybe it’s not hard to be a hero.

Maybe it is simply walking through our days one at a time, being the hero that our worlds need…not simply the heros that we want. 

Today it seems as if there has been cloud of a feeling that has settled upon me – and it is one that is not easily shaken.  In fact, I believe that this is a feeling that has been visiting me over the past few weeks. It seems to rear its ugly head in the most interesting of places: in the middle of my day at work, after a great date with a new guy, in the quiet of the morning when I think that no one is looking.

            It seems to come upon me suddenly, and I go from being secure to somehow feeling that I am only one inch tall in a world of giants.

 That the world around me is busy and sophisticated, and here I am, very young and simple. I could walk around telling myself all kinds of reasons why I would feel this way, but I suppose that we could just call it what it is – insecurity. It is not that I am necessarily worried of what other people think of me, but rather feeling that I am quite small in a very big and complicated world.

            The interesting part is, the major question that I have for myself is not why – that is a part of the equation that doesnt elude me. Rather, the part that I have trouble reconciling is the how.  Generally speaking, I am a confident person. I have always had a lot of positive life factors pushing me forward; I have always enjoyed my work and have been successful, I have always had lots of friends and enjoyed their company, I have always had a good home life with my parents, brothers, sisters, roommates, or whoever.  And then one day, I wake up and feel as if I have shrunk to half my size.

            While at work, I wandered away from my desk and found myself trudging out of the building and out into the sunshine. And I couldn’t help but think, “How does this happen to a person? How is that you can completely feel like you know who you are, and then one day wake up to realize that you have lost sight of yourself?” Or maybe I haven’t lost sight entirely,  but I feel that my identity is but an echo in the back of my mind or that the palpability of feeling like myself is slowing being pulled away from me. Maybe it’s just that I feel like somehow I need to take my soul by the shoulders and shake it to  remind myself, “Don’t forget who you are. You have a story worth telling and a contagious vibrancy worth having. You are intelligent, and you are accomplished, so don’t you forget that!”

            Maybe it’s just a world of business suits, expensive cars, fancy restaurants and brand new shoes. Somehow the glitter of it all gets under my skin, seemingly screaming of egotistical importance. It is in the face of this that I am reminded what I am not – not old enough, or successful enough, or thin enough, or cute enough, or smart enough…or enough of something. The sheer difference between me and the sparkling world around me is enough to make me shrink back. Its as if the world is caught up in brilliance, and in comparison, my heart is nothing more than bare and artless paper bag. Suddenly I am very quite, very small and very sunken into my surroundings. And in the midst, I long for the parts of the world that don’t care if I am very tall, very beautiful, very successful, or very intelligent. I want to disappear; wandering in the hills, smelling flowers, or sitting by a highway and watching all the cars speed by.

            The words of a Coldplay song have been echoing in my mind all afternoon,  

As I have began to navigate my shift from teenage years into adulthood, I’m sure that it can go without being said, that there are a lot of situations that haven’t looked or felt like what I anticipated. Of course we don’t always sit down and write out what our expectations of life are going to look like, but it is not uncommon for us to get to where we are going, to look around and say “Huh…somehow I thought this would be different.”

            One of the areas that I find that I am consistently more and more surprised by is my relationship with my mother. As a kid, well, more as a pre-teen and teenager, we had a TUMULTOUS relationship. I did not like her one single bit. And she knew it – I had absolutely no intentions of hiding it. I was cruel, and like most girls, I thought that I knew so much better than her. She didn’t know what was cool, what was important in life, how to dress, how to talk to boys, or how to do anything for that matter. Well, almost anything. She did know how to drive me stinkin bonkers. And that was no lie.

            The interesting thing is, as I have gotten older, I worked through my beef with her. A few years ago I was actually sitting in my car reading a book about womanhood and the relationship with our mothers. It began talking of the wounds that mothers can create for their daughters, and the importance of working through those wounds to re-establish bonds with our mothers. Without moving through these hurts, we have capacities to hold bitterness in our hearts long after we should. I began BAWLING as the words rolled across my mind and into my heart.

