Our Journey

I woke up this morning and my body felt different. It is changing. I am running three to four times a week, trying something new and challenging my body. And I’m growing stronger, changing shape and composition.

As a gymnast for 15 years I exercised great discipline, learned intense mental focus and a singular commitment to the sport and my goals. Through gymnastics I developed great physical abilities and discovered the amazing capacity my body. But… each skill, trick and routine was an attempt to force my body to do things that I was mentally afraid of or that felt impossible to do. I trained, cajoled and pushed my body to do things it couldn’t do naturally – splits, over splits, jumping, twisting.

Running can also be difficult and painful. Running the hills of Malawi and Nashville is grueling and exhausting. But there are also moments that are rhythmic and fluid. There are entire stretches where one finds a groove, the mind can totally relax as the body does its thing. A runner’s high is that moment of unity. Where the perfectly executed floor routine or dismount is always a triumph of mind over matter. The mind must always be alert and controlling the body to keep it poised over the four-inch balance beam or tight in the midst of a twist.

Then there is yoga. One practice last week after three years and I loved it. The results of yoga and gymnastics are often similar – increased flexibility and greater strength. But the methods are radically different. In yoga practice I am supposed to listen to my body, stopping if I need, avoiding certain poses. In gymnastics I worked to ignore discomfort and push through pain in order to achieve and excel. I find when I listen to my body it responds over time – almost gratefully – with greater agility and even greater peace and clarity of mind.

As a gymnast, setting goals, pushing and achieving, the results were often beautiful, skilled and exhilarating. But often at a physical price and sometimes an emotional one. Always de-valuing the present moment in favor of the end goal.

I still want to be healthy, fit and attractive. But now I’m trying to listen to my body first and wait for the results. I walk when I can’t run. When I can’t do a pose that everyone else in the room can do I have to be okay with that.

I’m focused on the process rather than a perceived perfection that I need to attain. And I feel my body changing even though I’m no longer a gymnast.

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The Easter tradition in the Malawi United Methodist Church is to celebrate the holiday with a three-day Easter program. The early church and high church traditions today call these three days from Good Friday to Easter Sunday the triidium. The same words are not used here, and would probably raise suspicion as too Catholic, but the intent and celebration is the same – to walk with Jesus again through the darkest hours of his life and remember his death in such a way that we can truly celebrate the glory and miracle of the resurrection on Sunday morning!

Our circuit is made up of seven local churches. This Easter weekend, Pastor Kaunda, the pastor in charge, his wife and a lay leader went to one church to host the program. Three other lay leaders traveled to the furthest local church for another program. And I remained at Galilea where the other four churches gathered.

Pastor Kaunda took equipment to show the “Jesus Film” on Friday night as a witness and evangelism effort. The other programs began on Friday night with worship and teaching. Saturday begins with worship and preaching, but the afternoon is dedicated to open air preaching or door-to-door evangelism.

Here in Blantyre it was pre-arranged with the chief in a neighborhood called Kampala that we would gather for worship and preaching in a large open space right among the houses. We took a small generator, speakers and microphone. About 70 members walked the 30 minutes to the place and began with choruses to draw the people from their homes. Our convener introduced the church and then the preacher took over.

After the preaching, persons began coming forward for prayer. Nine people gathered in the center of our gathering among their neighbors, friends and family. A lay leader, the preacher and I came to ask for their prayer concerns and prayed with each person, laying our hands on them. A child as young as 12 wanted to give his life to Jesus. A barren woman came asking us to pray that she would conceive a child. Another woman came to ask for deliverance in her family because her husband is cruel and an unbeliever. Two men asked for prayers for their financial standing.

As we prayed the songs of our congregation grew stronger. As I lifted my eyes from praying at one point, I saw that our congregation was forming a circle around us. By the time we finished praying, we were enclosed in a circle of song, the multitude of voices had become one voice.

There was more teaching in the evening back at Galilea. And we concluded the weekend with a service of Holy Communion on Sunday morning. It was a beautiful Easter program made possible by the hard work of the young people on the organizing committee and the women who cooked morning, noon and night to feed 100 people throughout the weekend.

He is Risen, He is Risen indeed.

