Adventure Love and Dentist Appointments

I want to be out adventuring. Getting my hands, knees and heart dirty.

I want to be standing in the middle of every mess with a megaphone of hope and a backpack full of first aid supplies. Bring me the ooziest open wounds, the loneliest loudest wails, the bruised and  battered women and children. I want to be knee deep in the disgusting, to catch tears, to hold bodies, to know stories, and to call on Light where it’s dark.

I was made for that. I’m compelled to go to those places. Always have been.

And then there wasMay.

The month God said to stop instead of go.

The month I stopped, and I prayed repeatedly:

“Do whatever it takes for Your glory to be known.”

Whatever it takes. Sounds like the perfect invitation for diving deeper into wild- and whole-hearted adventure love, right?

Well.

What if “whatever it takes” means taking you away from all the ways you knew how to love, so that it really does become the story of His glory and nothing else? What if “whatever it takes” is completely un-adventure-seeming and kind of crazy-making?

I’ve sat with Lifa at his homework desk for hours, bought chapter books, made a lot of healthy meals, and had a lot of big boy talks this month long break from ministry. Honestly, some of these May days have felt like I was locked up in a monotonous, passionless prison – a prison decked out with the sweetest jar full of roses and a crock pot, but a prison nonetheless.

Today I prayed May’s “do whatever it takes” prayer again, and I committed my mind, body, soul and strength to anything and everything God would have me do.

Wanna know what He impressed on my spirit this morning after praying that prayer? As clear as day… “Take Lifa to the dentist.”

FOR. REAL.

And the very next person I spoke with “happened” to be a dentist. She said she would see Lifa without requiring any type of documentation (which he doesn’t have).

Next Tuesday. 4pm. We’re going to the dentist, y’all.

An adventure-lover turned dental appointment scheduler.

WHAT IS HAPPENING!?!

Whatever it takes.

The One who came and did whatever it took told me this morning to go to the dentist. 

He’s also said to make friends in town, support the local tutoring center, go to the library, and know the business owners. To live where He sent me – not for fantastical missionary adventures in a foreign land, but for living Love every single day, right here at home. 

He left His Father’s house to come and live – to crack open his hands as a carpenter, to dine with tree-climbing tax collectors, and to make breakfast on the beach for his buddies. 

Love lived with the people around Him, wherever He was.

There were megaphone moments and miraculous storm-stilling, dead-raising adventure stories. And then, He took naps, hung out with his friends, and built the Kingdom.

I have this sneaking suspicion that there might be just as much space to live love in libraries, dentist offices and tutoring centers as there is in government hospitals and dilapidated shacks. I will always love dirty, messy, crisis-responding adventure-love. I will always make sure there is ample time for me feet to get stained by red dirt and my heart to be broken for the things that breaks His.

But maybe my dirty feet can walk into the places those dirty faces might never see and leave some footprints on their behalf.  Maybe we can build this thing together – the hungry mouths and the restaurant owners, the dirty unkempt and the professional hygienists, the invisible ones and the voices of change.

The Kingdom is not built on crisis management, although it is valuable and necessary. It doesn’t come like a tornado – at least not yet. The Kingdom of God comes like a harvest, like a well-watered garden, like love lived out every single day, wherever you are and whatever it takes.

Soul Food and Cranky Town

And she’s back…  

I’ve been quiet on purpose.

For the purpose of prioritizing life and love around what God says is important.

For the purpose of the kind of rest that envelops you from the top of your head to the soles of your feet.

Soul rest.

It’s been more than two years since my feet have left African soil. My feet and my soul got a little soiled and weary in the daily grind.

(Cranky-town for days.)

After conversations with the leadership team at Ten ThousandHomes about taking a 31-day break from ministry, I thought the month of May would look like naptime, creative outlets and basking in a few hours a day to not be in charge of anyone or anything. There have been a few hammock naps and a lot of Americanos. To my surprise, however, my hungry soul didn’t seek satisfaction in wide-open spaces, under waterfalls, or on top of a mountain trail like it has before.

I sit here today, on this 21^st day of May, just now realizing something new in me:

My soul food is no longer a to-go order. It’s Homemade.

And there’s nothing convenient about it.

It uses too many dishes, leaves an infantry of crumbs on the stovetop, and sometimes leaves you wondering aloud (in the form of 4-letter words) if it’s worth it to have to finish cooking dinner with a headlamp on because the power just went out again – or if you should’ve just made PB&J.

And then it sits around the table as a family. With placemats and cutlery set with pride by a long-legged little boy who’s learning about table manners and life. It stretches hands around a salt and pepper shaker to pray. And then it plays High-Low together with giggles abounding and beautiful conversations dispersed between turns.

At 7-years old, this is the first time Lifa has lived full-time in a place of safety, security and stability. A whole new world is opening up to us. After 5 years of being family, we are just now saying goodbye to surviving life’s circumstances in exchange for thriving in abundant life.

God has added one more to our dinner table, is expanding the capacity and cravings of our souls, and is just starting to give me a sneak peak that it only gets bigger and better from here.

Real life: There is still a lot of bed-wetting (Lifa), breakdowns (me – and the washing machine), and I  almost just stepped on a cobra in the kitchen (small-ish and now dead). Abundant life and soul rest still finds me mopping up cobra guts, taking away bike privileges for bad choices, wearing ear plugs in my own house, and staying up too late eating too much peanut butter and chocolate.

Oh, and Lifa has also learned how to appropriately use the word “cranky” (me again).

The month of May has turned from a desperate need for physical rest into a season of discovering the roots of unrest. It’s another blog for another day, but the endless hours and mounting frustration that build at the dangerous bus stop, over spelling test practice, and through teacher text messages might actually be teaching me something about God’s heart for the future of South Africa. The everything-breaking and endless messes that have turned May into more cooking and cleaning than ever before is writing a love story about homemade soul food through my family.

I just might be on to something with all this cranky.

As Lifa would say, “It’s about to get real.”

 (So tempted to alliterate “cranky” and “crunk” right now, but have used “crunk” entirely too many times today to be a respectable 30-year old woman.)

The places that have felt the most burdensome and life draining are becoming the birthplaces for new life-springs. I’m not quite there yet, and I still have more days of tired and cranky than inspired, Kingdom-mindedness. But maybe they work together.

Maybe the things that are not ok with me are not ok with Him, and it’s ok to not be ok with those things. I can’t live in a hammock or in cranky-town, but I can stop by those places long enough to let the fidgety, unfruitful, restlessness become fertile soil for a harvest I have no capacity for by my own strength or demeanor.

Like Lifa’s malnourished body had to learn all those years ago, I am learning to absorb abundant life for my soul through the growing pains, the burden-bearing and the long hours that don’t make for heroic missionary moments or anything warm and fuzzy.

Right now it’s time to pull out the homework desk, work on the subtraction problems he hasn’t been taught yet, and sneak as many nutrients as possible inside a taco shell. 

It’s time to feed my family, and feed my soul this new food that takes some getting used to.

The Father is stirring up a new starting place for a hope, a future, and for soul food in South Africa. At Home.