Between Worlds

Miss Kady just got back from her first trip to Europe... well, if you count Wales as "Europe". ;-) We chatted about her return culture shock and missing the great "fit" for her over there, which of course I can always relate to. I've swiped a couple of her beautiful shots...

Whenever I come home from Europe, I get pretty desperate to preserve my "Europe Brain", for lack of a better way to describe it. I routinely hit my stride there, relax socially, pick up a cute little accent, feel like a grown-up again, my Maserati engine revvs up and starts to rumble and look for the nearest autobahn. Then I battle the temptation to tear up return plane tickets as the date of "going down" (as they say of leaving Oxford) looms upon me, and it's all snatched away. When I come back to California, I get choppy and stumbling, bereft and growling for a few months, trying to "stay European", which never works. I always feel like I have one foot on each side of the Atlantic, and the continental plates are moving further away, and I always end up stuck on the wrong freaking side!
So now I'm launching into applications for graduate schools in Europe - my latest attempt to get back on the right side of the proverbial Pond. As I was surfing through the university websites today, memories of places, people and languages were coming back, thoughts about my European persona resurfaced, and with all the good, the nattering intimidation and pressure to present a really strong application kicked in a little.

And then I went back to my email, seeing messages about normal stuff going on around me here, relationships with many people who don't have a clue about all this and really don't care. They care about me - but the world that matters so much to me is irrelevant to them. It's as far away as Timbuktu. There's nothing in their day-to-day lives in Silicon Valley that relates at all, unless one dives into an international affairs course at Stanford. Which truly has been my salvation this past year, offering windows into another world. It's critical that I have that, or I just can't maintain the schizophrenic life in two completely different spheres... one truly ambitious, demanding and international, the other side relaxed to a fault and decidedly local.

As I sit here pondering this, I honestly don't know what will happen, if this is the year or not in which I'll at last fly the coop. But I realized that it's not really up to me. My job is to try - and let God show me the way.

A few thoughts have encouraged me lately, especially in light of the wholly unexpected and wonderful testimony of Katrina-zone missionaries Monty and Susan Scales last week. Since that unbelievable night I have tried to think of how I would write about it. But I can't do it justice. All I can say is that they were somewhat unwitting prophets of the living God, sent to deliver a message: that God hears my heart, He knows how badly I want to get back to Europe, He gave me that desire, and He will fulfill it.

I am a little choked up as I finish that sentence... the devil tells me that this is ridiculous, that it's all my emotions just going bananas, that I'll never get to do what I think I'm called to. But that's a lie, and I have to believe the word of the Lord as it has come to me. As I said back in August, "Let it be done to me according to Your word."

The most striking thing about the whole experience last week was that I had just gone to the Catholic church to pray that morning, really leveling with God about what was on my heart about Europe. I'd written it all out in my journal, drawing on past walks of faith that He had taken me through and recalled to mind this past year. And then that night, there were two complete strangers, echoing word-for-word all kinds of things that I had said and written that very day. It was like they'd been a fly on the wall, not just that day but for years too. I felt like God had almost been spying on me - except that of course I had been telling Him all this stuff. It's just that it gets so easy to think that He's not listening, that I'm just talking to the walls and writing pages upon pages in journals for no good reason except that I can't stop. And besides, every time I give up, the dream comes back and I start all over again with the same old heartwrenching pleading. Send me home. Send me home. Let me minister there. Here I am, send me. Speak, Lord, Your servant hears.

So that night, He spoke. I wanted answers like "that grad school will/will not accept you." "There will be enough money for school." But what God gave me was relationship. He gave me Himself. He told me He was listening, and He was going to give me my dreams and answer the cry of my heart.

Wow.

I am reminded of Regent professor Darrell Johnson's wonderful sermon (entitled, "This Strange Thing Happening") about Zechariah. It's taken from Luke 1:

...There was a priest named Zechariah... And he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. And they were both righteous before God, walking blamelessly in all the commandments and statutes of the Lord. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were advanced in years.