 I had a vision of me at 65 and being old and wrinkled and decrepit, and nasty – and that I was lonely because I had managed to push everyone out of my life with my stinky grotesque heart that had never forgiven my mother. The thought dropped into my mind instantaneously like a heap of bricks. And to be honest, it scared the shit out of me. The decision to forgive my mom was made at that exact moment, not because I loved her or understood her…but more out of sheer terror of my imagined fate.

             Now, at 24, the funny thing is I’m finding that for the first time in my life, I’m closer with my mom than I am with my dad. And for those of you who know me well, know that for most of my life I have practically been the president of the “Daddies Girl” Club. But my mom and I sit on the couch and giggle like school girls, she reads my mind sometimes, I call her and ask her about advice with boys…and it feels like it was only a few years ago that “my mother didn’t know anything about dating and boys.”

            This past year, one of my best friends had a broken engagement several weeks before her wedding. It was an event that nearly killed her (well, not really – she has steal in her bones, and has been AMAZINGLY beautifully strong throughout the whole thing). But tonight we had dinner at her parent’s house. Her mom made us great “mom dinner” (you know, the good stuff that tastes like a mama made it – veggies and bread and drinks and all the fancy stuff us 20-somethings usually only eat when our moms make them).  Her mom sat and talked with us for just a bit – but she had all other kind of mom/grandma duties to tend to, so she had to be a busybody about her home.

            Upon leaving I said to Dana, “I love your parents…and not because they are so great to me, but because you can just feel it that they love you so much.” To which Dana replied “Yeah, this year has been really hard on them I think, with the wedding not happening and all. It was really hard to watch them have to go through all of that.” Following this comment, she explained how after the whole thing was over, she couldn’t eat or sleep for quite a long time. She had moved back into her parent’s house, and for weeks her mom used to hold her into the wee hours of the morning as Dana sobbed, vomited, convulsed and endured panic attacks from her deep grief.  She said the funny thing was, she started sleeping all of the way through the night long before her mom did.

            This past year, I also had a broken relationship. I wasn’t engaged, but was on my way out of the country to move to be closer to him, and we fully had made plans to get married. The thing about that night was how I remember my mother in that moment.  I had collapsed on my sister’s bed. And when my mom came in from all of the noise, I managed to squeak out the words “It’s over mom.”

            I can’t remember much about the entire next week, but I remember this part well. Upon hearing those words, my mom simply began crying “No …NO…NO NO NO NO..” and pounding her fists into my sister’s mattress as the hot tears began to roll down her cheeks. She and my sister laid there with me for hours, weeping. And when it was all too late for my sister to be awake, my mom carried me to my bed, and sat at the foot of the mattress letting her own tears fall until I had stopped crying,  my breathing had become steady, and I had fallen asleep.

            Upon reading one of Don Miller’s books, he compares the love of a mother to the love of Jesus. He tells the story of Maya Angelou, and some traumatic events in her childhood. As a coping mechanism, Maya spent most of her early years in silence, not speaking at all. One day, when walking with her mother, her mother said to her “Baby, you know something? I think you are one of the most amazing women that I have ever met. Yes – Mary McLeod Bethune, Eleanor Roosevelt, my mother, and you – and you are really the greatest.”  Angelou says that it is this very moment that she thought to herself “Suppose I really am somebody?” It was her mother’s love and words that allowed her to grow into who she already was – an amazing accomplished person.

            That’s the thing about moms like mine, Dana’s, and Maya’s; they give a new meaning to the phrase “mama bear.” Dana had said that even though the entire experience was awful, she can’t explain the kind of blessing that she has from her parents. Just watching them pick her up and carry her through that experience was very telling about the level of love that her mom feels for her. And that’s the thing about mama bears in general – It’s almost a bravery that cannot be easily described. Men are protective and obviously love their children, but there is something of a ferocity in the way that mother’s love their children.

