Jumping off Cliffs

The other day I was taking a walk down memory lane, poking around the old documents in my My Documents folder (I write books. Did you know that?) and I found Him.

Him is the story of how I became a Christian. I went to my favorite coffee shop one day to get some homework done and I came out four hours later, blinking into the sun like a blind cave animal, 50 pages the richer and no idea where it had come from. Certainly not from within me; the only explanation then, and now, is that it was the Lord guiding my pen (well, fingers). I spent the next three days in a blur of frenzied fingers, pouring my heart onto the page. By the time I came back to myself I'd written the first half of Him. I'm still not quite sure what the end product was. Poetry? A memoir? Did I invent my own genre?

The portion of Him I'm about to show you is the last page of the book/memoir/whatever it is. At that point in my life I was having a very hard time justifying my return to Auburn in the fall. I'd spent three months in Texas with the four most amazing people in the world, starting my life over from scratch. I learned so many things that summer, but the moment that sticks with me the most happened on a very hot July day in the Third Ward. We were painting that day, a string of five clapboard houses in the poorest area of Houston; a place where kids run loose in the streets because both parents work during the day. The sun was so hot that the paint was drying on our paintbrushes. I'd stepped in a fire ant bed that morning as we prayed before starting the day, and my feet were nearly too swollen to keep shoes on. I was sunburned and hot and dehydrated and I wanted nothing more than to go home and shower and crawl in my bed to take a nap before dinner started. 

When it was time to leave I sent some of my kids with a bucketfull of sticky paintbrushes to find a hose so they could wash them out. I felt like I was herding cats, trying to get my group to stop painting each other and load up our supplies so we could get home. Then the paintbrush kids came back and told me that they couldn't find a water hose to wash the brushes out with. 

I rode home silently fuming; my kids lined up for the showers, as they should have, but because it was my worksite, I was in charge of rinsing out the brushes. My feet were on fire from the ant bites and I was covered in sweat and paint and who knew what else, bent over washing thirty plus paint brushes in the hot Texas sun. It was dinnertime before I finished, and then time for Chapel, and then time for a staff meeting, and by the time I had a minute to myself it was too dark to go outside to the trailer where our showers were. We lived in La Marque, but we fondly referred to our town as Sketchville. It wasn't safe to go outside alone after dark, especially to the shower trailer, and I wound up going to bed without taking a shower at all. 

The next day I got to the worksite and unloaded all thirty paint brushes, gritting my teeth against the thought of washing out all of them, again, when I got home that afternoon. After we prayed I got my group started on their jobs, and I was walking around checking on everyone when the front door of one of the houses we were working on opened. 

A teenaged boy came outside, holding a five gallon water jug like the ones we filled up for our campers every day. I could tell it was empty by the way he carried it; he plunked it down in a shopping cart parked next to the house and started walking slowly down the street. I didn't think anything about it until he came back an hour later, this time lugging a full water jug up the wheelchair ramp into the front door of his home.

I saw some things with blinding clarity then; I felt like God was shouting at me. "This family has to walk miles and miles to find water, every day," he was saying, "and you are worried about washing out your paintbrushes? Who are you?" 

That was the moment at which I knew that missions would play a huge part in the rest of my life because I realized how selfish I'd been. I was upset that I couldn't wash out some paint brushes, and the family I was supposed to be serving didn't even have running water. It was a moment of truth; I realized that not everyone lived like I did. Not everyone had been as ridiculously blessed. Not everyone had running water, or toilets that flushed, or access to a shower, or any of the other mundane things that I took for granted every day.  

By the time the summer ended I felt (or maybe I wanted--I still have trouble figuring out which) like I was being called to Africa to start an orphanage. I'd just read Radical and True Religion, and God had totally and completely flipped my world upside down. I nearly dropped out of Auburn before I ever came back for the fall semester of my junior year. To be fair, my motives were not completely with missions; there were other things that I didn't want to return to. I felt like it was easier to start completely over somewhere new (like Africa) than to build a new life on the ruins of an old one; it was easier to love orphans than to cut ties with the lifestyle and people I had loved before I met Christ. 

Him, or at least the part of it I want to share with you, picks up in the last three days of my time that summer, in the jungle of Puerto Rico, where I'd gone with most of the TEAMeffort staff members on an end-of-summer mission trip. 

***

we have a free afternoon the day before we leave so all of us load up in busses and drive hours out of town and hike through the woods and then stand and stare in awe at the forty foot cliff they want us to jump off of. i know there is nothing below me but water but i am terrified of hitting my head on a rock or jumping in the wrong spot or going down so deep i cant come back up in time or something else suitably gruesome and at first i just decide to sit by the waterfall and watch everyone else jump but then ashleigh gives me the stink eye and says,

you are in puerto rico.

in the summer.

you’ve just had the most amazing three months of your life.

and now you have a chance to jump off a cliff

(in puerto rico)

 and you won’t do it because you’re scared?

and so i say,

okay, fine,

because ashleigh is right ninety eight percent of the time.

so i climb off the waterfall and swim across the river and climb up the cliff and stare forty feet down where hannah and heather and ashleigh are cheering me on and i realize that life is a lot like this cliff because how many times have i stood at the top of a scary situation with God at the bottom of a cliff cheering me on and instead of choosing to jump i chose to give him almost every reason why i wouldn’t trust him. who am i kidding? the creator of the universe was cheering me on!  

ashleigh says you can do it. God says let your faith overcome your fear.

i am at the edge of a cliff with no way to go but forward.

and so, i jump. 

***

Anyways. Now I am getting to the whole purpose of this post: I got a phone call for a job interview the other day. The principal of a high school called me while I was teaching and I didn't get his voicemail until I was in Walgreens after school, shopping for light bulbs and bobby pins and other household ephemera. At first all I could do was stand there staring at the rows of household products, a puzzled look on my face. God had told me to go to Kosovo because no one hired in December, hadn't He? So what was this voicemail doing on my phone?!

Honor me with your time, God said, and I will honor you with a job. There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.

I thought, just for a second, about what would happen if I went for the interview, just to see how things went. But no--I felt immediately convicted. And I realized how much the Lord had grown me since my time on that waterfall in Puerto Rico!

A few years ago if you had told me that I would spend six months in Kosovo teaching English, I wouldn't have believed you. I would have stood at the top of my waterfall and told you every reason why I couldn't go to Kosovo--I was not a mature enough Christian, I didn't know anything about teaching ESL, I didn't know how to get there, I didn't know how to deal with kids.

And guess what? The Lord has groomed me for this very situation. And not only has he groomed me for it, he has given me a desire for it and a love of doing these things! In fact, he has given me such a desire for missions that I called Mr. Man back and told him that I was going to be occupied teaching ESL through June, and didn't think any more about it! God's words were still ringing in my ears, and I felt their power and truthfulness. I am trusting the Lord to provide me with the funds to get to Kosovo, and I am trusting him to provide me with the funds to survive once I get back.

The Lord is so good!