There is no silver bullet.

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I was sitting with my friend as she related to me her financial difficulties over the past week. Not that they had started this week, but the entire family falling ill at the same time hadn’t helped things. She said she was going to have to take change out of the little tin box in her store to buy vegetables for dinner. Just then, the Big Ma’am and three Big Sirs from World Vision arrived, to check how things were going with the store. My friend straightened and parted the curtain that separated her front room from the shop in her back doorway to go and meet them. I stood with her teenage daughters behind the curtain, invisible from the outside but able to see through the lightweight fabric. What I saw was that my friend was in presentation mode, stiff and formal. “How are things going with the store?” the Big Sirs asked. “Great,” she said. “Before we had problems with food, but now things are OK.”

“Call the child,” they said. They meant the youngest daughter, the sponsored child. The sponsored child raced across the room from where she had been standing with us behind the curtain and one of her older sisters began frantically trying to comb down her hair, put in a clip, make her presentable. My friend called the child’s name again, sounding irritated. It wasn’t that the visitors were showing any signs of being demanding or impatient; I couldn’t see their faces from where I was standing, but they might have even been smiling. It was just that my friend knew where she stood with them: they were the patrons, and their expectations must be met.

My friend called her daughter again. The older sister gave up trying to put in the hair clip and the little girl came running to the backdoor to stand next to her mother. I wondered if this group of four recognizes the effect their presence has on people. One of the Sirs took out his camera to take a photo of the two of them standing there, in front of the shop that World Vision had donated the initial stock for. “To provide this family with a much-needed livelihood,” I’m sure the letter will say when the photo arrives at the sponsor’s house in Australia.

“Smile!” the man said. Click.

A moment later they were gone. My friend returned and sat down wearily. “We were just talking about this,” I said. “You’re hardly making any profit from this store. You still don’t have enough money for food or medicine. Why didn’t you tell them that?”

“Unse kyaa matlab hai? What do they care?” she said. Just then, a customer arrived. She pulled out the box where chewing tobacco was hidden away and handed a couple of packets to the man at her door. Understandably, World Vision has forbidden her from selling those addictive products in her store. Unfortunately, they’re just about the only thing in stock that she makes any money on. The other colored packages of cookies and candy and salty snacks have negligible profit margins. “The things they gave me don’t sell,” she said. “They should have just given me money and I would have bought things for the store myself.” Fair enough. But I find myself wondering whether even that modification would have made much difference. There are so many of these little doorway shops in our neighborhood that there’s hardly enough demand to warrant the supply. The fact that most people aren’t able to read or write and have no knowledge of accounting doesn’t increase the chances of entrepreneurial success, either.

I think again of the photo. That photo makes me angry, because that photo will be a lie. The family in the picture is still constantly worried about how to stay afloat financially, and they go into debt over basic healthcare and school fees. When I had a sponsored child on my fridge in college, I certainly assumed the smiling face looking back at me was out of the woods, so to speak, now that a big aid organization had intervened (that was a Compassion child, by the way, but a few years back in Thailand I also discovered sponsored children being withdrawn from the program and sent to the local temple to live as monks because their families still weren’t able to feed them). I understand the marketing of the whole thing, and how you raise more money by turning compassion into a canned feel-good experience that can be personalized to appeal to consumers. Just $30 a month, to change somebody’s life, supposedly. Heck, it’s a good deal.

But those kinds of bargains just don’t exist in the real world. And I would love to turn this little anecdote into a plug for building relationship with the poor instead of just throwing money at them—I do believe that money is the least of my neighbors’ problems, when you get right down to it—but this situation does not demonstrate any such neat and tidy moral. The fact is that I’ve known this family for about two years, and despite the fun times we’ve had together and the stories we’ve shared and the deep sense of connection we have with each other, all that relationship hasn’t had a measurable impact on their finances. At all. The stresses in their lives are essentially the same now as they were when we first met them. But for what it’s worth, they do tell me honestly about those problems. My friend has cried and laughed and even gotten angry and argued with me, which she would never do with a patron, a boss, a donor, or anyone she needed to impress or appease in order to keep the relationship in tact.

So perhaps I’m being too hard on the international aid groups, because I don’t have a cunning alternative to offer them. But as long as we’re going around not changing the world (because that is beyond us), we might as well get to know our neighbors and try to love them well. Change is slow and small, usually, and it doesn’t always come… but when it does, it nearly always comes through relationship.

A routine de-stoning

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I had first learned about gallstones in China. When my husband and I showed up to teach English at an obscure college in Jiangxi province, we were promptly taken to an assembly line-style clinic for an extremely comprehensive round of medical examinations. I guess the school figured there was no point in going to the trouble of importing English teachers all the way from America if they were just going to get sick and die on them before the end of the school year. So, our boss accompanied us into each room along the corridor: make a fist for the blood test, pull up your shirt for the EKG, lay on your side for the ultrasound. Her presence was a bit awkward, but her limited English was helpful since no one else at the clinic spoke any, and our Chinese wasn’t good enough yet to understand most of what was happening. When it came to the ultrasound, the nurse rolled the jellied sensor around on my side and then began pointing as the fuzzy image on the screen with apparent concern. She was pointing out the problem to my boss of course, not to me.