Sometimes it seems that they’d think that not a moment has passed since the very instant that they had pushed their infant out of their own bodies and into the big bold world.

            As I sat in the Minneapolis airport, thinking about relationships, and my own heartache, and my indescribable mother, I couldn’t help but let all of the tears just stream down my face. Mama bears like mine, and like Dana’s are more the exception than the rule. Not all women in the world are big brave and incredible in the face of their children. Not all mothers hold their daughters into the wee hours of the night to ensure that they will survive the harm of broken hearts. Not all mothers will call things out in their children, describing greatness and accomplishment. Not all mothers look their children in the face and show the depths of their capabilities with a few simple words. Not all mothers have hearts that bleed long after their daughters have healed – simply at the thought that their children were wronged. We simply got lucky to have the same DNA as such incredible people.

            I don’t know that I have ever loved anything as much as my mom loves me. I don’t know that I have even come remotely close to thinking about loving something as much as my mom loves me. But I suppose that is part of it all – all part of growing in life. Being 3 years old and thinking that your mother is the only person in the world for you. Being sixteen and hating your mother more than you can think of – an only seeing the parts of your life that she “just doesn’t understand.”

And then you arrive and your 20s and realize that your mother is quite possibly the most amazing woman that has walked the planet…and if you’re really lucky, you’ll grow up to be half the woman that she was.

We are all familiar with the phrase, “No man is an island.” In fact, throughout the last few years there have been a several movies produced to convey this idea to its viewers.

Crash was one of the more popular of these films, showing different kinds of people from various walks of life, and how their lives were in all intertwined in one way or another. Some of the connections were very impacting, and others were more subtle, but the underlying message was the same:

 ”You are not simply floating alone in this world – you have influence and impact on those around you.”

So, I am assuming that at some point in time, all of us have come to terms with this idea – that you are not alone in our worlds. However, over the last few years, I have begun to realize that there are things that we know- ideas that we are familiar with. Then on the other hand, there are things that we know – ideas that impact us; truths that we live by.  As with many things, I am a firm believer that when we have made the leap from mere ideas that we know to truths that we live by, we are changed people. We live differently, we act differently, we think differently – everything is new.

So what does it mean to really know that we aren’t little islands? A host of things can come to mind. It means that we have to have friends, we need families, we need neighbors. Ok, so that is the part that we already know…but what is the truth part – the life changing part?

We need one another. We need community.

Our souls need to be vulnerable, to be known.

This week, I’ve been on vacation. As much as my office makes my little heart tick, we all know that sometimes it does a person good to get out and stretch, relax, and let our brains turn into putty.  My vacation has been spit into two halves; the hostess half, and the guest half.  One of my roomates when I lived in New Zealand came to stay with me in LA  for a few days before taking off to launch her career as a missionary. The second part was me going out to Minneapolis to spend a few days with a gal that I lived with during college.

So, as I am readying fly back to my life, my job, my apartment, my bills and my reality, I cannot help but be  stuck with the realization that I feel so dang great. This vacation I didn’t do a whole lot of activities out of the ordinary. Beach, baseball games, beers, parties, lake days, shopping…nothing entirely unique.  But as I am thinking of printing my boarding pass back to LA, I realize, I am so blessed because I have gotten a chance to connect with people in my life who KNOW me.  There is some thing powerful in being known. About the notion that other people can come into your life years later, and you don’t need to explain much – you don’t need to tell them that you have a hard time picking what you are going to eat for lunch, or that you don’t have much patience for obnoxious waiters, or get embarassed if you get bad gas or something like that. You are known. There is no embarrassment, there is only comfort.

As I am thinking about leaving Dana, I realize the truth in the statement “Home is where the heart is.” I feel at home in Minneapolis. I could really up and move here in a millisecond. I love the trees, I love the city, I love the people, I love the lakes and the beauty that I find here.

But what I think I love even more, is simply getting to be ME. Unedited. Uncensored. Raw.  

