50 years – The Fifth Decade 2004 -2014 – The One with the Sabbatical

I turned fifty last month and wrote 4 blogposts looking at each decade of my life. I got as far as 2004, when I was well-established in field administration. This is the installment that brings us up to the present and then “to infinity and beyond”.

Places lived: Mali, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, USA. 

Verse:

Jeremiah 6:16
This is what the Lord says: “Stop at the crossroads and look around. Ask for the old, godly way, and walk in it. Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls. But you reply, ‘No that’s not the road we want!’”

Life-Shaping events:

In 2004, due to political unrest and its aftereffects, I ended up going from being assistant director over one country to full director over two countries. The day before I was elected, we had some sort of group mixer in which we pasted bits of cardboard to a map to represent the different parts of our work. For some reason, I had to carry it home for the night and bring it back the next day. As I picked my way carefully through mud puddles, I had a fear that I would drop the poster in the mud and mess it up. And then I realized that I had a much larger fear: “What if I drop the BRANCH in the mud while I am director?”

It was a difficult time to be director and as the years went by I wondered why I could not be director at a time when all was normal. We were losing staff and the financial resources that went with them. Work in both countries was threatened by instability.  We joked in meetings about making “more bricks with less straw”.

Key verse:

You keep track of my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book. Psalm 56:8

There were a lot of difficult things during this period, so many, in fact that I was overwhelmed by “unexpected tears” during my sabbatical (2011) when I finally took time to enumerate and grieve over them:

Senseless court cases, civil unrest, threats of terrorists, sickness and medevacs of key people, a suicide, personal and family crises among our staff. So much that might have been, that was thwarted for reasons I cannot now see. So many cases also where we were forced to rely on God instead of our own capacities

 I’d like to say that this was a time that I did rely solely on God, but much of the time I relied on my own ability to multi-task and stay on top of a multitude of things. I am someone driven by duty and the work was without end, with not enough people to do it. People often commented then (and still do) on my seemingly limitless energy and my job became one that no one else could imagine doing.

By 2009, I was nearing burnout. I was dry and thirsty and in exile spiritually.

 But God was seeking after me putting books and sermons and verses in my path. I actually memorized:

“I lie in the dust completely discouraged. Revive me by your word.” Ps 119:25

My furlough was due in mid-2010 and my boss suggested that rather than doing a normal “home assignment” in administration, I consider a Sabbatical. This was a window of hope that was opened to me, that somehow things could get better. But even as I planned things to do during my sabbatical, events combined to delay it until early 2011. Read here (in the first post on this blog) about how God began inviting me to healthy practices of reading and meditation and scripture memory in that time of “delayed gratification”.



In the summer of 2010, when I should have been returning to begin the sabbatical but could not, I went ahead and did a trip to Northern Ireland which was truly a drink of cold water to me in a very dry time.

Read: northern-ireland-and-color-green

This was also a time where I was challenged to begin thinking about Sabbath and what it really means for me, the gift that it is. (See here my “Prezi” sermon on Sabbath, which I have given three times.)

Coming back to Mali, I began getting serious about Sabbath and that is literally what carried me through to the Sabbatical time in 2011.

As that time is mostly detailed in this blog, I will not repeat it here, or this could become very recursive. I've included lots of links to specific blog-posts.

Highlights of the Sabbatical would be

• The time at the Boiler room in Kansas City.



Boiler Room Building in Kansas City 

• A month at the retreat center on Lake Thunderbird

• The Oklahoma Freewheel 500-mile bike ride across Oklahoma. 

 

In this Sabbatical time and beyond, God is teaching me the importance of

• Removing distractions
• Creating space for quietness and contemplation.
• Sabbath
• Creativity – including blogging, making candles, music.
• Reading
• Journaling
• The Liturgical year: Lent, advent. . .
• Living in community and interdependence
• Living in simplicity without a lot of stuff. Being evacuated and then having to liquidate your household in short order will do that to you.
• God’s work is Unhindered by what appear to us to be major setbacks.
• The Responsibility for Getting the work done is God’s not mine.

“Do not feel totally, personally, irrevocably responsible for everything. . . That’s my job. Love, God.”

 After the Sabbatical

God knew what he was doing in arranging the sabbatical before one of the most difficult times in my life: the coup d’état in Mali and our evacuation [March-April 2012]. (Read “In the Pressure cooker” parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). I really do not know if I could have survived this time without the Sabbatical preparation.

God prepared me and resourced me to lead our group in this very difficult time, using the unique gifts he had given me. He had taught me that I needed to take time for myself, for reflection and contemplation and planning and rest:

“Get up and go! Come back and wield your sword in the part of the kingdom where you can wield it best.” [see blog post]

The time during the coup is one where God sustained me and where my unique giftings came together for that time. People commented that it seemed like I was truly “in the zone.” It is

During my sabbatical, God introduced me to the idea of being a nomad, living simply and relying on God. 2012 was the year of being a nomad. When I did my taxes for the year 2012, I honestly could not say where my tax home was. In this year, I made 15 border crossings, hopping back and forth between Mali, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Thailand, France, and Cameroon. From March to December, I averaged 2.5 weeks per country and was truly “transient” in this time.

And it was during this time that the Lord led me to accept a regional role which would involve setting up in Cameroon and traveling significantly throughout Francophone Africa. This, too, was a step of faith, but God has been good.

It is interesting to see how the administrative skills as well as my crisis management experience in the past years have prepared me for this role.

“These 40 years . . . “

As I was reflecting on the five decades that make up my first 50 years, I began thinking of theme verses for each decade. The week of my birthday, I kept coming back to Deuteronomy 2:7 which was a key verse for my 3rd decade

“The Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He has watched over your journey through this vast wilderness. These 40 years, the Lord your God has been with you and you have lacked nothing.”

And then I heard a podcast the week of my birthday and it centered on Deuteronomy 8, which had such a similar theme that I thought it was the same passage until I looked it up.

8.2 Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. 3 He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 4 Your clothes did not wear out and your feet did not swell during these forty years. 5 Know then in your heart that as a man disciplines his son, so the Lord your God disciplines you.
15 He led you through the vast and dreadful wilderness, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. 16 He gave you manna to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, 

This really seems to be a perfect description of the past 10 years especially but also the entire 40 years I have been a Christian.

[To follow - 5th Decade - part 2, people, bikes, music, books, etc]