“What is it?” I asked. “What is she saying?” My boss furrowed her brow. “Uh… it is a kind of disease. I am not sure how to say in English.” Fear began to gnaw open a space through my stomach, but that didn’t show up on the screen. “Well, what kind of disease?” I asked again. My boss was thinking. “Mmmm… my father has this kind of disease. He is very elderly. I will look up the words and tell you later. Maybe tomorrow.” Maybe tomorrow? We moved onto the next test in the next room, and I worried over whatever terrible thing the nurse thought she had found in my abdomen until the next day when my pestering texts and phone calls finally elicited a response from my boss: gallstones.

That didn’t seem too scary. I left it alone, not convinced that there was any truth behind it anyway. What could they really tell from such a scrambled, nondescript image? ThThen a few months ago I was under the jellied ultrasound wand again, here in India, investigating what seems now to be completely unrelated stomach pain. “Gallstones,” the Indian doctor told me in English. This time he pointed them out to me on the crystal clear image enlarged on the screen in front of me. No getting out of it this time.

I began telling my neighbors about the upcoming operation. Most of them were really worried about it, since nearly everyone knows someone who’s died in hospital. There’s very little understanding of anatomy or healthcare, so the reasons why some operations work and others don’t remain a mystery. Some people wanted to take me to see their doctor and get a second opinion. Others wanted to stay at the hospital with me. “Your husband can just stay home and I’ll be with you every minute while you’re there!” one friend told me. The most restful recovery my Indian friends can imagine is one surrounded by a great cloud of concerned friends and relatives, so the idea of my husband and I “alone” in the hospital pained them. Someone else confidently told me that there was no need for surgery when eating enough papaya would be sufficient to get rid of the stones.

An old grandmother I know took me to meet her son, who promptly took a matchbox from off the shelf and showed me the kidney stone he passed a few months ago. What’s the appropriate response when a stranger shows you the lump of sandstone that he passed through his body? I raised my eyebrows with an appreciative, “Oh,” and inquired about the treatment that had produced this unique keepsake.

Another family had a grandmother visiting from the village who I had never met before. When I told them about the upcoming surgery, she related the story of her sister-in-law’s sister’s somebody who had gotten surgery (though it was unclear by the end exactly what kind of surgery it had been). “She didn’t survive that,” the grandmother concluded with sagely detachment, staring ahead of her. “Nope, she’s dead.” I felt like laughing, but the family seemed embarrassed by their relative’s unsettling anecdote. Her daughter began explaining to the woman what a good friend I was and how long they had known me. Her expression didn’t change, but the grandmother seemed to take the hint. “Pray to God,” she said, turning to me. “If He wills it, all will go well.”

The morning of the surgery, I was feeling a bit nervous in spite of the rational knowledge that this was a fairly safe procedure. A man with a folder in his hand arrived in the waiting room. “Aiye,” he said, and turned to leave. “Come.” We followed. He took us upstairs to the general ward, where two nurses were tasked with “helping” me change clothes: one of them dressed me like an invalid doll, and the other observed. A little while later, another group of nurses and doctors came in to give various shots and start an IV of antibiotics and then glucose. We could communicate well enough in Hindi, but there was rarely explanation or warning of what was coming beforehand. We read books and listened to the sounds of Indian music videos and soap operas wafting through the dividing curtain between my bed and the rest of the ward until eventually, another person appeared at the foot of my bed: “Aiye.” I followed her downstairs, took off my shoes outside of a siding door, walked barefoot into the operating room, and laid down on the table, awake. Watching the surgeons make their final preparations next to me was unnerving. I felt as though the operation was going to start at any moment with me still lying there fully conscious! The anesthesiologist noticed my agitation and asked why I was so nervous. I explained that in my country, the patient never sees the inside of the operating theater because they’re already out cold by that point. He laughed and assured me that I “wouldn’t know anything” while the surgery was going on. I had the irrational fear that the drug might not be able to knock me out of such a hyper-vigilant state, but no sooner had I watched the syringe empty into my arm than my eyes went out of focus and I fell asleep wondering how long it would take to fall asleep.

For some reason, I only spoke in Hindi while I was coming off the anesthesia, even in response to A.’s questions in English. While I was still coming to, the doctor called A. into another room where my gallbladder was sitting in a bowl. The doctor sliced it open in front of him, dug out six gallstones, and handed them to him in a plastic bag.

