Tea mugs

Can you guess what is consumed most by humans all around the globe after air and water? Tea! Did you know that green tea and black tea come from the same plant just like green mangos and ripe ones? Yesterday I woke up early, the seroma was better, and I had the morning free, so after several false starts, I got myself out the door for a run. Ok, a jog. Ok, something that is supposed to be a jog but is hardly any faster than a walk. But I’m proud to say I kept up this lowly pace for two miles, aching all the way, and then walked another two after that, and returned stiff and sore, but I’m on my way back to normal. (Sort of.) What kept me going for that hour of misery was a BBC history podcast called “In Our Time” (with very cool accents) about tea. And what caught my attention about tea was how it was adopted and then adapted by Brits so that now it is the national hot drink, but drinking tea in Britain doesn’t look like drinking tea in China, where it came from. Brits don’t have the same tea ceremonies, or those fancy little bowls. No, you could catch a Brit chugging it unceremoniously from a mug. And Brits add milk and sugar. An entirely different flavor. The leaves are the same in both places, the essence of the thing, but the customs around drinking it change from culture to culture.

I thought about this as I got ready for the day but was interrupted when I glanced in the mirror.  Usually I avoid doing this because I haven’t gotten used to that alien, Grima Wormtongue look. But this time I was surprised to see two dark smudges above my eyes where my eyebrows used to be. Looks like I was trying to stop a headache by pinching those pressure points there and had charcoal on my fingers. The eyebrows are making a come-back! And I definitely have white peach fuzz growing on my head. Don’t know what the radiation will do, but I’m glad to have something finally going on up there. I went back to thinking about tea rituals as I struggled to keep awake after all that rigorous exercise but fell asleep on the couch. I was glad when a visitor came to pull me out of my lethargy, and I told her about the tea. 

Tea is important in my house because Robert drinks it first thing and last thing of the day with coffee in between. He even carries tea bags with him when he travels, and my kitchen has more tea-making paraphernalia than any other kind of paraphernalia, which rather supports that opening statistic.  I prefer coffee (though it’s verboten for me with tachycardia. I tried decaf on the Zocalo the other day because everyone else was having one, and it smelled so good…bad idea). It’s an American habit ever since we thumbed our nose at the British with the whole Boston Tea Party thing.

Culture changes so much about how we do things. Most of the world drinks tea, but it would probably not have become this popular if everyone had to drink tea the way Chinese drink tea, if they had had to import all the ceremonies and accouterments.

Missions is like that. We want Jesus to be loved everywhere. But He won’t be if we insist on importing the accouterments—the bowls and rituals—like having people worship in a language they hardly speak. Better to figure out the essentials and not sweat the rest. Better to run a few 20 minute miles than none at all. 

mugs Elai and Mikael gave us

Family Tree

Robert is in another market town tonight. Thursday he left Tlaxiaco at 7000 feet and went down to Ometepec (or as our friend Dan says, who visited us there for a few weeks: O Sweatepec) at sea level. In fact tomorrow, as he leaves, he and Jason will stop at the beach and take a swim, eat some ceviche, and chill until they head on to the next stop. (We never did this once when we lived in the area.)

He called me and out of the blue gave me some news that I didn’t expect and that is some of the best possible news he could have had. Not like the cryptic fb message I got from Philip that said, “I accidentally worked all night and got evicted” plus his new status of “Homeless.” How do you unpack that from several thousand miles away? I messaged back, “Should I be worried?” because I figured that if there was anything really wrong, he wouldn’t be saying cryptic things. He said, “Nope,” so I guess we’re ok. He said he had until midnight to move out. Something about mold in the room next door. How does this happen in the driest corner of Texas? It’s a mystery. Then I got a message from Elai saying she had a surprise for me, so I called her to see what  that was all about, and she told me she has a Frida Kahlo tabby kitten. I'm hoping that all these kitten adoptions means  she’s practicing for giving me some real grandchildren some day.

So the news. I have to go back to when we lived in another market town—Tlapa. We were at home one afternoon with the kids and a car drove up to the house. It was some Mexican mission mobilizers who had tracked us down (we had no phone, so they drove a bunch of hours to Tlapa to find us) and were inviting us to spend time in Acapulco, mobilizing missionaries there in churches that had participated in the latest Comiban (a worldwide Hispanic mission conference similar to Urbana). So off we went. We lived in a concrete jungle far away from any beaches or sea breezes, and it was the hottest, most uncomfortable place I have ever lived. The kids slept in hammocks to stay cool, and we would sometimes get up in the middle of the night to shower to cool off. The walls were always hot to the touch.

But while we were there, we gathered a team of women from the churches in the city and led it to O Sweatepec to plant churches among the Mixtecs there. One of the women, Celida, was a persistent and gifted evangelist. She brought her Mixtec landlord, Vicente, to the Lord, and several others and taught them the basics of being a church, but for a long time, not much happened. Vicente has been faithfully traveling to his home village to tell them about Jesus, and tonight I found out that finally, some have responded. Recently they were baptized. Now they want to visit other Mixtec towns and take their good news with them. And Vicente, who had been gathering just with his family in his home, has now grown a small congregation in O Sweatepec.

You plant. Someone else waters, but the plant that grows gives joy to everyone. Go Vicente. His name (it’s Robert’s middle name, too) means victorious, winner, overcomer, and this is true. Something good has been won. This chain of events has taken a while, but it’s why we came to Mexico. Seeds planted over ten years ago are bearing fruit, and that’s about the best news that could come to me over the phone from O Sweatepec. 

Some day...

Exotic

Robert and I had gone to a town called Tlaxiaco, which means in Nahuatl: place where it rains on the ball court, so you know that North Americans aren’t the first civilization obsessed with sports. We were visiting our team mates, Paco and Ofelia, and they introduced us to Pedro, a person as unlikely as the town. Because it’s not just the name. After driving three hours through mountainside, small towns, and corn fields, you suddenly enter this miniature city bristling with people and every trade imaginable. No two homes or buildings or streets are built the same. Or painted the same. And some people have brought back some ideas for houses from the States: “siding” made from concrete, or a chalet that looks transplanted wholesale. It’s an interesting place.