And maybe this is where the tension comes in – as people being known is our biggest fear, as well as our greatest need. We are all slightly neurotic, sending out mixed signals for people to come in and know us and love us, but in the process we get freaked out and kick them away, close ourselves down and turn off our hearts. I’m not too certain why we are like that. Maybe there are deep theological truths in that – something about the way that human beings are fundamentally made that leads us to crave after extreme opposites.

But what I do know is that it has been the times where we have been brave, where we have been courageous, where I have let my heart be open – where I have shown the parts of me that I didn’t think that anyone would want to see – these are the things that have lead to some of the greatest friendships I have ever known. And it is in these friendships that our hearts lie. So, I suppose whether its Minneapolis, or Kona, or Costa Mesa…home is where you’re heart is – home is wherever there are people that know the dark blackened parts of your heart, and somehow manage to love you anyway.

This week I started reading a new book by one of my favorite authors. Several years ago, Don Miller burst onto the Christian writing scene, most noted for his life-changing book Blue Like Jazz. If any of you had read it, then you understand the depth of my heart-throb for this man’s writing abilities. I am currently reading Searching for God Knows What, which I think might be one of his earlier publications.

Now I don’t know if Don Miller is married, or even has a girlfriend, but he should be made aware that he is my soul mate. Crazy sounding I know, but the man can write the words that I can only grapple with…and as a writer, that means its true love.

 Now, because Miller is a genius, he points out something amazing within the story of Adam and Eve that I have never seen before.  For those if us that grew up in Sunday School, we get the “Felt Board” story: God made man, man ran around with animals and nature. But then something was wrong…man was lonely. Then we all know the part where Adam takes a nap and Eve waltzes on the scene. Poof. Problem solved. Thanks God.

What Miller points out is that the order of things might have been a little bit different if we pay attention to the details in the text. He shows how man was running around being all…manly…and then he suddenly realizes that he’s a third wheel to all of the animal couples.  Adam is waltzing around, and decides to ask God if he too can have a buddy in the world.  And then God says:

“Go and name all of the animals”

Ok, so that hardly sounds like “Sure Adam” Bam, here’s a chic for you. And when you stop to think about, Miller points out, naming the animals is a HUGE job. If you really think to sit down and do the math, you are talking about millions of animals…and this man was charged with the task of naming them all? As an organizational freak, I could easily tell you it would take YEARS to simply categorize them. 

The implications of this mere one sentence in Genesis has enormous connotations. First of all, if the Garden of Eden contained life as it should have been, we should note that 100 years of Adam’s “perfect life” included work and TONS of lonliness. It included years of roaming the globe and searching for relationship and community. I know this is a huge point that should be further unpacked, but I want to get to the main idea, so I’ll let you chew on that idea on your own.

What I love about Miller’s picture of Adam and Eve is when he points out how these 100  years of toil, work and isolation must have made Adam feel when Eve did step onto the scene.  Let’s look at Miller’s thought process:

Moses said that the whole time Adam was naming the animals, that entire hundred years, he couldn’t find a helpmate suitable for him. This means that while he was naming cattle he was lonely because he couldn’t really communicate in the same way with the cattle, and when he was naming the fish he probably wanted to go in in the ocean with them….So here’s this guy whose intensely relational, needing other people, and in order to cause him to appreciate the gift of companionship, God had him hang out with chimps for a hundred years.

Its quite beautiful really. God directed Adam’s steps so that when he created Eve, Adam would have the utmost appreciation, respect and gratitude.

Miller then goes on to note that in this day and age, men can merely go to the Internet and access all of the naked women he wants to see…and we wonder why women get raped and molested and abused. Maybe if we all had to toil for a hundred years before we found each other, we would treat each other differently.