After a day of painful, nauseous recovery and a night in the ward, we headed back to the slum. I was still feeling too weak to do much of anything, but our neighbors took such good care of us. One family made lunch for us, and after coming to visit in the afternoon, decided to cater our dinner as well. When we tried to protest, the mother put on her stern face and waved away our concerns with her hand as she started resolutely down the stairs to go home and begin cooking. The next day, our landlady downstairs graciously made roti for us since my abs still weren’t up to kneading the flour. “Why shouldn’t I do it? We all live in one house!” she said. We have felt very loved by all the help and the stream of visitors.

And we had joked about what to do with the gallstones, but now it’s become obvious that the real purpose was for show-and-tell. After making their inquiries after my health and dispensing advice on what I should avoid eating or doing while I recovered, people always analyzed the stones in the plastic bag, or if we had forgotten to offer, they would ask to see them. Maybe I need to find a matchbox for them.

 

Scenes from daily life

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After coming back from celebrating the Hindu festival of Holi at a friend’s house on Monday: LOTS of food, and lots of colored powder being thrown around and smeared on everybody’s faces. We missed most of the giant color fight going on outside our hosts’ house, but on the walk home we saw plenty of people who were stained purple, pink, or green from head to toe. The streets are still splashed with color from the craziness.
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Dal, spices, chili peppers, and fruit sitting on our kitchen counter.
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Filling up our water drum for the day. This photo is actually a few months old– these days it’s gotten too hot to wear a shawl, even in the morning!
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Notice the two men at the very top of the photo, changing out the billboard: no ropes, no harnesses… and this photo wasn’t even taken from ground level.
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Sunset over the slum. The small black dots in the sky are kites.

Am I Pretending to be Poor?

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A few days ago I had the uncomfortable experience of traveling back and forth between what felt like two entirely different worlds. During the day, I found myself in the middle of an impromptu and chaotic voter ID registration blitz at a local school, helping to fill out forms for people who can’t read or write and who—in the absence of any birth certificate or school records—may be applying for a document which will legally prove their existence for the first time in their lives. It was noisy, crowded, and disorganized as people scrambled around to get their applications in order, struggling with an inane paper system that could have been easily streamlined with a basic computer, and receiving little information from the disdainful government officials responsible.Then in the evening, I headed over to the upscale shopping district of the city to meet for coffee with another expat. When I spend time with other expats, they often tell me about the places they’ve found to buy imported brands, peanut butter, organic products, and even bacon, of all things. I can’t even remember the last time I ate pork; we gave it up after we decided to move into a Muslim neighborhood (for the sake of relationship rather than for the sake of any kind of ritual purity). But it’s not like I don’t enjoy peanut butter or organic food! If I were still living in the West I would be highly interested in figuring out where to buy organic produce, or stylish shoes, for example. But here, the thought never even crosses my mind. When none of my neighbors can afford to buy anything besides the conventionally-grown vegetables at the local market, when those same fresh veggies are available just walking distance from my house, and when we cook every meal from scratch, how could I possibly afford to travel to another part of the city to buy my food at an expensive, indoor shop where it would cost ten times what it does on the side of the road? And where would I wear jeans or any other article of clothing besides my loose-fitting salwar kameez suits when I have joined a community in which women scarcely leave the house without their heads covered? In this context, jeans would read as a socio-political statement, or maybe worse, as a cry for inappropriate attention. Many foreigners are doing important and compassionate work here in India, and they aren’t living extravagantly; by the standards of their home country, all of these things they buy are extremely cheap and reasonable. Many of them work alongside highly educated, wealthy Indians to whom Western clothing and customs are entirely acceptable. But for me it’s different. That kind of lifestyle would be far out of reach for all of my friends, and it would separate me from them.

After coffee, my husband and I wandered around, enjoying the spacious sidewalks and temperate weather. We passed by huge, glass storefronts with mannequins behind them sporting either Western-style designer ensembles or luxurious saris worth hundreds of dollars, never mind rupees. We walked past the flashy mall which a neighbor had once described to us after a family window-shopping outing as a wonderful place “where it’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter,” and where they had been fascinated by the “moving staircases” but were too terrified to ride them from one floor to another.

The people who milled around us now were likely unimpressed by the escalators inside: they all wore Western clothing, carried smart phones, and drove cars and fancy motorbikes. Probably they were more drawn to the Western labels and fashions which have become status markers in Indian society, helping people to project a cosmopolitan and cultured image. From inside the mall, brightly-lit signs for KFC and Dominoes Pizza welcomed patrons into upscale restaurants which certainly would not be associated with those same signs in the small towns that I remember as pit-stops on the long American road trips of my youth.

In a way, all of this felt familiar—hadn’t I also worn Western clothes, carried an iphone, driven a car, and gone out with friends in my previous life? All of those things had been so normal in America, but here they were alien experiences. I have never shopped at a mall in India. I have lived in this city for a year and a half without ever seeing most of the coffee shops, stores, bars, and restaurants where wealthy, educated Indians in my city hang out. Instead I have been to village weddings and Muslim saints’ graves, outdoor markets and public hospitals, train stations and slums.