Ok, Neil Peart didn’t think so. Too crowded maybe, too compact for comfort, all those narrow streets with the houses closing in on them like sleeves too tight. When he took his therapeutic motorcycle tour through southern Mexico, his policy was to stop at dark and grab a hotel, but he made an exception: Tlaxiaco.

That’s too bad. Tlaxiaco has history. It calls itself the Heroic City because its militia helped turn the tide in the resistance movement against the French invaders who had added Mexico to its Empire in the 1860’s. And it used to be the second most important city in the state, even boasting a theatre. But when it got sacked during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the business folk packed up and moved wholesale to the capital, leaving the forlorn town with a few mementos like a clock tower and beautiful colonial buildings to remind it of its glory days. Today it’s coming back as a thriving market town for the dozens of Indian communities surrounding it.

Pedro is as exotic as the city. Smartly dressed, articulate, courteous, this young man was born to a Mixtec family but raised in the city, speaking only Spanish. Although his parents are animists, still turning in illness to traditional healers to purge evil spirits and cure imbalances of hot and cold in the body, Pedro spent time in Ohio busing tables and brought back an interest in Buddhism. He’s a Hispanic, Mixtec, Catholic, Buddhist, Ohian restaurant worker turned Mexican farmer. You just don’t get much opportunity to talk to someone like this…with a place like Tlaxiaco bursting in the background.

Fascinating conversation. Pedro said that to choose among all the religions out there was to limit yourself, to fragment your thinking. You could be enriched by listening to the variety of gurus, monks, Sufis, and priests willing to teach you. (His very first question was about Jainism; we were scrambling.)  He said he lived without ambition, without being corrupted by materialism, and without dividing his mind by settling for just one faith. He embraced them all, but especially Buddhism that freed you from guilt and fear of death. Christians tell you you’re a sinner and then try to save you, he said. Buddhism doesn’t believe in sin; it’s just the flip-side of Good. Death is the friend of Life, he said, a time to be liberated from the body. I live a tranquil life, he said, accepting everything. 

I won't give you my side of the conversation. You know it. Life is a game of poker, and I staked all my chips on a guy who came back from the dead.With a body. Pedro said He knew all about this guy, but I said, no, because this guy takes you all or nothing, like a spouse.  He said love has no limits. I said, no, it doesn't. But it limits itself for the other. For both of us, the tone was right. We were both listening, and it was enjoyable. We both wished we could have persuaded the other.

In the end he said he was thankful for the conversation. I was, too. I asked him why he was, and he said he’d learned that different people can be comforted by such different beliefs. True enough.

In case you’re wondering where Robert was during all of this—he and Jason had driven on to Guerrero for a week of checking in with carpenters and believers there. I had stayed visiting until my bus brought me back to Oaxaca for the night.

A Mixtec Buddhist. That’s got to be a first. We all prayed together at the end, holding hands in a circle, and I prayed a blessing over him, and a hope that he would meet my guy someday. Not sure what I'd have done if he'd have offered to pray a Buddhist blessing over me. Have to think about that. It would have started a whole new round of conversation.

I think he doesn’t know what he’s missing. I think he’s like the people who bypass Tlaxiaco, or southern Mexico, for that matter, and miss the truly Exotic. But you make your choices.

Needles

It’s five am. I’ve been writing since two. But it’s not been posts I’ve been working on. It’s my “other project.” And I find it’s frustrating. When I first started writing, there was an urgency, and I scrambled to get the words on paper. Now, after these months of writing and a long-term project, I find that it takes determination to keep going, and I don’t have words for full blogs and full pages for my project on the same day. So I decided to write something short to tell you what’s happening: I’m writing, just not for you.

And God has put a thorn in my side, a little one that is not life threatening or even painful, but just a nagging inconvenience. It involves a new medical term I learned and researched yesterday: seroma. I’m going to take a wild stab that I haven’t researched and say it’s related to the word serum. Because what I have is a build-up of serum in my side over the incision, making my side hard to the touch and tight and sore, It's difficult to stretch my arm up.

At first I was afraid it was something serious and I might have to go find a doctor here (no thank you) or even fly home early. So I started researching. I called my pharmacist in Canada, who said to contact her if I saw signs of swelling, but she said to call the cancer clinic. I tried that, but the nurse wasn’t in, and I had to wait til she called back. That nurse sounded a bit impatient with me; why wasn’t I calling my breast surgeon ( who hadn’t told me to contact her if there were signs of swelling)? So I tried that, and of course, her office was closed. Sigh. Thankfully, Robert has a cousin out west who is a breast surgeon, and I emailed her, and she responded immediately giving me my vocab word for the day and assuring me I wasn’t going to die or land in Emergency if I waited to get back to Canada before having things looked after.

I should have stopped there. Silly me. I did more research online and found that the remedy surgeons go for, if you insist, is to stick a needle into the sore area and drain the extra fluid by hand. Right. More needles. And this doesn’t necessarily just happen once but can happen several times a week over months. Right. Hmmm.

So life threatening or not, I’m praying God will take away this thorn in my side. You all keep praying for the big stuff, like my staying alive and all that, but if you find an extra spare moment, ask him to take the swelling away without the needles. There are some vocabulary terms I don’t need to learn. 

I don't need to know what this is called

Reoriented

It was raining, but there were fireworks to welcome me home. Not just little crackers, but big booming, sparking things overhead. Of course in Tlalixtac, Oaxaca (say that three times fast), I could have come home just about any day of the year, and there would have been fireworks. In fact, the fireworks for tonight weren’t for celebrating my return, or for celebrating any of the other occasions that merit fireworks—new house warming, birthdays, deaths, death anniversaries, patron saint parties for the neighborhood (which can last for weeks)—but was the routine practice for a safety class “for pyrotechnic teachers.” It tells you something about southern Mexico when you have schools setting up to teach pyrotechnic teachers.