Now, a few nights ago, my girlfriend and I had a great Friday night. It was blazing hot, and we had headed to the mall to get a new “meet the parents dress” for Hillary. Because we are women, we had a wonderful time shopping; we found a dress and shoes that made her look like a million bucks, and we had a coupon so she hardly paid anything out of pocket. After the shopping was over, we headed to an El Torito Grill for some bomb Mexican dinner, and margaritas. We relaxed, ate, and connected over great conversation.

When we were leaving, there was a local musician playing guitar in the center of the mall. The night was warm, and lingered there, in little cafe chairs, looking up at the night sky, enjoying the music and thinking about how grand our little lives were.

And then Hillary says “You know that would make this night PERFECT? Yogurtland.” Only one problem….as we began to walk over to finalize our perfection…we were suddenly struck with the realization that

YOGURTLAND WAS CLOSED.

Clearly, we were incredibly let down (if you’ve hung out with me lately, you’d know that I have a slight addiction to tart frozen yogurt, berries and captain crunch….its my weakness).

But after letting Miller’s words sink in, a hard and fast truth settled into my mind.

Yogurtland MUST be closed. In life, perfection yields ungratefulness and a sense of entitlement. So as long as I am going to be a woman of character, Yogurtland must always be closed.

About a year ago, I really wrestled with this issue. I hated that God couldnt have orchestrated the world for us to be people of character without strife. That we couldnt love and appreciate Eve without naming the animals first. That we couldnt appreciate the night sky and the cafe performer and still get to sit and devour Yogurtland. It all seemed a bit unfair. That you had to have a struggle to have a blessing.

What I love about Miller, is that he sees the beauty in the whole thing. In fact, he uses exactly those words several times, recognizing the tension that God has created, and that it is actually quite beautiful. Its artistic. Its ironic. Its meaningful.  Its like the movie “American Beauty” where just when the main character becomes truly happy, he is murdered. But he dies with a smile on his face…and in that there is beauty. You are almost happy for him as he lies there dead and smiling.

I’m not trying to say that God is morbid. But I am saying that God is an artist. A play-write. An author. He writes interesting plots of movies worth watching, and books worth reading. He delights the reader with the complexities in the story line.

He shows us that the tension is supposed to be there. It was there in the Garden of Eden. That tension is not the result of ”Sin” and ”The Fall” as some Christians would like to believe… even as I want to be believe. Looking back, I vied with this thought for such a long time because it paints a very different kind of God. In my head, the way things should be hashed out is like this:

1. God was hanging out in nothingness before time (this is a huge theological blanket statement…I realize…let’s not get hung up here)

2. God created all kinds of great stuff.

3. God created man to be in relationship with Him and his stuff.

4. The world was perfect. I.e. no work, no tears, no toil, no hunger, no TENSION, no struggle, no unhappiness….etc.

5. Man biffed the whole thing by that whole “Snake and the Apple” story and all of the exempt items from point 4 came crashing into our reality.  

Now the reason that I dont like the whole “No Yogurtland” concept is because this idea does match with my five excellent points of Theology. It changes my frame work. If God created the world to involve tension, and struggle, and loneliness and work… then maybe God isn’t who I thought He was when I signed up for this whole thing. Which is why for a long time God really made me jazzed…in a bad way. I felt lied to or something.

But as I am reading over Miller’s words, maybe I am starting to see it all in another light. Maybe I’m half right… God isn’t who I thought He was (Big surprise there).  But the part that I am thinking that I was wrong about, is that God isn’t a liar. God didn’t fake me out… maybe its just that God is more of a visionary, an artist and a storyteller than I originally gave Him credit for.

Of course this doesn’t mean that I’m comfortable with the whole thing yet. A God that is a Liar feels unfair, but a God that is a visionary…that’s just plain scary. Scary in a good-great-change-your-life kind of way. I suppose this is really why I haven’t just turned and walked away on the whole thing quite yet. I feel like I’ve seen too much out of this Visionary-God to be able to cut the cord.  And even though a large bowl of tart frozen yogurt covered in fresh berries and captain crunch in my weakness…I think I can forgo Yogurtland when given the chance at a real life.