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Last year I introduced the members of my local church to foot washing on Maundy Thursday. Only eight or ten of gathered that evening. But as Holy Week approached this year, my pastor in charge asked if I would lead the service again.

So on Thursday night, the congregation met for the fourth night of Bible study during Holy Week. We discussed why Jesus might have done this, how Judas misunderstood, and if we see leaders today who are willing to humble themselves in a similar fashion.

Then I knelt to wash Pastor Kaunda’s feet and he knelt to wash mine. The congregation of nearly 20 sang as each person came forward to have their feet washed. I washed the feet of women who have served me countless meals, cooking over an open fire and acrid smoke. I washed the feet of a young man who has spent hours around my dining room table translating and editing devotions and articles. I washed the feet of a woman with whom I’m not completely reconciled. I washed the feet of a small child. I saw Kaunda wash the feet of the guard who patrols my yard each night to keep our family safe.

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And I washed Wilson’s feet. Wilson. He has given his life these past 18 months to serve our family. He washes our clothes so that I don’t get blistered hands. He cleans our home so that we can give time and energy to ministry. He advises us on matters big and small. He changes flat tires, totes water, fixes stopped up sinks, notices when lights are not turned on and when doors are not locked. He knows our public reputation and our private flaws. He witnesses the intimacy of our family – both tender and not so tender.

As I washed his feet it felt so inadequate, so late in coming.

As a pastor, as a pastor in Malawi, there is respect and protocol attached to the position regardless of one’s personal merits or worth. I cannot carry a bag or Bible more than three steps from my car before someone has taken it to carry it to the church or into the house. I am served first and better – rice rather than nsima, a fork rather than a spoon, or a spoon rather than my hands.

So each person around the circle on Thursday night has served me in one – or a million and one ways. To kneel at their feet was the greatest privilege. Yet it felt like so little in comparison to all that has been done for me.

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Jeff and I have found that marriage can be lonely, even despite the proximity and the daily intimacies. We have so perfected the skills of delegation and scheduling that we can spend entire weeks in productivity without actually sharing life together.

I read this morning in reference to being a pastor that “Every gospel truth was maintained intact, and all the human energy was wholly admirable, but the rhythms were off.” (The Pastor: A Memoir by Eugene Peterson) That is what we have found in the past year. We strive to be faithful to prayer, we hope that we remain in line with God’s will. Our intentions and endeavors are respectable, maybe even admirable. But the rhythms are off.

When we came to Malawi, we truly believed (and still do) that we were following a call, a chance to use our gifts, experience and education in new ways and in service of the gospel that we had not done before.

But the calling to a new ministry was also a chance to live abroad as we had hoped to do at some point. It was the right time for Jeff to leave the high-stress, crazy hour profession. I jumped at the opportunity to work full-time again and offer Jeff more time with the kids.

Now I realize that my desire for work was not as altruistic as I would have liked to believe. Alongside my abiding conviction that Jeff has amazing gifts for parenting and that our family would benefit from his more regular presence at home, was a lurking tit-for-tat desire to be working and unavailable for PTO meetings and room mom sign-ups. But the move and new careers and swapping of roles did not change our rhythm much and the tempo may have only increased.

This has only become clear to us in recent weeks as we hit a wall of uber-produtivity and corresponding loneliness. We married because we love each other, because we make each other laugh, because we compliment each other, because there is calling to be fulfilled together that we cannot fulfill alone. And in this time and place we have the unique opportunity to work, quite literally, for the same purpose and even same institution.

So we want to take advantage of this time, to create a rhythm of life together that honors all that we love about one another, the family we have, the calling we have heard. Not to divide and conquer, but to embark on tasks together. When he holds me accountable for working too much, I have to let go of the pouty mindset that says, “But you did it for years. It’s my turn.” When I offer to help he should have the freedom to name how I can be helpful.

A march has a rhythm; it’s well-choreographed, precise – and individual. But now we’re looking for a more fluid rhythm, one that requires a partner.

We can sing as we take the kids to school together. Dance in the kitchen while the chicken bakes. Take time for instruments after dinner. The rhythm is ours to create – together.