It’s ironic, because actually I would rather go out for gelato on a special occasion than spend hours making buffalo biryani at home to celebrate something important. And I don’t particularly enjoy Indian weddings or visiting saints’ graves as a leisure activity, but I accompany my friends to these kinds of places because it’s what they do for fun, on the fairly rare occasions that they go anywhere at all. I’m not Indian, I’m not a Muslim, I’m not from the village, and I come from a wealthy, educated background, so it’s strange when I run into another expat or an Indian coworker at an NGO. They’re wearing Western clothes and talking about the city’s nightlife and checking facebook. They’re puzzled by my bangles and Indian dress, and my apparent ignorance about the city’s restaurants and bars; it’s hard to answer the unspoken questions about why I don’t do all of the “normal” things that they already associate with my culture. Why am I emulating people who are lower-class and “backward”? No one aspires to move into a slum, any more than someone would aspire to move into the projects, or into a trailer park, if they had another option. Am I just putting on some kind of act, pretending to be poor?

It’s a question worth asking, in order to make sure I’m not losing or hiding myself in the midst of all this radical “adjustment” across culture, religion, and socioeconomic class. But I really believe the answer to that question is, No, I’m not pretending to be someone I’m not. I’ve just chosen to make a lot of choices in my life based on a desire to relate to people who are different from me and to meet them on their own turf. That means that the superficial aspects of my life—food, clothing, social habits, etc.–often reflect the culture to which I am adapting rather than my own preferences or sensibilities. It means that what was foreign becomes familiar and what was familiar becomes foreign. But my hope is that the essential core of who I am and what I’m about will remain unchanged; merely translated into a new language, or converted into a new medium.

I know that my choices are strange, but my old life just doesn’t seem normal either, anymore. In America, jeans and English and a high school education don’t make you privileged, but here they do. In India, Western habits and food and clothing are all luxury commodities in themselves; the English language is a status symbol. I feel uncomfortable in the wealthy areas of the city because when I go there, the poor—the people I have lived among for the past two years—are still part of the scene, but as rickshaw pullers, children selling balloons on the side of the road, beggars entreating passing shoppers for change. I have begun learning to see things from their perspective, so it feels strange and wrong when I go to these places and feel that I’m being grouped in again with the wealthy shoppers, unaware and uninvolved, instead of with the poor on the sidelines.

Perhaps the main reason these situations feel uncomfortable for me is that they actually force a sort of crisis of identity: where do I fit, after all? Me, the foreigner with access to nearly limitless resources and opportunity, who owns a laptop and an ipod and a facebook account, but who lives without AC, speaks Hindi, and spends more of her time with illiterate village migrants in a slum than with people of her own race, religion, nationality, or socioeconomic background?

An outsider on the inside, an insider on the outside.

New to India, and yet more acquainted with its harsh realities than most of the middle- and upper-class Indians who have spent their whole lives here.

Integrated into the slum, and yet a total stranger to the worldview that orders my neighbors’ universe.

Sharing in my neighbors’ experiences, and yet completely unversed in the tragedy, suffering, and desperation that has shaped so much of their lives.

I’m still trying to find my place in this society. So my life feels strange to myself, when I bump into my old life unexpectedly in an expat or a wealthy Indian. Yet again, I find that life here forces me to learn more about myself than about anyone or anything else.

Source: New feed

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When we landed in Delhi, we noticed the usual things first: the crowds, the grime, the thick smoke hanging in the air from the little fires everyone burns this time of year to keep warm in the mornings and evenings. The area around the train station isn’t necessarily a fair representation of the country, because parts of India are beautiful, peaceful, and clean, but this was the gritty neighborhood where we took a small, dingy hotel room to await the departure of our train a day and a half after we flew in. The train was of course delayed, but this time we had bunks to ourselves and the car wasn’t nearly as crowded as the one that had taken us to Delhi two months before. I was feeling irritated by the delay and by the grimy railway station platform where we had waited before even boarding the train. I was also irritated that someone had stolen A.’s shoes on the train while we were sleeping, so that on arrival he walked off the train barefoot like an Indian holy man. But as we left the train station I felt my spirits lifting in spite of myself. It was sunny and cool, and as we sped along in the autorickshaw, I had to smile at the familiar scenes of street life that we breezed past: chai stands, laborers waiting for work, goats, cows, rickshaws, and pedestrians everywhere—chaotic and pulsing with life, the way that all of India is, with an energy that makes you excited and makes you want to be part of it all. It was less crowded and more laid-back than in Delhi. And the sky was actually blue.