It’s a good thing they have added a safety class. With that much “pyrotechnics” (techniques of fire), there are horror stories. I remember when I was a little girl growing up in a tiny town of Honduras and had been invited to someone’s birthday party to break open the piñata and scramble for candy, staying low to the ground to avoid the bat still swinging overhead until an adult waded into the crowd of children  to coax it from the hands of the bandana-blinded child still intent on cracking it, the firecrackers were going off everywhere, and one caught in my dress (dresses were the only thing girls wore back then) and burned a hole right through it. And I remember coming home and our big brave hound of a dog was huddled under a bed (he was not an inside dog at all, but we couldn’t keep him out on these occasions), trembling and salivating with fear. We guessed he’d had a firecracker come too close as a pup, too.

His name was Dicky, named after a member of our mission staff back in Wheaton (along with Rufo, named after the director, and Rhoda Bird, our parrot, named after the secretary. Rhoda Bird’s claim to fame was falling into the washing machine, one of those old timey round ones that just washed, and you had to put the clothes through the wringer by hand and rinse them in a tub of water yourself. It was my job to pass the clothes through the wringer. I remember how the sheets used to pop the rollers apart and you had to spread them apart, dripping all over, and put them through again. Anyway, Dicky (the dog) would not have approved of some of the places we’ve lived in southern Mexico. The town where we lived in Guerrero, called Tlapa of Comfort (now there’s an oxymoron) is cramped between a high shaggy mountain on one side and a river on the other, and a wash snugged up to one side that changes from a bed of gravel to a raging, five foot deep tributary when the rains wash down the mountain. There are fireworks almost every day, and they echo off the side of the mountain and rattle the tile roofs of the houses so that they have to be rearranged every so often to keep the light out.

No, the fireworks were not for me, but I had two parties in my honor. In the morning, our church got together a bit earlier than usual and laid breakfast out on the table, and we had chiles rellenos, and tamales de amarillo, de rajas, y de frijol, and tostadas, and chicharron con salsa, and pollo rostizado, and jello that looked like the Mexican flag, and if none of these sound like breakfast foods, then you’ll just have to come try almuerzo in Oaxaca for yourself.  We told them about doing the Grito in Canada. Someone at the table wondered if Canadians do fiestas. How do you answer that?  I mean, most parties don’t have fireworks there. And we prayed around the table, and studied the Bible together, wondering, in the gospels, what the preaching sounded like before Jesus had died and come back again (and no, that wasn’t Robert wondering).

Then in the evening (good thing I had a nap!) we had another party with team members, and that’s when the fireworks started (pyro techniques, I mean, not the other kind that people light off). This morning both Robert and I woke up disoriented in our own bed, thinking we were in Canada, until the dogs started barking, and the traffic on the Panamerican Highway started up in earnest. After today’s fiestas and fireworks, though, I think we are finally re-oriented. It’s good to be home.

Zippers and circuses

Today we get on a plane and go home. Home. That word sure changes meaning with this lifestyle. This way of living is sometimes called a third culture, because, as someone said, we’re really only at home flying between places. I wouldn’t go that far. At least get me off the airplane. But while most cultures are tied to a geographical area, this “third culture” is tied to movement, to integration, to incarnation. It means moving between homes, riding on the differences and drawing them together like the closing of  a zipper.  Our kids used to be called mk’s, missionary kids, but they have so much in common with the kids of diplomats, military personnel,  and others who  live cross-culturally, that now they are joined together as tck’s, third culture kids. I am a tck. My kids are tck’s.

I once read a book that has the best metaphor for tck’s I’ve ever found. The book is by John Irving, a Canadian who navigates between Canada and American audiences. I’m not recommending the book (check him out before you tackle him), but there is one scene that has stayed with me ever since I read it years ago. One of the characters is an Indian (from India) doctor who had immigrated to Canada years before the story begins. Haunted by the needs in India and all he has left behind, he returns to India, time and time again, realizing he can’t let go. Throughout the story, he is constantly wrestling with his identity as an Indian living in Canada. During his visits back, he researches dwarfism in India and, in order to collect his data, follows Indian circuses as they move around the country because they provide jobs for entire dwarf communities.

At the very end of the book, the doctor is standing at a bus stop, and there is a young mother and her son waiting for the same bus. It’s winter. Night. Snow is falling. The streetlight shines down on the three humans bundled against the cold. (If I were discussing this book in a class, which I won’t, I would call attention to the things in the scene that show its truthfulness: the light, the baptism in snow, the child’s innocence, the transitional nature of the place.) The little boy turns and looks at the man beside him, dark skinned, exotic-looking, and he asks in wonder, “Who are you?” The doctor realizes this is his chance. He has one opportunity to answer that question truly, honestly, transparently, the one question he’s been wrestling with for years. He knows that he needs to answer quickly before the mother gets uneasy and moves her son away. Or the bus comes and shatters the magic. He leans down, looks in the boy’s eyes and tells him the truth: “I’m a son of the circus.”

Tck’s are kids of the circus, carrying their culture invisibly inside them as they get moved around. They are children of Oz, zipper childen, children of airports, trails, and movement. Their culture is the one that falls through the crack and gets lost to view because it’s not tied to one place but to the seams between places. They connect things. Their own lives and worldviews are the thread.

Tck’s are not that by choice. The last time I was in a Mixtec town, we met an eight year old American boy, the son of one of our Mixtec friends, who had just come back to Mexico with his family. He did not speak Spanish. He’d never been out of the US, and here he was in a Mixtec village, learning how to live. How many migrants in the world give birth to tck’s? I read that when migrants arrived from all over Asia en mass to work in Hawaii, the children created a new language in one generation. There’s genesis there.

