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]

Wax tears

Wax - on the inside of my candle jar
Hardened over time
Layer by layer as the jar is tilted and turned.
The flame of your Spirit
Melts the wax from the inside out.
Slowly, gently the core softens and pools.
Then if I coax the flame to the edges,
Wax wells up and runs down
Like the tears I could not cry,
Flowing down
Leaving the glass clean and
HOT and
Letting the light pass to those outside.
And as my tears melt, they provide
Fuel for the Flame to burn. . .
Brighter.
Come, Holy Spirit,  Come.

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out of the pressure cooker, steam to tears

 It's one month today since I came out of Mali and this makes the third country I have been in on my exile: Burkina Faso (working base), Thailand  (conference), and now France for two weeks of vacation.

The time in Mali was intense, the pressure always building, being responsible for and making decisions that would affect the lives of 100 people for months to come.

Our spiritual retreat was scheduled during the early days of the coup when we were still under curfew. I hope the catholic center is enjoying the grill we took out to their retreat center. We were never able to pick it up.

We eventually had a three-day mini retreat, without our speaker and childcare team. I decided to start out the sharing times as people were coming into it cold.  I began by sharing about my sabbatical in 2011, beginning with  the quote I had seen at Corrymeela in northern Ireland in 2010:

  "Do not feel totally, personally, irrevocably resonsible for everything...That's my job.        Love, God"

That was good head knowledge, but it was taking a while to sink in.

In telling about my sabbatical, I got to the part where God brought unexpected tears in healing for a bunch of hard things in previous years. As I cited them, the tears began again. I was thinking that this whole coup situation is another really hard thing.

And on another level, I was thinking, "I'm Monsieur le Directeur, I can't cry in front of everybody. What will the Malians think?  If I lose it, what will that do to everyone else?"  In retrospect, they were good tears and not a bad things for people to see even in or cross cultural context.

Just two days later, I was announcing our "strategic withdrawal" to the same group and this time my prayer was to get everything explained clearly (in French and without prep) and without crying . This time I did and felt God sustaining as he would so many times in the next 11 days.

And through all that time, god also brought times of encouragement coupled with sustaining and tears:

•  a song (Jonathan David Helser's "I have risen"
• a verse (Numbers 33:14 The LORD replied, “I will personally go with you, Moses, and I will give you rest—everything will be fine for you.”)
• through an eCard:

"You are the Lord's. You are in God's place at God's perfect time. Your days are in his hands and he holds your future. He has gifted you and placed his hand upon you to bless you and make you a blessing. The burden of your ministry is not yours to carry - as you rest, HE will work; as you abide, He will bring fruit; as you sow, he will give the increase. He is your shield and exceeding great reward." Roy Lessin

I got a lot of emails from folks saying they were praying. And the ones from form former directors who'd been there in the trenches in ivory coast with me always hit the spot but made it hard to see the screen for a while. (thanks, guys).
I think the tie with 9 years of unrest in Ivory Coast made it particularly hard. While I recognized that I have unique giftings in crisis management - apparemment je suis diplôme en gestion de crises ; I did not want to look down the long road ahead if it meant years of unraveling. I kept thinking, "I don't know if I can do it all over again," and at the same time, "for such a time as this."

When we came out a month ago, I  had a personal debrief and then a group debrief. Tears were had by all.

If you think about a pressure cooker, after you turn it off, all that steam eventually has to come out. And that's a good thing.

This morning my devotional took me to

Luke 6.21.MSG
"You're blessed when you've lost it all. God's kingdom is there for the finding. You're blessed when you're ravenously hungry. Then you're ready for the Messianic meal.  You're blessed when the tears flow freely. Joy comes with the morning."

Thanks, God, for tears and the promise of joy and land where one day there will be no more tears.

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Unexpected Tears

Mid-way during my time in Kansas City, I went to see "Soul Surfer" which is a good, christian movie with some quality actors: Helen Hunt and Dennis Quaid. I am not so macho that I can't admit that I sometimes cry at movies, but in this particular case, I cried through a good deal of the movie, so much so that I was glad that it was 4 pm and there was only 2 other people in the theater.

The odd thing is that I have found myself crying a LOT since I began the sabbatical - reading books, listening to songs, in church, during dramas at conference last week, during other movies, but thankfully not during "Thor" last week, as that would have totally messed up the cool 3D effects. 

I've been trying to figure that out - the crying part. Last fall, I read Dan Allender's book "Sabbath" and he says that noise in our lives 

"masks a far greater cacophony that will seldom be heard until we choose silence. The problem is the underlying noise is louder than the masking sounds we use to cover what we don’t want to hear.” 

If we are silent, we are forced to deal with things, to being deeply disturbed. When we are quiet we can confront and hear the voice of  loss - dealing with grief that will surface when we are silent. A grief we fell too impoverished to invite in as a guest, so we send it away as an unwanted stranger. We have to turn up the volume on Loss/Grief, or it will keep calling us back and not allow joy.

Apparently when Dan Allendar went on his sabbatical, a friend asked him, “Are you ready for what will come?” True to form, he found himself awakening from deep sleep weeping, but was unaware why.

He says that "grief is like vomiting. It exhausts, nauseates, and relieves. Empties us, weakens us, but prepares us for food again." Or as Jesus puts it : "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Back to Soul Surfer: Why did it affect me so? This movie started out with them singing "Blessed Be Your Name" (Matt Redman) which we sing ALL the time in Mali. There is a reason we sing it a lot as it deals with praising God when things don't seem to be going the way we think they should be:

"You give and take away. . . . When the darkness closes in, still I will say. . Blessed Be Your Name". 

I think I decided that is why the movie resonated so much with me. The surfer girl had a lot of promise and then had that taken away inexplicably and then dealt with the loss.  The things that could have been were shattered, and then they were redeemed, remade into something better.

And that made sense set against the relief of so many things in Mali and Ivory Coast: senseless court cases, civil unrest, threats of terrorists, sickness and medevacs of key people. So much that might have been, that was thwarted for reasons I can not now see. So many cases also where we were forced to rely on God instead of our own capacities. And being quiet has allowed me to grieve those things.

In this time of Sabbatical and unexpected tears, God has given me this verse, which has been meaningful:

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

An atheist friend of mine recently lead me to this verse:

 I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the Lord, do all these things. Isaiah 45:7 (The french says "prosperity and adversity")

God is sovereign even when adversity and disaster come our way. 

Last week's sermon by Harold Bullock was on Celebrating the Tapestry of Life. When looking at a tapestry, you can not see the pattern that is being woven from the back. It is not clear until it is done and you flip it over. You need those dark threads to provide contrast.  Harold closed with: "I can't see the pattern in the Tapestry, but i know the weaver."

Pray with me as I am about to head off to the lake for a month. This will be a time for silence. Pray that I can still my heart and sit silently.