Then back into our community: smiles, laughter, holding new babies that were born while we were gone, and somberly receiving news about the old men who died in our absence. People are happy, people are sad; some are healthy and some are sick. People have engagements and sorrows and secrets to tell us about, and we are part of it all, again. Everyone is telling us how much they missed us and how glad they are that we’re back. Our landlord’s two-year-old son started talking since we left and one of the few words he knows is my husband’s name, which he apparently began calling out at our door while we were gone and which he now happily yells up the stairwell when we are sitting in our room with the door open. I feel a sense of belonging that I have missed without realizing it; that I had been searching for without realizing it was here. I make roti in my simple kitchen, looking at the happy colors of the fresh green peppers and orange dal and red and yellow spices sitting in glass jars on my counter. I savor the familiar sound of the call to prayer, I rediscover the taste of chai with salt, I get my tongue around those strange d’s and r’s again and remember what things are called in Hindi. I wonder how we ever slept through all the night noises, but then I do. I feel a sense of peace and gratitude that I haven’t felt for a very long time, even before we left for the States.

It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. In fact, while we waited in limbo for our visas I had gone back and forth many times in my mind over whether or not I could really survive in India, or whether or not I even wanted to—you can survive a lot more than you would like to, sometimes.  These were questions I was afraid to even ask, feeling paralyzed in both directions if I were actually to make a decision. Or be told what to decide. If God asked me to stay, then I would feel trapped; if He asked me to leave, I felt I would be a failure. To my surprise (and initial horror), God turned the question back around on me and asked me what I wanted. After it became quite clear that He had no intention of making the decision for me, that there could be good and fruitful outcomes no matter what, and that I had complete freedom to do as I pleased, I initially felt more confusion than relief. But this realization then launched me into several weeks of contemplating the future without guilt or fear to drive the process.

I eventually found that in spite of my stressful experiences in India thus far, my uncertainty about what the future would hold, and my doubts about how much I can handle, I really wanted to go back to my community in India– not out of duty or guilt or fear or anything else, but out of love. I want to see some of my hopes for this place realized. I want to be there for people over time. I want to press on, for the first time in my life, past the restlessness and boredom and difficulty and frustration that so often tempt me to distract myself with something new and exciting. I do enjoy all of the great food, comforts, conveniences, and familiar cultural experiences that India does NOT have to offer, but I want to experience the deeper joy that comes from committing to a particular place and to particular people past the point where it’s just fun and convenient. I want to stick around long enough for me to actually change, instead of just opting for a change of scenery. That’s not easy when I have friends scattered around the world and can travel between nearly any two points on the globe in 24 hours. All that mobility and connectedness gives me the sense that I could go almost anywhere and do nearly anything (all the while comparing my situation side-by-side with others’ on social media), but I believe that committing to throw in our lot with a particular community—limiting ourselves to one choice among all the hypothetical possibilities that remain—is a universal challenge we all must face. In my own life, I am convinced that my spiritual growth depends on it.

So we’re back in our “village” again, and this time it feels like a gift. That has made all the difference. The air is thick with possibilities, and yet the present moment itself is full.

“Ma’am, please calm down.”

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After a two month slog through the visa application system, we are very happy to report that we have both been granted the visas we need to return to India! It was a long series of administrative mishaps involving BLS, the company to which the Indian consulate has outsourced its visa services.  Since the only job the Indian consulate has outsourced to this company is to make sure that all the necessary documents are present and stacked in the right order before they get submitted, it was confusing to repeatedly have our applications—which the BLS staff had checked over and approved—instantly rejected as incomplete at the consulate.

The lack of organization at the office was so extreme as to have been laughable, if so much of our lives didn’t depend on it. Their website required us to make an appointment beforehand, but on arriving at the office, everyone is given a number and waits for their turn regardless of previous appointment. We should have known it was a bad omen when we walked in the very first day and overheard a woman dressing down the manager for his office’s “sheer incompetence.” We had heard the horror stories about people receiving stranger’s passports in the mail instead of their own, or passports being lost altogether, but we hoped that we would be spare that kind of misfortune (my passport did end up lost at one point, but fortunately only for a few hours; it was found in the truck that ferried passports back and forth between BLS and the consulate).

What was laughable, even in the moment, was the bulletin board in the office which proudly displayed “appreciations”, letters of apparent praise written by those lucky customers who eventually had made it through the gauntlet. One letter, dated from a few months before, declared that the customer could see the company was in a sort of “panic”, but that he was confident that with more time and hard work, “you will become the kind of company you wish to be.” Another letter offered more back-handed praise to the company as a whole while marveling over the wonder of having found a single employee who was helpful: “Dear Mr. A., I would like to thank you first in trying to help me… In fact you came as a ray of hope for me otherwise I was lost between Travisa, BLS and Consulate General.  It is very hard to reach [the office], then getting somebody helpful like you is just a miracle.”

Comradery builds quickly among visa applicants in the office. One day several of us overheard a staff member asking someone to contact them if they had any further questions. “But how can I,” the woman countered, “when none of the numbers work, and you never answer your email?” “Yeah,” I chimed in, “None of those phone numbers are real.” “One of them is a fax machine!” another person shouted from the second row of chairs. Another day, a fellow applicant called me over and told me in conspiratorial tones that the excuse the staff had just made to me about the most recent problem with my visa was a lie; she knew it because she was here the day it happened. We all shared stories and bonded over recounting the absurdities of the application process. Everyone was in the same situation: no information on their visas, after weeks of waiting and multiple visits to the office.