Jesus was a tck, carrying his own bi-culture with him wherever he went, pulling people together that were strangers before, blessing the good and redeeming the bad, and saying things like, “As you are going to all the nations…” As you are going. We all carry this human-divine culture with us now that sews people together that were strangers before.  We are all tck’s, even those of us who never move. “We are foreigners, nomads here on the earth, looking forward to a country we can call our own.” God’s makes us all, like his own Son, his third culture kids.

Abruptly

I think what she meant was that I am most likely cancer-free. As far as she can tell. Not that she would actually say it. Not that there are any guarantees. From the pathology report of what was removed during the surgery, my breast surgeon said that I had had “a very good response to the chemo treatment.”  In other words, as the chemo coursed through the blood vessels, it ate away at the cancer until there were only six small spots left, the largest only a half centimeter thick, and there was no sign of malignancy in the margins around the original mass, the lymphatics, or even the nodes, which had shown malignancy in the original biopsy. So (hopefully) that’s that. (Although I still have radiation and more drug therapy to make sure the monster doesn’t come back, and I have several years’ wait before anyone says the words cancer free.) So it looks like God has answered so many prayers, and I feel thanks welling up inside me for the good news I have gotten so far.

Hierve el agua, Oaxaca

The only thing was that the doctor’s news was so abrupt after such a long process. There is all that time in the chemo chair, all those stays in the hospital, then surgery and the weeks to heal so the stitches could come out (no one has said anything about taking out the nine inches of stitches, which seem to have disappeared on their own—maybe it’s a miracle--and if they haven’t, I’m taking them to my grave), and then I wait 45 minutes in the doctor’s office while other women come and go, and my little niece that we’re babysitting for the day gets restless “reading” Maclean’s, and then I go in and change, and get examined, and then…there it is. “You’ve had a very good response to the chemo treatment. You’re free to go.”

It’s so sudden, so abrupt. There is still uncertainty, but this pathology report is the only news I’m likely to get during this year of treatment, and the news is good. I wonder at how abrupt news comes to us, news of any kind. Like a cliff. Like the earthquake in Chile. Or when you found out you were pregnant (ok, not the same kind of thing). Maybe all the momentous things of life are that way. I think of a certain wedding I’m helping to host. All these months of planning and anticipation, and then it will be over in a few hours, and the couple will look at each other and think, “We’re married. We’re really married.”  I think of Philip, leaving home a year early, changing his graduation date abruptly, from one day to the next. I’m still getting used to it, having him gone. Good news. Bad news. It changes things radically, so abruptly, sometimes like an invisible tornado dropping Dorothy in Oz.

Hierve el Agua

The people that Jesus healed must have felt that way, too, and that’s why he always assured them that it was true, yes, they were healed, and they could pick up their mat and just walk away. And maybe Jesus felt that way himself, knowing that his Father had been setting up his plan of redemption for thousands of years, since the fall of the first couple, and His promise to them, and since the calling of Abraham, too, and His promise to him. And Jesus would fulfill that plan in one microsecond on a Sunday morning, in a cave. I bet, because he was human, it amazed him, too, as it did all of the rest of us, with the abruptness of it. The disciples must have felt that way when Jesus’ ministry was so suddenly cut off after just three years, and then again when he came back to them, and then again when, after a few days, he disappeared for good. His return will be like that, you know. Sudden. Abrupt After all that time, just… done. “You’re free to go.” We won’t have to wait any five years to see how things turn out.

And some day, abruptly, we will be with God, for death is the ultimate sudden good news, and we will be looking back on all of this, and the feeling will switch, and all of this that we live now will feel sudden while our time with God will seem like what we’ve always been waiting for. But strangely, it will feel like a constant surprise, like constant good news, just getting better and better as we grow.

Fiesta in Canada

Put fourteen Mexican guys, one fruit farming family, two missionaries, and some good food together on September 15^th, and what do you get? Yes, El Grito. The Yell. Those of you living in Mexico made your way to the nearest public plaza (or downtown to the zocalo, if you’re into crushing crowds), where after some ceremony, the municipal president (or the governor, or the president of the country) walked out onto a balcony before midnight and gave a short, rousing speech that ended with the triple yell, fists held high, “¡Viva Mexico!” to which the entire crowd responded in kind, with all the patriotism in its communal soul. I was yelling “Viva Mexico” myself last night, startling the staid Canadian fruit farming family. They noted quietly, “That was quite dramatic. Is it always this way?” Yes. It is always this way. Mexico is nothing if not dramatic.

The Grito commemorates the struggle for Mexican Independence. In 1810 the Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo was involved in a plot to overthrow the Spanish colonial government and replace it with one run by the Mexican born criollos.  When rumors reached him he was about to be arrested, he sent his brother with armed men to free his fellow revolutionaries who were already in jail, and then he rang the church bells to gather his congregation in the square. There he gave them what is now Mexico’s most famous speech. The exact words are lost, but the sentiment kept the revolution going for over a decade until Independence came over a decade later, in 1821.

This is what we were celebrating on the back lawn of a Canadian fruit farm, surrounded by now barren peach trees. Sadly, the short season is over, and the men are going to other jobs or back home. The food was hamburgers and sausages, potato salad and iced tea rather than enchiladas and taquitos de pollo, tostadas and cerveza, but they all disappeared just as quickly, and the spirit was the same. These guys had worked in Canada long enough to be bi-culturally ravenous. They delegated one of their number, Everardo, as the yeller, because he was from Guanajuato, the same state as Miguel Hidalgo. When dark fell, the fruit farmer led him through the back door, up the stairs, through his bedroom, and out onto the balcony. Someone shone a strong flashlight on him (I wonder who would have one of those) as a spotlight and all fourteen guys erupted into cheers and yells. They knew what to do.

Everardo waited for silence. Then he raised his fists high in the air and gave “the speech.”

