Our So-Crazy-They-Just-Might-Work Ideas {for (In)Courage}

I’m honored to share at (In)Courage today. You can read the full post here.

Sun sliced through the window of our third-story vintage (aka old and falling apart) Chicago apartment and I thought again about this idea I had entertained over the past several months. I missed living overseas, teaching, and interacting with other cultures. What if I emailed the nearby college and asked about volunteering in one of their ESL classes? I cocked my head to listen for the sleeping baby and tiptoed to the computer.

Flipping open the laptop and searching the school’s website, I scanned the list of ESL instructors. I smiled. One of them was an alumnus of my college. Searching for the right email, my ringing phone pierced the silence. I jumped up, but it was too late. The baby wailed from the other room.

Months later, I finally sent that email and got a prompt reply. Yes, there is a need for volunteers. Yes, you can bring your baby. That’s great that you lived in China and speak Mandarin, but the need is in a class of Saudi Arabian students. Can you come on Monday?

My eight-month-old on my hip, I met the instructor at the door to her classroom. The room was full of shy Saudi men and women. Some girls wore western clothing, but one donned a full burka and all the women wore the traditional hijab, a head covering of a scarf or hat over their shiny black hair.

I visited the class just four times before the teacher approached me after class with a strange question. A student had asked if she could live with us …

Continue reading at (In)Courage.

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I Tried to Run Away from Love {for (in)courage}

My Love Story

The first time I ever had a date on Valentine’s Day, I was 31 years old. It ended up being the hinge upon which my entire life turned.

Wildly independent, when other girls in college were hoping to snag a man and get their ring by spring, I turned my nose up at them, determined to do something “more” with my life. I wasn’t going to tie myself to a man who would hold me back from all God had planned for me (and I was sure I was destined for Christian Rockstar status).

And so I successfully avoided serious relationships, teaching in the inner city of Chicago and then moving to China to teach English and study Chinese. Although I was lonely at times, I was sure God could bring me a man who was also called to the same area of China I was if that was what He wanted. Until then, I could make singleness work.

But in the middle of my fifth year in China, I was blindsided.

I returned to the states for a wedding and “happened” to carpool with a guy on the way to a lake cottage with a group of friends for the weekend. Convinced God wanted me to marry a man also called overseas, I ignored my growing attraction to this guy with the piercing blue eyes and baritone voice—an actor in Chicago—at least until the ride home.

Oh no, I thought as we talked, laughed, and connected like old friends at the end of the weekend. As we dropped him off, he asked for my phone number and wasted little time in making sure we spent hours “hanging out” over the next two weeks before I flew back to China.

He asked me out for Valentine’s Day the night before I was supposed to leave. Cradling cappuccinos, we finally talked about “us.” What were we doing and what were we going to do?

He had plans—had researched—how to do long distance relationships well. Over Skype we could read books, watch movies, have “dates,” and even play computer games simultaneously. He would come visit me in China, of course.

And he did.

We got engaged after four months of a long-distance relationship where we talked for five hours every other day, read books together and wrote letters, then scanned them in because letters seemed more authentic than emails which could be overly polished. We were married by the following Valentine’s Day.

As I feared, marriage and missions have been mutually exclusive for me. This year is the seventh Valentine’s we are spending together and we’ll most likely get a babysitter for our three littles so we can have an hour or two of peace together involving pasta, candlelight, and coffee.

Our life is not radical, exotic or original, but our love is real and I have no doubt it was God’s intention to derail my pretty plans for myself in favor of blowing me away with His plans for me …

Continue reading at (In)Courage.

 

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Breastfeeding and the Liturgy of the Hours {for SheLoves}

I’ve grown to recognize that pausing, waiting and stillness is, in fact, a gift of lavish love from a patient father.

I am a doer, goer and to-do list extraordinaire. I buy post-it notes in 12 packs. Freshman year of college was the first time I met anyone who actually enjoyed sitting around doing nothing. Bursting into our dorm room to change clothes for an intramural soccer game before my study group and the floor party later that night, I was shocked to find my roommate perched on her bed, staring at the wall.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Fine,” she answered.

“But what are you doing?” I asked, puzzled.

“Just sitting here,” she responded. I’m sure I gave her a quizzical look before darting off to my game, inwardly judging her for wasting time.

That was the beginning of nearly twenty years of living with introverts (including my husband), a true gift of tough grace for an extroverted over-achiever like me.

Through the years, God has used various people and circumstances to wrestle me to the ground, sometimes finding it necessary to dislocate a limb of pride, power or privilege along the way as He holds me to a forced stop. But though sitting still can sometimes feel more like being punished in time-out, I’ve grown to recognize that pausing, waiting and stillness is, in fact, a gift of lavish love from a patient father.

***

Now is one of those times—and I am fighting it. I am breastfeeding my newborn several hours a day, leaving my other two children, age four and two, wild and free to execute devious plots and create elaborate messes. Though I thought pregnancy was the worst sort of slowness, I had forgotten the demands of having an infant.

I now spend hours on my couch, holding a tiny, dependent human, in the midst of a house that looks like someone picked it up, shook it snow-globe-style and then put it back down again…

…continue reading at SheLoves. 