In that environment, it wasn’t hard for my husband to lead a sort of quiet revolt on Christmas Eve, and have security called on him. When he found himself trying yet again to wrangle information out of an unhelpful staff, he insisted on waiting next to the manager’s desk instead of waiting “five more minutes”, again, after two hours of waiting, and his act of calm defiance inspired others to join him. They, too, had waited a long time with no effect.  Fortunately, by that time he had already made enough visits to the building to have befriended the amicable African immigrant who stood guard outside, so the whole matter came to an anticlimactic end after the security guard made his entrance, grinning, and politely invited him to take a seat.

One of the last times we visited the office, the woman at the information desk asked casually, “Did you ever make it to India?” I stared at her blankly, incredulous.  I suppose two months would have been enough time to do that, if we were so inclined to subject ourselves to this twice in as many months.  But did she not recall seeing us continuously during that time? A few minutes later one the staff said brightly, “Wow, you guys have spent so much time here it’s like you’ve become our family!” He said this without irony. I think I managed a weak smile.

Now, visas and tickets in hand, we’re thankful and relieved to be putting this season of waiting behind us and get back to the life we left behind in India. Uncertainty abounds there, too, but it takes on a different shade in the light of concrete hopes and plans.

Between Points A and B

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Well, we’re still in America– not where we expected to be by this date. Many people have told us encouragingly that there must be something else we’re supposed to do here before we go back to India… otherwise we’d already be there, right? There are definitely meaningful and important things that have happened during our stay, but these days we’re mostly feeling bored and looking for useful ways to fill time.

I don’t think there is anything left that I’m supposed to do. What’s becoming clear to me is that the challenging invitation in front of me while I wait isn’t actually to do anything, but rather to learn how to stop doing. Perhaps the reason I’m still here (besides the incompetence of the people handling our visa applications) is that I’m being given an opportunity to learn how to truly wait for something.

I don’t wait well. I’ve rarely ever waited for anything in my life. Because waiting means embracing emptiness inside of oneself; living in the actual tension of not knowing what will happen next, and perhaps even reaching a point of spiritual indifference from which one can joyfully embrace whatever answer or circumstance arises.

I don’t usually embrace emptiness. I run from it– which is why most of the time my “waiting” is actually an active process of filling my mind with all sorts of plans and counter-plans and contingencies, thinking ahead in both directions to prepare myself for every possible outcome before it happens.

I spend time forecasting how long I think it will take for whatever I am awaiting to arrive.

I count down days.

I imagine how I’ll feel when it happens.

I imagine my response if something unexpected happens, and then explore what each and every one of those things might be, so that I will expect them if they happen.

Creating my own plans and answers is no substitute for patiently waiting and receiving the plans and answers that God has for me. But there’s a paradox here, because as human beings we are co-creators and co-conspiritors with God, which means that we work cooperatively with Him to create the future. We have an important role to play in shaping what kind of person we will become and what kind of world we will live in! Where we delude ourselves is in thinking that we can actually create ourselves or our future independently of God.

Rather than action plans and will-power, our growth ultimately depends on our decisions to receive grace or not. Will we accept God’s invitations in our life? Will we recognize God’s activity; push into that realm of weakness and vulnerability that brings us closer to God? Even a thwarted plan or an unexpected delay can be a grace to us if we allow it to be.

So we can resist and kick and scream and slow down the process of our own growth, but we cannot engineer that process to ensure our preferred timing and style. Waiting is not merely a formula of putting in a set amount of time and effort to get a predictable or desired result. It is always an opening of ourselves to the unknown; a giving of consent for our own expectations and plans to be subverted and changed, and for new possibilities to come into existence. Waiting is a patient, sustained yes to God which humbly lays aside our own desires—not disregarding them, but accepting the possibility of giving them up in exchange for something we would not have chosen for ourselves.

I am in that in-between space now, trying to wait with open hands. Amidst my boredom, confusion, frustration, and uncertainty about the future, I am trying to learn how to take hold of the grace that is offered and to allow it to change me. It isn’t easy and I don’t always take it, but as many times as I get wound up in anxiety or bids for control, I find that I am allowed to wander back and try again. I find that grace is offered to me again and again.

The Bad News is Over

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          As a mentor of ours in New Zealand likes to say, “The Good News is that the bad news is over.” He says that to discover what Jesus’ message is for a given person or society, you first have to find out what the circumstances of that particular person or group are: their motivations, their hopes and fears, their problems, and their life experiences. What is it that is keeping them from God? Where are they in need of hope, or healing? The amazing thing about Jesus is that even while he proclaims universal truths about what it means to be human, he also approaches individual human beings with a personal message of truth for them. God is one, yet he meets each of us on different journeys and in different ways.