Mexicans!

Long live the heroes that gave us the Fatherland!

Long live Hidalgo!

Long live Morelos!

Long live Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez!

Long live Allende!

Long live Aldama and Matamoros!

Long live National Independence!

Long Live Mexico! Long Live Mexico! Long Live Mexico!

And the fireworks started. Yes. Fireworks. I didn’t even know that was legal in Canada. And as they exploded over our heads in bursts of sound and color, the men yelled even more. It was a grand celebration. And the dogs went crazy, and the Canadians laughed, and everyone realized it’s good to celebrate a bit of home together, even when it’s someone else’s home. 

People I admire

If I were teaching in Oaxaca right now, I’d be preparing my seniors for their SAT tests which, for 2015, still has the essay attached. I would shoot a topic at them, put the timer on for 25 minutes and watch them scramble. Then when the timer dinged, we’d talk about how they could do better on the test date, where there’s even more pressure. We’d talk about a hook at the beginning, a solid theme, imagery to support the theme, and framing right through the conclusion to bind the thing together. In and out in 25 minutes. Hopefully when they sat down to take the test for the last time, they’d have practiced enough that the quotes, themes, and facts they’d used before would come to mind quickly, and they would write well. By the time I return to teaching, the SAT essay will be optional, take twice as long, and will be an analysis of a passage rather than an opinion essay. I look forward to the challenge.

I’d also be looking over my seniors’ college application essays. Hopefully they’ve put more than 25 minutes of thought into these. A favorite topic for these essays is: Describe a person you admire. Here’s someone I admire, a someone and his wife.

The very first Mixtec I ever met was Pedro Marquez. Years before, he had migrated from a Oaxacan village to Culiacan, Sinaloa, to work in the vast harvests of cukes and peppers and tomatoes there, had fallen in love with a Hispanic woman named Guille, and had settled to raise his family in a town of dirt streets and makeshift housing 45 minutes outside the city. He no longer made his living picking vegetables but had become a vendor in the camps where the migrant workers stayed during harvest. Every weekend he would pack up his truck with clothes he bought at a wholesale market a day’s bus ride away, bread Guille made in the beehive oven in their back yard, meat they dried on a clothesline, pig fat fritters he fried in a huge tub, and Guille’s pozole (corn kernel soup) prickling with chile. All the kids helped. This was a hard-working family.

While he made his living selling in the camps, Pedro also pastored a church of other Mixtecs who had settled in Villa Juarez as well. This is how we’d come to know him. When we drove into Mexico, someone we met along the way had given us his name as someone working with Indian migrant workers from southern Mexico. And so he was. We showed up at his doorstep and said we wanted to learn Mixtec and learn from him. He took us in, and he and Guille became our family. They found us a place to live, a one-room store front lacking even an out-house, and we slept, between the concrete counter and the wall, on a bed that Robert had built into the back of our pick-up truck that folded into a bench and table during the day.

Pedro introduced us to Mixtecs in the camps where he sold his wares, and everyone loved him. Sometimes the Hispanic vendors were harsh with the Mixtec workers, barging into their tin and cardboard rooms without asking, and rudely demanding payment for things they’d bought on credit without respectfully waiting until the homeowner broached the subject first. Pedro would rather forgive a debt than show such disrespect. Pedro knew people’s names and cared about what was happening in their families.

But he wasn’t just a good salesman. It went much further than that. He genuinely cared about people and was generous to a fault. Many of the people in the church he pastored were there because he had helped establish them in business. He would teach people his own trade, taking them to his own clients, and when they had secured their business, he was the one who would move on to new camps, new sales items, and new relationships. He did this over and over with people who needed his help. Many of them, like us, he helped find places to stay until they could establish themselves. Some lived in his home with him for a time.

And these were not family, not necessarily even believers at first. Pedro and Guille were just very generous people, some of the most unselfish I’ve ever met. Their church was full of people who had seen what God does practically through those he touches with his love. And we watched how they, too, took on this quality of their pastor and became helpers for others as well. I have met many Mixtecs suspicious of all outsiders and closed to the idea of trusting anyone outside their tribe. I’ve also met Mixtecs who have been generous and open-hearted. But the first to show me how God marries evangelism with social work so that the gospel of grace has hands held out to help, were Pedro and his wife Guille.   

Humor me

Today I had another MUGA scan. The receptionist hands you a piece of paper with a list that says, “You are here for:

X-ray – a technologist will come for you…

Ultrasound -  a technologist will come for you… etc. etc.

And you can tell they are a little embarrassed about the MUGA scan because they don’t call it an immediately recognizable name like X-ray. They say, “You are here for nuclear medicine!” Hmm.  At least it’s better than some of the other options for names out there: cardiac blood pooling imaging (as a human and an English teacher, I have several problems with this one) or better yet, radionuclide ventriculography (ok, just try to imagine telling the receptionist you are here for this). That mouthful actually means they put a radioactive tracer in your blood and track its progress through your heart so that they can see if the chemo is damaging anything in there.

The nurse that came to get me was young and petite and quiet-spoken, and she had trouble finding my veins. Well actually she found my veins all right, but she poked (that is the word they use for it. Let’s be honest: it’s more like stabbed) around them, through them and not far enough into them, or something, (she couldn’t get the tracer into my veins; it was like my veins were rejecting it—pushing the stuff right back out or something. It was for a MUGA scan, after all). All the while she kept turning to me and asking, “Are you feeling all right? Are you feeling all right? Are you feeling all right?” Maybe I was turning pale, but I have to admit the questions were making me feel as light-headed as the multiple stabs. I did feel a bit sorry for her—she looked about as old as Elai—but I felt more sorry for me! I now had a purple lump welling up on the back of my hand, and the tracer wasn’t even started! She gently held my hand in both of hers, looked into my eyes (maybe she should try being a chaplain) and said I had fragile veins. Fragile veins? I casually mentioned that I had had dozens of IVs by now, and no one had mentioned that I had fragile veins. Fragile just doesn’t sound promising, does it?

