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.