Tag: Oklahoma

Time after Time

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Time is funny.

Einstein told us time was relative, that it depended on fixed points, speeds, and movements for time to have any sort of meaning. I have certainly felt its relativity these days. Life is on the move. I’m in transition. A few days here, a few weeks there, Christmas back with family, and then Africa. Until I move into my house in Uganda, I won’t be in any one place long enough to collect dust.

That move still doesn’t quite feel real to me. I am excited for it. I’m praying about it. I’m trying to learn and prepare as much as I can before I go. But I’m in limbo. I’m not settled in Africa yet, but I already feel out of place in Oklahoma. And the time…

Time doesn’t come for me in seconds, minutes, days, or weeks anymore. It seems to move very differently, in different intervals. The units of measurement for time aren’t hollow seconds, but meaningful rhythms and patterns. How long has it been since I saw North Carolina friends? Well, as long as those daisies sitting in my vase have lasted. How long until I move? Only so many more hugs from Dad, or heart-to-hearts with Jacob, or episodes of a favorite TV show with Mom. How many hours have I driven to see friends and family? That’s measured in the number of audio books I’ve listened through. How long until I leave for training? That’s counted in how many churches I’ve gotten to visit and share with.

Time has a way of telescoping for me recently—of stretching out and shrinking up in the most unreliable ways. The few short minutes it takes to drink in exactly the way the mist hangs over damp Oklahoma oaks in a purple dusk will stretch to years in my memory until time brings me back to Oklahoma and gives me the chance to see it again. Time totally stops when I pull up the car just to take in the exact way the bronzy Oklahoma twilight reflects in still puddles across a gravel backroad. And yet whole days vanish as I try to pack and sort and check off items on a very long to-do list.

Time right now feels less like a certain quantity of days until I move and more like a certain number of brilliant starry nights with a fresh Fall wind and the Milky way overhead, a certain number of those signature Oklahoma sunsets that stretch and stretch over the fields for miles just until they break and the fiery sky snaps into dusk, a certain number of last hugs with friends, last tears at parting, last goodbyes.

And all the time, Africa is calling.

As I pack up my life here and bring things to conclusion before I leave, I find my mind increasingly often faced towards Africa, contemplating the new life there, the new favorite sights, sounds, faces, hugs. Between all my lasts and my unreliable measurements of time, Africa looms larger and larger, rushing the days past me, but stretching them out with tasks of conclusion and preparation.

Paul wrote to his Ephesian brothers and sisters, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise, but as wise, making the best use of time, because the days are evil.”

There’s quite a bit in that to calm and comfort me during this transition. If I face these days wisely, counting them in whatever ways I can, making the best use of my times however short or long, I will walk as a child of the Light, in goodness and truth, and I will please my Lord. That’s what Paul says in Ephesians 5. And he says that the days can be evil—can rush on by without anyone the better off for them unless…

Unless I redeem my time, soak in all the rest, the preparation, the fellowship, the experiences of the Lord’s faithfulness.

Moses was somewhat of an authority on time himself, having lived through a lot more of it than we will, and experiencing quite a few transitions himself. In psalm 90 he muses on what he had learned. Our days can be like grasses, he says, fresh in the morning and withered by evening. “We bring our years to an end like a sigh,” he says.

Wow. What a picture. How many of my days end like a sigh? That sounds like such a tragedy in light of the joy we can have in our Lord and the pleasure we can have in the days he has given us. “So,” Moses says, “teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom… Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.”

If we want to redeem our time, we must count our days, make them count, fill them with joy in the Lord’s presence, squeezing all the good we can out of our days instead of letting them rush on and end like a sigh. That, Paul and Moses say, is a wise way to live.

So as these crazy days come to a close, as my transition comes nearer, I hope you will find me, dear friends, counting my days, redeeming my time, and making the best use of them. With the Lord and his wisdom, my days may be full and joyful, not a bit wasted or sighed away.

Summer Symphony

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Free Matinee tickets

We listen from black vinyl bucket seats

Atop a puttering tractor.

 

Standing hay sighs slowly in the breeze.

Grasshoppers flick in the dry stems.

 

Hidden crickets raise an alarm

And grind into a higher gear

To match the tractor’s engine.

 

Cicadas in their perches

Count the rising temperature

With anxious screeches.

 

Gravel groans beneath hooves, tires, feet

And the cow’s tail swipes and slaps at gnats.

 

Oaks creak and stretch in the wind,

Their scorched leaves lazily clap.

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An ember sunset sweeps for miles

inking Oklahoma orange

seeping into rough red dirt.

 

I know no greater glitter

than the sun sparkles in tassels

of a field full of corn.

 

A wide West sky blushes,

blooms flame, flinging phoenix fire

across the dome of the dying day.

 

Dusk descends with dewy exhale.

Evening velvets into vagaries

of lingering liminal light.

 

Speckled stars scintillate

in the winking windows of heaven

shuddering disbelief at their distant beauty.

 

The sickle-sharp moon

soothes the sea of grasses

into blue oblivion.