To her eternal credit, when she surmised I was uncomfortable with this operation (!), she said, “Let me go get a colleague.” An old guy came in, sat down, and in went the tracer, first try. Whew. He commented, as if to cover her, “Those veins can sure move around a lot, can’t they.” I must say I had never noticed before. Then my gal came right back in and escorted me to the big machine and did a fine job, I assume, cardiac blood pooling imaging me. I was quite proud of her.

I thought I would be able to go home and recoup my good humor before the next trial (I told you I am a wimp—absolutely no pain tolerance whatsoever), but I had to go to clinic here in town (it’s in the back of a basement of a nursing home next to the getaway stairs. Why would anyone put a nursing station in a basement? I get the getaway stairs) and get stitches pulled so the drain tube could be pulled that was snaking all the way from under the surgery scar up to my collar bone. It didn’t help that when I showed up at 1:00 the nurse said I was supposed to come at 1:30, and when I showed up again then, she said I didn’t actually have an appointment; I had ceased to exist in half an hour. I protested as nicely as I could, holding onto my side which stung from the tube, and she smiled. I think she’s Russian or Ukranian. Every time I’ve gone to this clinic, the nurse is a different ethnicity. Jamaican, Persian, Russian. Kind of cool. I’d like to work with them—just not in the basement. The stitch-pulling hurt. The tube-pulling did not. Robert was kind enough to wait until after the process to tell me that his stitches had hurt like the dickens. And this was just stitches for the drain. We haven’t mentioned any other stitches. Maybe those are self-dissolving. Let’s hope. If they are not, all you nurse friends of mine, don’t tell me!  I need some time to recoup my good humor.

a tattoo I will not be getting

Guess who asked if he could take the scissors home when he found they aren’t reused…

The Good Lie

Last night we watched a movie called The Good Lie. It’s about the South Sudanese children orphaned by war and forced to walk hundreds of miles to safety in Kenya, where they lived (still live) in refugee camps until they were relocated. They are called the Lost Boys of Sudan. The movie shows the Africans adjusting to US culture: watching how others are eating their meals with plastic forks on the plane, wondering what to do with the plate of quivering jello on the kitchen counter, assuming the telephone ring is some kind of alarm, walking into someone’s house without waiting for them to open the door. At one point they try to communicate to their American hostess what is really bothering them (they were separated from their sister), but the woman keeps moving from room to room, showing them how to flick on the lights.

I have a friend here in Canada who is a lost girl of Sudan. When she was very young, she lost her family to war in South Sudan and was saved from death when a bullet knocked her into a shallow hole in the ground, out of sight of the gunmen. She also fled to Kenya and lived in refugee camps. Later, a visiting Canadian fell in love with her and married her, and now she lives here. She brought me cookies and helped me weed my garden. She says she had lots of practice at that in Africa before she came. She is tall and slender and beautiful and bends at the waist when she works the ground, and I can imagine her in a field with other women like a stately flock of cranes moving slowly through shallow water. But I cannot imagine what she has gone through. I can’t. I’m glad she is happy here now with her family.

In the movie The Good Lie, one of the Africans goes to school, and his teacher is having a discussion about the book they are reading, Huck Finn. In the book, Huck lies about Jim to save him from being punished as a runaway slave and sold down the river. The question is, of course, are there times we have to lie in order to save other people from harm? This question comes up in the movie as the South Sudanese lost boys (and girl) try to hold their little band together. I won’t say more in case you haven’t watched the movie.

The title is a figure of speech called an oxymoron. The word means “pointedly stupid” because it looks like a contradiction, the two words crossing each other out—like jumbo shrimp, civil war, good grief, devout atheist, recorded live, or unbiased opinion—but it points toward a paradox. I’m reading a book called The Promise of Paradox that explores the paradoxical nature of Christianity, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. How do you explain: “If you save your life, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for my sake, you will save it,” or “I form light and create darkness; I make weal and create woe”?

Nothing puts a harsher spotlight on the paradox of Christianity than suffering: the suffering of Canaanites killed by genocidal Jews, the suffering of Jews killed by genocidal Nazis, the suffering of God killed by everyone, the suffering of children lost from Sudan, the suffering of people ravished by malaria, AIDS, famine, cancer. These aren’t things to be explained away. These aren’t issues we resolve with words. But somehow, we have this hope, this seeing of what is invisible, that this suffering is a good lie.

Long shadows

As my students would tell you, words cast long shadows called connotations. Some words cast longer shadows than others.

That word. Missionary. It can be a dirty word. When Robert and I first went to Mexico as missionaries, we lived in an isolated Mixtec village. Coming into town for groceries one day, someone told us there were fellow Canadians in town, a rare thing in that part of the country, so we looked them up and invited them over for coffee. We knew they worked for MCC, a Christian organization promoting community development in the area, so we expected, as fellow travelers and workers among the indigenous of the area, a pleasant chat and a comparing of notes about home and work and what had brought us to this corner of Mexico.

Unfortunately, the conversation began something like this;

Us: “So what do you do here?”

Them: “We work in such and such villages as development workers helping people build clay stoves.  And what do you do?”

Us: “We work in such and such villages as missionaries helping people learn about God.”

At the word missionary, the room chilled, and the faces of our guests froze in shock. I watched as the woman tried to draw words into her mouth. I could see a muscle twitch in her temple as she clenched and unclenched her jaw. She finally spit the words at us as she got up to leave, “How dare you try to change their ancient spirituality.” (She never caught the irony that she was trying to change their ancient way of cooking.) To this couple our task was an abomination.