To the rich young ruler, the good news is that Jesus is inviting him to cast off all of the wealth, possessions, and comfort that have blocked him from experiencing real life with all of its joys and sorrows, and he lays before him the opportunity to commune with God through loving service and relationship with other people. To the impoverished paralytic by the side of the pool of Siloam who has never known comfort or riches, who has spent years waiting for someone more powerful than himself to rescue him, Jesus speaks words of healing and empowerment: “Get up and walk.”

To the Pharisees, who have spent their lives pursuing the spiritual disciplines of fasting, pious works, and thorough obedience to religious law, Jesus breaks through the delusion that they have achieved true relationship with God by denouncing heir false piety and pointing them toward the path that would rescue them from their particular bondage: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” His repeated, harsh rebukes of these arrogant men are actually a loving and persistent call for them to embrace the only change that could save them. But with those who are buried in shame and guilt rather than pride and apparent righteousness, Jesus takes a different tack. There is no rebuke from him for the woman caught in adultery. Jesus never snuffs out a smoldering wick or breaks a bruised reed, and he recognizes the poor in spirit when he sees them. In this case, it is the self-righteous accusers who are shamed out of following through with the punishment they had planned, and Jesus offers that fallen woman the surprise of mercy and a fresh start instead of the anger she expected from God and society alike.

Everyone’s journey is different. Some people come chasing after Jesus with a determined hope that refuses to be turned away—think of the blind man crying out to Jesus over the demands of the crowd for him to shut up, or the guys lowering their disabled friend down to Jesus through a hole they had dug in a stranger’s roof, because they were determined to get to Jesus in spite of the long line of people waiting outside. Other people are just minding their own business, or even hiding from Jesus, when he begins pursuing them: that’s the Samaritan woman at the well, who’s taken off guard by the man who strikes up conversation with her in spite of the taboos which divide their genders, their religions, and their races. That’s also Zacchaeus, who thinks he is inconspicuously observing Jesus from the safe distance of his tree branch when Jesus puts him on the spot and invites himself over for lunch.

And so it is with our journeys: different people, different seasons, different truths which Jesus speaks into our lives to guide us down the particular path which will lead each of us to God. I’m trying to get better about accepting that, so I can stop judging other people according to the truth that has been give to me. Like Peter on the beach with Jesus, hearing that the road ahead of him will include suffering and a sacrifice of his personal freedom, I turn to others and want to know, “What about these guys? Are they going to have to give up as much as I do to follow you?” And Jesus, still the same 2,000 years later, replies simply, “What is that to you? You, follow me.”

It is probably my growing awareness of the unique and personal nature of journeying with Jesus that has me so frustrated with the spiritual formulas, the moral rules, and the angry God of judgment that I so often hear proclaimed in churches as supposedly “good news”. This message of fear and judgment does nothing to cure the disease of the righteous religious people who already know the formulas and keep the rules, and it crushes the people who are already “bruised reeds”–the sexually broken, the abused, those who already hate themselves and expect rejection from God with equal intensity.

I think the Good News is love—in all of its universal truth and individual expression. Love was what Jesus offered to pharisees, paralytics, and prostituted women alike, but because he knew each of them down to the very core of their being, the path toward God he offered to each of them was unique. The good news for each of them, and for each of us, is that the bad news is over.

On Miracles and Justice through Community

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          This week I heard a moving story about a family’s brush with death and their experience of God’s miraculous intervention to save the life of their newborn daughter. They described the six hundred people who were interceding for them all at the same time, the nearness of God throughout the whole ordeal, the state-of-the-art medical facilities and the world-class doctors they were able to get treatment from. I appreciated hearing an honest and personal account of a very difficult situation, and at the end of the story I felt happy and relieved to see a photo of their adorable little girl who continues to develop as a normal, healthy child. But this story of miraculous intervention and the avoidance of tragedy also brought up more complex emotions and questions for me. I couldn’t help but think of all the babies and children in my neighborhood in India who have died of preventable causes over the past few years– things much simpler than the condition this baby suffered from. I wondered whether those children are any less precious to God than this little girl who was saved. I wondered whether God is really petty enough to count the number of intercessors before deciding whether to get involved.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve begun trying to sort out the difference between God’s blessings and the privileges that we hold onto for ourselves. In this story, it was remarkable that the child survived a very serious health condition and a very rare complication after a high-risk surgery– her recovery is certainly a miracle that goes beyond the limits of medical treatment. But still, a part of her story is that she was operated on by, literally, the best surgeon in the world. A part of her story is that her family had access to some of the best medical centers in the world, that they could afford it, and that their families were wealthy enough to put them up in a hotel and provide for their every need while they waited for their daughter to be able to leave the hospital. All of these factors of geography, income, and family connections played a significant role in determining whether the child would live or die.