 

Wind washes the world awake

and signals the sparrow to sing

the first-light fanfare

of phoenix flight to life.

 

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My Acorn

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Repatriation sounds like a dirty word. And it is. A lot of emotional and mental mess comes with moving from a foreign place you called home back to the place you originally called home. A lot of that mess comes from expecting to be able to fall right back in with how things were before you left—the same friendships, the same habits, the same communities, the same you. But those things aren’t the same as when you left, and the most different of them all is you.

In the year and a half I was away, my siblings grew up. My church family is made up almost entirely of a new group of people. People got married, had kids, moved away. And in my own year and a half, I learned a new language, made new friends, changed my habits, and learned more or less how to be at home in a completely different culture.

Bringing all of those experiences back with me wasn’t as simple as just packing up my suitcases for the plane ride, which I’ll assure was no easy task in and of itself. And sharing those experiences wasn’t as easy as unpacking my suitcase and showing off my Bulgarian pottery or books or tablecloths.

Even though I’ve been back over four months, I still have no context for many of my overseas experiences and stories. Many people don’t have a clue what I’m talking about when I explain my favorite Bulgarian foods. Most people don’t understand when I explain my yearning for at least one chance to walk to the grocery store, or chat up the lady at the fruit stand before I buy half a kilo of cherries she picked that morning.

In my head I know that this is the same experience in reverse of when I would try to explain living by the river to my Bulgarian friends, or fireflies and starry skies to kids who had only ever lived in the confines of a Bulgarian city. But my heart doesn’t understand the similarities of the two experiences. It only feels yearning—for both places.

And that’s where the mess of repatriation comes in. Is it wrong to miss my new country when I have the blessing to be back in my native one? Is it wrong to take my native country for granted and forget the foreign country that showed me hospitality and kindness and grace? Sometimes I feel guilt that I can enjoy bluebell ice cream or a quick drive to the grocery store when I know my Bulgarian friends never will. And sometimes I’m confused when I have to make a schedule to meet a friend, or when I take for granted that I can hop in my car and drive anywhere I need to.

But those feelings are comparable to times in Bulgaria when I would feel guilty about the far places of the world I got to see that none of my American friends had experienced, or when I would feel confusion at the beautiful parks full of snow, or the fresh produce markets I took for granted because they filled my every day.

The guilt and confusion come in deciding, what should I like more? I love my native country. But I also love the country that became home to me in the past two years. They have both nurtured and grown me in ways the other couldn’t. Now that I’m back in my ‘home’ country, my native country, I realize that BOTH Bulgaria AND the United States are my homes now, in different ways. It’s not wrong to miss and love both of them. My experience as an expat grew me and shaped me, and the most gracious and grateful thing I can do with that experience is to acknowledge its place in my life.

I can love both Bulgaria’s yellow sunflower fields as far as the eye can see and the lazy mayfly haze that hovers above the tall grasses shimmering in the Oklahoma sunset. I can appreciate the chilling beauty of Bulgaria’s snowy mountain vistas just as much as Oklahoma’s mile-long sunset shadows across the flat fields and the golden sunlight that seeps in through your skin. I can remember the grey ghetto dirt just as fondly as the Oklahoma red that sifts through my socks. I can long for the taste of fresh strawberries and yoghurt just as much as I enjoy homemade ice cream sweetened by good company. And it’s alright for my heart to race through the peaks at memories of rushing mountain streams just as quickly as it races when the lazy Oklahoma rivers trip along their banks and stir my childhood awake in me.

Repatriation, I’m learning, is largely a personal thing. I am the one most changed by it. I carry the change with me, and if I let it, it will continue to grow in me and stretch my heart wide enough to carry two loves for two very different countries.

You all know by now that Tolkien’s deep, earthy Middle Earth stories are some of my favorites. And it should come as no surprise to you that the picture I think best encompasses my repatriation comes from them. In the film version of The Hobbit, the main character Bilbo was just an ordinary, armchair variety person until he was called off into the wide world for an adventure. Near the end of his adventure as he sits musing on it, he pulls an acorn from his pocket—one he picked up along the journey.

The leader of his traveling companions asks him, “You’ve carried it all this way?”

Bilbo answers, “I’m going to plant it in my garden, in Bag End.”

The leader of the amazing adventure, a king himself, surrounded by a royal hall filled with treasures, remarks, “It’s a poor prize to take back to the Shire.”

But Bilbo answers thoughtfully, “One day it’ll grow. And every time I look at it, I’ll remember. Remember everything that happened: the good, the bad … and how lucky I am that I made it home.”

My experience overseas feels in many ways like a small acorn I carry with me, unsure of what to do with it. As I’ve continued to examine and sort through my last two years of adventures overseas, I’ve noticed it growing. Planted in my native soil, my kernel of experience has already sprouted and become a sapling. As I remember my experiences, good and bad, I remember what they’ve taught me. And that tiny tree has already stretched my heart big enough to love my two countries as my two homes.

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