Or it can be an empty word. You’ve all heard the sermon, “We are all called to be missionaries right here at home. There is no need to get on a plane.” The people preaching these sermons don’t see how foreign missionaries effectively bring Christ to those who don’t know him. They expect the job to get done through more natural channels. A church I know went through a leadership change and preached an entire series on this topic, questioning the idea of any missionary calling at all beyond the call to reach your neighbor. They printed in their literature that missionaries who travel afar to plant churches in other cultures are expensive and  ineffective, and revoked their funding. Ouch.

Or it can be a treacherous word. When Robert and I first worked in a Mixtec village in Mexico, we were the first outsiders to live there. And still, a group of teachers stopped us on the path to challenge us. “We know who you are,” they said. ”We know why you are here. We know what you will do. You will come into our village bringing clothes and food. You will buy people with your money. Just like the politicians. And you will divide the village and undermine all our ways and customs. You should leave.”

We should know why we go to far off places and challenge people’s ancient spirituality. We should know how we’re called. Perhaps most importantly, we should know what we are meant to do when we get there—and what we are not. This has to be the hardest question to answer. How do we make that ambiguous word missionary an inspiration? How do we make one connotation stick when we all own the word together?

The Great Sherlock Holmes

I know someone who writes novels. Suspense and romance. Series, even. They are set in this area, and you can walk into the library here, or Walmart, and get a copy. We were driving in Texas a year ago and found one on a used book shelf there. Her next one is Emergency Reunion. This is Sandra Orchard, and we’re related!!! Sadly, I don’t write novels. Sigh. I just read them.

Everywhere we drive, Robert stops at garage sales, pawn shops, and thrift stores. I always keep a book in my purse so I can wait patiently in the car if I need to, but occasionally I go in and find treasures. First I look for clothing with certain perfect colors and am always puzzled when I can’t find any. I think I should start a clothing line with those perfect colors no one carries. Surely everyone would buy them. I would. Then I move on to art puzzles (just as rare as perfect clothing) and, of course, great books. I found a copy of Little Bee to send home with my friend Sandy on my last treasure hunt, so I’m motivated to keep looking. Orphanmaster’s Son  is still top of the list. I’d buy every two buck copy I could find just to give it away.

I’m not going to make fashion statements here, so let’s move on to puzzles...and books. Puzzles that are books. Detective novels. If you are keeping a list here are some ideas.

If you are interested in early stuff, here goes. It was an American who invented the genre in English: Edgar Allen Poe with his Murders in the Rue Morgue, his influence sailing across the pond to inspire a Sherlock Holmes.  But English speakers weren’t the first to use detection. In“Susanna and the Elders” from the Apocrypha Daniel cross examines two witnesses accusing a beautiful young woman of sexual misconduct. He uses detection to prove them false, saving her life. The Greek, Oedipus Rex, uses detection when he uncovers his wretched past (he has killed his father and married his own mother, bringing fate down on his head) by examining witnesses. In the Arab One Thousand and One Nights, a fisherman finds a locked chest with the body of a woman cut up inside, and someone has to solve the mystery in three days. The Chinese preferred the inverted mystery story, introducing the criminal first and then having a wise local magistrate explain the crime with help from ghosts, a great deal of philosophy, and hundreds of extra characters. Chinese mystery stories were long. I’ll be honest. I’ve only read knock-offs.

Back in England, Dickens tried his hand with a mystery in Bleak House, where an Inspector has to figure out which of the many suspects who visited a conniving lawyer’s office one evening murdered him there (you can watch the BBC series, if you prefer). Dickens influenced Wilkie Collins, who wrote The Moonstone, the first detective novel, and a masterpiece. Next, the queens of crime Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers (powerful Christian apologetic making a living on superb crime fiction) ushered in a Golden Age of detective fiction. Today I’d add P.D. James, who invented a poet detective, Adam Dagliesh, and has just added a Jane Austin mystery, Death Comes to Pemberly, recently made into a movie. And please try her Children of Men, an apocalyptic view of what happens when we aren’t kept alive by having children around. I think part of the trouble with our aging churches in North America is that they don’t have baby churches around to keep them young, so I use this book as an illustration of why starting baby churches is so important. Sorry, nothing to do with detectives, but well worth adding to the list.

I like detectives that rely on their knowledge of local culture to solve crime:

Precious Ramotse, the Botswanan in charge of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

V.I Warshawski,who delves into the subcultures of Chicago

Jim Chee, a Navajo cop

John Rebus, a Scottish detective investigating the underside of Edinburgh.

And how could I forget G. K. Chesterton, the Father of Paradox who created Father Brown, the mild, quirky priest who paradoxically uses reason and his intuition about human nature to catch his man? He explains his method: “You see, I had murdered them all myself.” This, too, is an author worth reading, so if you find him on a two buck sale shelf, pick him up, read him, and pass him on.

God made us to love solving puzzles. The greatest puzzle, the greatest mystery of them all, of course, is the conundrum of a thousand years: how to save the world. And the greatest mystery writer of them all is still writing. He’s hit the climax and is deep into the denouement, ready to head into that final grand conclusion, the end of the world. And we are the characters and the witnesses of his glorious resolution. I love how he does this, my favorite mystery writer.

Forests and trees

When Robert and I still lived in Guerrero, we met a Mixtec Christian man named Jose Guadalupe who was a gifted evangelist. One day we took him along to visit a family we were evangelizing. They brought him a chair next to the kitchen fire, and he started telling a story to the few people milling around. The story began with Adam and Eve and was about how God was redeeming the world. As Jose Guadalupe wove his story, the people in the kitchen began pulling up chairs and sitting around him. As more people wandered through the kitchen, the group grew until he had the entire extended family sitting around him, spellbound, listening to God’s story. They later made a commitment to Christ. But Jose Guadalupe never took out a Bible, didn’t even have one on him. He knew the story, loved the story, told the story passionately, the story about Jesus, and the people around him listened and said yes to it—yes to Jesus, the whole point of the story.