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How Our Muslim Student Became Auntie Boo {for SheLoves}

I’m over at SheLoves today, sharing about how a Muslim girl came to live with us and became a part of our family…

My three-year-old son tightly twisted the long strand of strong black hair round and round his fingers as he emerged from the guest room yesterday. I peeked through the bedroom door and found my one-year-old daughter squatting on the floor, peering into a fish tank at the “fiffy”—a silky black Betta fish that fluttered to the surface of the bowl. Next to her, Shirin, a 26-year-old Saudi Arabian girl, sat cross-legged taking videos of my daughter that will no doubt make her famous on Snapchat in Saudi Arabia. I smiled silently at the scene, reflecting on the treasure of an unexpected relationship.

***

Three years ago, living back in Chicago after spending several years abroad, I was hungry for relationships with anyone who wasn’t a white American. Though I felt limited by my new mommy status, I volunteered to help ESL students at a nearby university practice their English on the condition that I could bring my eight-month-old son. Desperate for native speakers for students to practice with, the teacher agreed and invited me to her class of Saudi Arabians.

The class was made up of six women and four men who were forced to practice English together despite the fact that in conservative Islamic Saudi Arabia, men and women aren’t even allowed to attend mixed-gender classes. Most of the women wore traditional Saudi clothing—headscarves called hijabs and black, lightweight cloaks called abayas. They were painfully shy, though the presence of a baby magically cracked their solemn demeanor. After the third week volunteering, the teacher of the class whispered that there was something she needed to talk to me about after class.

Scooping up my son who had spent the class crawling under feet, skirts and chair legs, I handed him my keys to play with as I curiously sat down with the teacher.

“So,” she started. “Do you know Shirin from class?” I nodded. “Well,” she continued, “she wanted me to ask you if she could live with you for three months. She’ll pay you rent,” she added.
Surprised, I told her that I wasn’t sure, but I’d talk to my husband.

Though this was something that excited me, I was pretty sure my more level-headed husband would simply shake his head with that smirk on his face that says, “I love you for being so different, honey—but you’re kind of crazy.”

Instead, he leaned back against the kitchen counter, smiled, and shocked me by saying, “There’s really no reason we shouldn’t have her.”
Shirin moved in with us at the end of the summer and three months turned into ten…

…continue reading at SheLoves.

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Chicago’s Uptown {You Are Here Stories}

I’m sharing today at You Are Here Stories for the theme “sound.” You Are Here is a collection of stories about roots, identity and place, which are some of the topics I love to write about the most.  Here is a teaser, but I hope you can click over and check out the rest of the article on their site!

A fire engine shrieked through the stoplight, casting a light show in my room and spraying the bare white walls with color. Even through closed windows, the sound was deafening. Within minutes, an ambulance from the hospital in the other direction bayed and bounded through the intersection. I rubbed my eyes. The city had assaulted me through the night, pushing away any hope of restful sleep. The thought of coffee propelled me out of bed.  

As new college graduates, my two roommates and I were fresh from the sweetly singing suburbs. Having recently secured jobs in Chicago, we moved into a two bedroom apartment above a tuxedo shop doubling as a dry cleaner in Uptown, at the corner of Clark and Wilson. Our landlords owned the block. The father, an Arab from Palestine who worked tirelessly at the dry cleaner, was a large silver-haired man with bushy eyebrows and kind black eyes. He gave us a 10 percent discount for being his tenants. His burly son lived across the hall from us and owned the cell phone shop next door, which sold a variety of wares during our four years living there. The uncles worked across the street at the liquor store where we dropped off our rent.

Continue reading…

Photo of the Wilson L station by Graham Garfield

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When Life is Less Radical Than You Imagined {Mudroom}


Today, I’m honored to share for the first time at The Mudroom, a site that describes itself as a “place for stories emerging from the mess.”
Life is so different from what we expected, I thought, folding my teaching clothes and placing them with my husband’s dance shoes in the bag for Goodwill.  Before marriage, I imagined I would live a radical life through overseas missions, inner-city teaching or ministry to refugees.  My husband was determined to follow his call as a stage actor in Chicago. 

And now?  We rent a three bedroom home with a fenced back yard in Colorado.  I stay home with our kids and the most radical thing about us is that I used to live in China and my husband is currently an audio book narrator.  Apart from that, life is rolling along much like interstate driving on cruise control: fast, smooth and predictable. 

A few weeks ago, my husband suddenly began praying for “a vision for our family,” which dug up some soul questions I had hoped to bury.

In the past few years, I’ve inwardly rebelled against the way the church promised me Big Dreams and a Big Life.  I’ve discovered the truth: that most of life is made up of mundane moments and tasks sprinkled with splashes of delight.  There seem to be a selective few who get to be world changers.   

My generation of 30-somethings is wrestling with the incongruity of the youth group and Christian college messages of living a “sold out and radical” life for Jesus in contrast with our cheerio-decorated, mortgage-paying realities.  We’re finding that following Jesus is not quite as glamorous as we expected…
 continue reading at The Mudroom

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The Mudroom

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