It will change as our kids grow, our jobs change, as we move and encounter unforeseeable circumstances. But for now, we want to make time to dance together. To match our lives to a holy and healthy rhythm of the Spirit that called us together and calls us forward.

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The tragedies in Malawi are not that different from the tragedies in the United States – sickness, car accidents, deaths of children. The shock and the grief are universal. I wrestle to describe how these tragedies are different here. In some ways it comes down to the layers that are missing in Malawi to gloss over the anxiety, ugliness and brutality of it all.

Last week the lay leader’s three-year-old little boy was bitten by a snake when his mother took him outside to pee around 10pm. By the morning his hand and forearm were swollen. When I saw him at the hospital about 12 hours later his little hand was about three inches thick. His mom had not slept at all on the concrete floor by his bed. And they were both tired of trying to keep his arm raised above his head. Within a couple days Jimmy was fine.

But the difficulty is that no one knew if he would be fine, until he was. And sleeping on a concrete floor waiting for friends to bring food, changes of clothes and clean sheets only accentuates the fact that she was in a hospital and the future, uncertain.

No one can – or does – say. “Oh, a snake bite. We’ll give you this and that and you can expect the swelling to go down in 2 days and he’ll be feeling back to normal in 3 days.” Is it that the medical professionals here don’t have this information? Or that medical professionals in the USA make it up and we trust them because everything is neat and tidy and they have paid a lot of money to say so?

I know, I know. I should not write blogs when I’m tired.

But then as we left the ward where Jimmy was staying, the other women I was with stopped me from crossing over to the parking lot and pointed silently. A line of 15 – 20 chitenje-wrapped women were following a nurse carrying a small child wrapped in a sheet. The image of a small foot in a tennis shoe visible from under the sheet is burned into my memory. The mother walked behind, held up by a friend as she sobbed and wailed for her child. All the women followed the nurse and dead child into the mortuary and then just moments later the women walked out again.

The hospital is incomparable to the hospitals I am used to in order, cleanliness, staffing and every way. But there is something I can’t name – holistic? healing? closer to reality? – in the grieving process about accompanying your own child to the mortuary, supported by friends and relatives. Something that our sterile and care-ful culture has removed.

Then yesterday our pastor and his wife took their 4-year-old son, Khumbo, to a private hospital about 20 minutes from here. He has been diagnosed with asthma but I have never heard about any long-term treatment except returning to the hospital each time he can’t catch his breath. With each trip the parents get more worried. And Khumbo is growing to hate doctors.

We left Esther to care for her son. She would eat the food that the women brought for her and try to sleep on the 8-inch square wooden stool by Khumbo’s bed. When people have so little faith in medicine, the only hope is prayer. When doctors and nurses are so over-worked, medicine is in short supply and technology is limited, the best hope is that God will heal. And that is what we pray for.

But then again… on the way home from the hospital we passed a heart-stopping accident. A large flatbed truck was off the road, on its side, about 50 feet from the road. A couple hundred feet later was a mini-bus that had been opened on one side like a sardine can. We can only guess that the minibus tried to pass someone and couldn’t get over in time before colliding with the flatbed truck.

It was difficult to drive after witnessing such an accident. The same reaction to a horrible crash anywhere in the world. But then to consider how few ambulances there are. That the phone network often goes down to call these ambulances. How far they were from the government hospital. And how little could probably be done in an emergency trauma situation like that. Each new realization and limitation hit me as I tried to keep driving and arrive home safely with my own carload full of mothers and children.

In the USA, our certainty in the efficacy of modern medicine may be an illusion. Some might say that our trust in technology has eliminated our need of faith. The clean sheets and hot food and toilets in every room may only dull the edges of the trauma and fear that plague us during illness, before and after surgeries, or in the greatest tragedies.

I know that I am conditioned to take my children to the private hospital where it looks and smells something like the hospitals at home, but I have to admit that amidst all the Clorox and functioning labs there is something missing that exists at Queen Elizabeth government hospital. Where people crammed in together, two children to a bed, share meals and blankets and conversation and prayer.

I pray that everyone will have access to undiluted medicine and working x-ray machines and malaria-free hospitals. But I also pray that everyone will feel free to wail when they are in grief, to rely on friends to hold them up and to pray like they believe God will intervene.

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