The last of the Bible Study sermons this Sunday reminded me of Jose Guadalupe . Mike was talking about how we can miss the forest for the trees. He used an illustration from Psychology about selective attention that I watched when I taught AP Psych in Oaxaca. Here’s a link if you want to be a guinea pig. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo I’m an idea kind of person, someone who lives in her head; so I miss a lot of forests! I remember teaching about missions in a church once and catching myself saying that missions is the most important topic that the Bible covers because it’s about God rescuing us from everywhere we’ve lost ourselves. It’s about our getting back to him. But someone brought me up short saying that no, missions isn’t the most important topic in the Bible. There won’t be any missions in heaven. There is only one most important topic in the Bible. Really, there is only one topic in the Bible. That is Jesus. And that is what Mike was getting at.

He reminded us that the Bible is not Jesus. It’s not as important as Jesus. The purpose of the Bible is to direct us to Jesus, to reveal Jesus, to persuade us of Jesus. Every bit of it, from Genesis to Revelation, is to lead us to Jesus. And the Bible isn’t the only way Jesus reveals himself to us: the Body around us reveals him. Worship reveals him. The sacraments reveal him. Visions reveal him. Even the burning of our own hearts can reveal him. Reading the Bible wasn’t even possible for most people up until the printing press and still isn’t possible for many people today because of language and political barriers. But that doesn’t stop God from revealing Jesus. That was certainly my experience with the conversion of the first Mixtec Christians in Guerrero. They didn’t come to Jesus because of reading a Bible (someone was reading it, but not them).

So Mike’s point is that as we discuss our interpretations of the Bible, agreeing, disagreeing, even sharply disagreeing, we should not forget the forest: Jesus. Perhaps more importantly, as God reveals Jesus to other people through us (scary thought) we shouldn’t forget the forest. In the end, it won’t be our interpretations of Scripture that save us; it will be Jesus. So if people don’t respect the Bible, don’t believe it, don’t know it, don’t trust it, don’t even have it, all is not lost. Isn’t this where our culture is now? Pretty much where the Mixtecs are? A dim memory of some stories told that sounded like tall tales, but not much else? Nothing personal that hits you in the gut?

Perhaps, just as in the days of Paul, we may have to be the word of God to people, knowing how to be Jews to Jews and Gentiles to Gentiles and post-moderns to post-moderns, knowing how to get the facts across about the life of Jesus, how to convince people of his sheer awesomeness, how to lead them to worship. We may have to carry him in our words and in our days and in our acts, so that people who no longer read Scripture may read us. This is how the disciples turned the world upside down, and how the Mixtecs came to Jesus, and how Mixtecs like Jose Guadalupe carry Jesus to other people. Maybe Niagara isn’t much different.

Don’t forget to watch the video. How many passes were there…?

Critical thinking

One of the topics that I would be teaching if I were in Mexico right now is ethos, or credibility. When a speaker starts talking, we are making a decision whether or not that person is trustworthy. We take everything into account including body language and the person’s past. If we don’t know anything about the speaker, we make snap decisions based on appearance, accent, eye contact, opening words, even the volume and modulation of their voice. As we settle in, we are checking what the speaker says against what we already know. Once we decide that a person is trustworthy, we are open to the new things they throw at us. Otherwise we shut them out.

In these days of election in both Canada and the US, we are well aware how political candidates manipulate ethos. But we do this with preachers in our churches, too. Do they sound like they fit the profile we know we can trust? We’re listening for certain key phrases so we can judge whether to stay open or not. What I find frustrating as I get older is that more people I thought I could trust also say things I don’t agree with, and people I’ve written off start saying some things that make sense to me now. I just can’t trust the stereotypes anymore.  I can’t go into conversations predicting the outcome. I find I have to sift the content more and not buy all of it wholesale. Checking ethos is more complicated—more work. Sigh.

In this last month, I have been going to my home church but also listening to a good sermon series at another church that I occasionally attend, a church in the same denomination, just down the road, that helped start my church. The series is called Bible Study, taught by a guy named Mike. It tackles the ways that the Bible, a divine book that teaches salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus, is also a human book narrated by people in specific historical contexts (Your antennae are already going up; I can see them). So they tell the stories from perspectives that made sense thousands of years ago but might not be strictly “accurate” today. They describe the world in terms of domes and storehouses in the sky and pillars and waters under the earth (not scientifically accurate terms). They change the chronology of events in different narratives depending on their focus, and their numbers and names don’t always match up. Mike even says that Jericho during the time depicted in Joshua might not have had walls. No walls? He goes on to say that anyone listening is totally free to disagree with what he says, that’s not a problem. Whew. Because although most of what he says makes sense to me, not all of it does. (I’ve got to check out those walls.) And there are other things Mike says that I heartily disagree with. He doesn’t believe in missionary calling. At all. No missionarying other than what happens right at home.

But what he is saying about the Bible being a divine-human book (like Jesus was a divine-human man) is a relief, and I like this series and have recommended it because I have noticed details in the Bible that could be called inconsistencies when read in a modernist style, and I don’t want these details  to undermine anyone’s faith in the Bible as God’s Word. So in terms of ethos, Mike is a mix and, what I’m discovering is, most of us are.

Meanwhile, down the road, the preaching at my home church is very different. It claims that if you don’t believe in literal 24 hour days during creation, your faith is suspect. You could be in danger of losing your salvation. These are drastically different kinds of preaching going on in sister churches next door to one another, and I’m connected to both and respect both and agree with parts and disagree with parts of what each one teaches. Their ethos is a tangled mix.

My guess is that this scenario is only going to get more complicated as I get older, and that what God wants is for me to listen to my brothers and sisters and think and make the best decisions I can and respect others as they do the same. This is called critical thinking, and it’s what I would be teaching at school, if I were there. We have been good at shutting other people out as soon as they say something we disagree with as if listening were dangerous. With this philosophy we are going to end up with a very small group of people we can talk to, and I don’t think this is how God’s kingdom works. I think it grows, and we grow, rightly dividing the word of truth.