I’ve waited outside of crappy public hospitals in India with families who shuttle relatives back and forth from home to bring meager provisions for the patient and the people who are waiting at their bedside. I’ve seen the families who come in from the villages for treatment and who just sleep outside on the grass or curl into the fetal position on one corner of their patient’s hospital bed for nights on end because there’s nowhere else to stay and no money to pay for accommodation. I’ve seen situations in which so many odds are stacked against them that it would take a big miracle to save anyone, and I wonder– have we taken some of our privileges for granted and given God credit for things that global economics, or politics, or we personally have allotted to ourselves? How many Indian doctors and nurses are competing for high-paying positions in American hospitals instead of taking positions at hospitals and clinics in their home country where there are severe staff shortages because our country can afford to pay them more, and because treating wealthy patients in spacious, private offices is less stressful than treating poor patients in overcrowded clinics?

I’m not resentful that children in my home country get great medical care. On the contrary, I join this child’s parents in celebrating the gift of her life! But I am also disturbed that children in my adopted home country hardly get any medical care at all, and I also grieve with the parents of so many children whose lives have been lost– not for lack of divine intrvention, but for lack of basic medical care… and maybe for lack of God’s people intervening.

I’m struck by how much relationships can determine in our lives. I know many wealthy people who are extremely generous amongst their friends and relatives. They are often quick to respond to any need that is brought to their attention, but the problem is that few needs are likely to crop up in their network of relationships, because everyone they know is also likely to be fairly educated, wealthy, and well-placed in the world. Likewise, when entire families, neighborhoods, groups of peope, or nations are poor, chances are that the neediest people will only have other needy people in their networks of relationships when some crisis arises.

What if we could change that? What if we who are wealthy (if you’re literate and have access to a computer and an internet connection to read this, then you are in that category) could expand our circle of friends and family to include those who are poor? If a stranger needs housing, or cancer treatment, or a hot meal, we may or may not contribute through some indirect, sterile line of charitable donation. But if our sister or father or friend is the one who is ill or without a job or in need of a place to stay, there’s no way we would let them go without!

The redefinition of family and responsibility for our fellow human beings is at the very heart of the Kingdom Jesus preached. He scandalized his listeners by declaring that his mother and brother and sisters were not merely his biological kin, but included all those who did the will of God. He revolutionized our concept of the “neighbor” whom we are to love as we love ourselves to include not just those who are ethnically, religiously, or geographically close to us but even those who are our enemies. Many people were offended by these teachings because they believed that Jesus was devaluing the relationships between parents and children, or between people of the same nation or religion. Those people didn’t understand him. He was actually telling us that we owe that same level of committed care and compassion to whoever is in need of it, whether they’re biological family or not.

Expanding our sense of family and neighborhood goes beyond just moving money around. It means making our time, our energy, our resources, our connections, and our know-how available to those we have accepted as part of our surrogate family. Maybe that means moving into a neighborhood where poor people will live nextdoor to us. Maybe it means creating opportunities to build relationship with people in need by volunteering somewhere where we will cross paths with people we wouldn’t meet in the course of our usual routine. However we go about it, it’s bound to take some intentional effort and creativity because it will take us beyond our comfort zone. But I believe that if we can do that, then all of the advantages we’ve been given in life—whether direct gifts from God or the unjust gains of an unequal system—will become true blessings to those who give and to those who receive.

Advent

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          Two years ago, we were waiting to move to India for the first time. This advent season, we are waiting for visas to be processed so that we can return to India. There are certainly times that seem more clearly marked than others by uncertainty or waiting, but the truth is that Advent speaks to our perpetual life experience of living in the present and waiting for the future to unfold. No matter what season of life we are in, we harbor hopes, fears, and expectations in our hearts; we turn excitement, possibilities, or dread over and over in our minds. And advent speaks to that tension of suspended possibilities; of hoping and preparing but not knowing how it all will turn out.

I used to think it was a bit artificial to go through the motions of supposedly waiting in suspense for something that we all knew was coming in a predictable form on a predictable schedule. After all, Advent culminates in Christmas every year. No surprises there. But Advent is not just the season of counting down to Christmas day—it’s also the long vigil for God’s arrival. We are waiting for God to be born in our world, to grow in our lives, to proclaim peace in every painful situation of conflict and confusion that we find ourselves tangled up in. And the truth is that while we may have our own ideas of what that will mean, we don’t know exactly what it will look like when it happens.

Advent, a wise priest told me last week, is the spiritual art of waiting for the unexpected: preparing ourselves for what we know while remaining open to the unknown. If we aren’t on the lookout for Jesus, we’ll be caught off guard by his arrival in our lives. But if all of our careful planning fools us into believing that we can predict and control the future, then that rigorous preparation may actually prevent us from embracing him when he comes! Our assumptions may prevent us from accepting the surprising ways that Christ chooses to incarnate in our lives and in our world. It’s a delicate balance of planning and not planning; preparation and spontaneity.