Zechariah and Elizabeth knew broken dreams. Years of hoping, praying, begging God - and it looked like He had withheld blessing, said no, even made fools of them.

Now while he was serving as priest before God when his division was on duty, according to the custom of the priesthood, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense. And the whole multitude of the people were praying outside at the hour of incense.

It was just a normal routine time of prayer before the Lord... just as I was in my normal routine of sitting in that Catholic church, journaling my prayers as I always do. But just think - he was praying in the temple, with a multitude of people praying outside. I was praying in an honored church, where multitudes of people pray, and there are multitudes of friends and family who have been praying for this desire of my heart too. We are asking. But oddly enough, maybe because we've been waiting so long for an answer, we forget that God listens.

And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord (and missionaries showed up at 20's...) standing on the right side of the altar of incense. And Zechariah was troubled when he saw him, and fear fell upon him. But the angel said to him, "Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John.

That's got to be one of the best lines ever in Scripture. "Do not be afraid, for your prayer has been heard." As Darrell Johnson preached, "Your prayers have not just been bouncing off the ceiling. Zechariah's prayers were heard, and so are yours, and so are mine." Words I'll never forget, because it was such a harbinger of hope.

And you will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great before the Lord....he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb. He will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.

I look at that set of promises and I pray for a similar calling in Europe. Whatever my job description, my heart is to be present to people with the Holy Spirit in me, turning people's hearts to hope in the Lord and live a life filled with His meaning, purpose and joy.

Susan and Monty had a number of things to say that I wanted to somehow capture here. Better than anything I can write, Susan is doing a great job of capturing their hearts and adventures in their blog (linked above). But here are some of the principles and interesting parallels I heard last Wednesday:

~ Susan said she had to wait 50 years to finally go on a mission trip... that morning I had reminded God that I had been asking for 10 years to permanently move to Europe.
~ Both of us had complained that there were always people around going on mission trips... but that we never got to go! I had said that very line right there that night before Susan and Monty shared their story.
~ Susan was a complete Maserati like me - a dreamer for the Lord, big personality, big heart, and when the Lord called, it was with the same overwhelming sense of urgency that I have, and that I read in Mother Teresa's letters. We all cried out, "Let me go do this!" It was undeniable, and would not go away.
~ What kind of man does a Maserati marry? A man of prayer. Monty knew how to go to the Lord and pour our his heart; he recognized all the signs of spiritual warfare, and he knew how to lead through it. Bravo. He also said, "If God calls your spouse, He's calling you too, because you are one."
~ Monty: "If I have the time, the money, and the ability, it's probably not God's will for me."
~ Monty: "If my "devil meter" is in the red zone, I'm right where God wants me. If things are too easy or too peaceful, something's wrong!"
~ Susan: "We hated our jobs - we'd come home at night and complain. But the minute we got to Mississippi and found out what they needed from us, we had to laugh - our jobs were exactly the training we needed to be the most help now." (I call this the "Joseph in Jail" principle - learning to govern first his slave master Potiphar's household, then the whole jail...then Egypt. Someone recently reminded me that I was governing my bosses' office.)
~ Susan: "Whatever you're doing now, it is preparation for where God will take you. Learn everything you can in what you are doing." (This made me start praying for a job where I would learn something I needed for service in Europe.)
~ Monty: "Your calling must be big, or you wouldn't be registering on the devil meter all the time!"
~ Susan: "Following the Lord begins with steps of faith - like Indiana Jones stepping completely into thin air over the chasm, and the bridge forming underneath his feet when it was too late to get back on the cliff." (One of my all-time favorite images of faith.)

Like I said... I can't capture the power and all the amazing connections between my story and their story... but I do know that I was so deeply encouraged that I wept three different times that night, grateful that God had come to say that my prayers had been heard. I could hear Him saying, "Don't give up; I will send you home to Europe. I'm just not done yet with training you first." It took a huge weight off my chest... and when I got home, all resolutions to journal the whole amazing thing fell to the wayside and I slept more deeply and peacefully than I had in weeks.