Three Autumns.

or "post to keep my suitcase heart at bay."

I’ve just woken up from something of a vision.

In the vision I was at an American grocery store. I was shopping for cheese. After finding the cheese I wanted I stepped out of the store and into the evening autumn air, my flannel protecting me from the chill. I got into a green car and went about doing the things I normally do. The vision ended there. Rather, I forced it to end. It was too painful. It was all too painful to remind myself that it’s autumn all over America, and that I live in a place where it’s hot and humid and rainy every single day of the season.

I used to not like autumn so much. When I was a child I associated it with stagnation; the freedom of summer was over and I had to once again rebuild the self-discipline that my summer was spent destroying with plays and friends and staying up until three in the morning for no reason. I even solidified a certain hatred for it in 2007, when it became associated with the figurative death that only suburban angst, community college, and existential loneliness can bring. But then something changed: One august afternoon, I got into a car and moved to Kirksville. It was only about 200 miles away, but it felt like a different world. And suddenly the autumn took new symbolism in the abundance of life that the season would bring me. For three consecutive years, the falling of the leaves and the donning of the flannel and putting on gloves for the first time of the year was directly correlated with the making of new friends, and of god opening up for me a new season of growth and of plenty and life filling up with wonder and contentment and joy to the point of bursting. Whenever I think of autumn, I think of just how broken I was three years ago. How much I depended on myself, and how meaningless everything in life felt, and how I didn’t really want to get through the rest of my life feeling so alone. And how in each of these three autumns, God put people in my life and used them to begin to destroy all the parts of me that I had made to protect myself and defend myself and feel secure and as though I could make it all on my own. It would get almost unbearably cold, but my life was full. Never, ever underestimate the power of kindness.

Our first week here we talked about the ways God speaks to us. There are a lot of ways, but the one that stuck out to me was “coincidence”. I relate to it because I look back at the last three autumns, and each of them is marked with coincidental happenings that ended up twisting my entire life up in the lives of people who were strangers at the time but who I now call family. And it wasn’t perfect, and there were things that I would have done differently, but I think of that scared eighteen-year-old-boy who was so hungry to feel worth something and to know that he was built for something more noble than bathing his brain cells in dopamine. The worth and purpose I was looking for I found in the following command: “love the Lord your God more than anything, and love other people just as much as you love yourself.” And this seemed to me at the time like a quaint true maxim that was contrary to my nature and altogether very simple. Taken at face value it doesn’t really mean anything. But then through a series of events I’m still trying to piece together myself, it became clear to me. The key word in this command seems to be love. And at the time I didn’t really know what that was. I thought love was what you felt when you did a good job and everyone told you they were proud of you, or the feelings you feel when you look at a pretty girl, or any other number of quantifiable statistics and figures that you can look at as empirical evidence for value. And oh, dear children, how wrong I got proven over and over again, each autumn serving as something of a loving slap in the face to all the lies I had chosen to believe. And it brought me to this point where I could actually trust God enough to follow him here, to a place where there is no autumn. The only difference is that the dirty rain insists on beating a little bit harder each day, and the extra humidity that accompanies it.

And part of me misses it all so much, but there’s this part of me that is filled with contentment. This contentment comes from my realization only now that it was never the weather that made those autumns so special. It was always the people, and always God. And it’s those same things that I find both in this place and in the traces and people of my life from those three autumns that continue to weave their way through my life even still. And there is a peace that comes from that, that the good that God is doing is only increasing with time.

Even if I’m still praying for an envelope of fallen Kirksville leaves.

This post is dedicated to the people I’m referring to in this post, who will know that it’s them by a slight nagging suspicion that it might be them.

every twelve year old 's dream

I finally fumbled in the right digits to call home, and in talking with my mom I stumbled into the perfect metaphor for what DTS is and how all of you readers can understand what we’re all going through. Ok, so remember when you’re young and you went to summer camp? and it was great and fun and you stayed in a room or a tent or a cabin with a bunch of different kids, and you did lots of fun things and it was better than how your summer was going so far, but it seems to go by way too fast, and so by the end of the week you have to leave and you think to yourself: “I wish summer camp just went on forever.”

DTS is perpetual summer camp. That idea of a weeklong summer camp, with the adjustments necessary to make it work in a 5-month timeframe. By saying this I don’t mean to trivialize it; we spend 4 hours a day in class and have various other activities and chores, and we’re always up to great stuff and it seems like the Lord is constantly working in us and through us and changing us, and life is abundant in this place. Every week so far God’s broke me or changed me in some meaningful way. The way I described it in my journal is that it’s similar to how muscle is built. it’s not merely piled on; by working out,you’re actually breaking down the current muscle, sending your body the message that what you have isn’t strong enough and you need better. And it’s sort of like that, because in this environment you inevitably come up against every weakness in you. Having to be loving and joyful and peaceful and patient and kind and good and faithful at all times takes work. and God doesn’t seem to be in the business of patching your flaws, but instead it’s like he’s pulling all your baby teeth so that the big teeth can grow. and until you let him do it the big teeth start to come in and mash down on the nerves of the baby teeth, driving you crazy.

There are a lot of things that are easy to get over for the first week or so, like those inconveniences you deal with at summer camp; not being able to text all your friends, not being able to go to the store and buy the things you’re used to, the slight feeling of homesickness. and when you’re gone for a week it’s ok. but when you’ve been gone for a month, and you have no idea what’s going in the lives of just about everyone you care about, and you have 20 square feet of personal space, and you never, ever have any privacy, the quaintness that was so endearing at first doesn’t necessarily lose its’ appeal but it at any rate loses the sense of novelty.

On saturday I ended up going to Chinatown with Grace, buying the most expensive glasses of water we ever paid for (Look at the menu before you sit down, kids.), and we went to church. and because I went to church on saturday, it meant that while everyone else went to church on sunday, I had three floors of the NRTC to myself for a few hours. It was delightful. I listened to about an hour of the previous’ week’s Prairie Home Companion on the internet that wasn’t bogged down by the din of 20 laptops, and I played it as loud as I wanted, and I went for a walk around the triple-pond of the ramsong campus. I had a bowl of rice for 20 baht at a cafe. I would sing as loud as I wanted, prayed out loud, and made thump noises on all of the bunk-beds, and played folk songs as loudly as I wanted on a borrowed guitar. and it was my sabbath, and it was delightful. and then in a slow trickle, everyone was back, and my privacy faded, but that small amount of time was enough to reconstitute my sanity. When I first got here I rationalized a lot of the inconveniences I would put up with as temporary things that I could deal with because it was just a few months and soon I would be done and I would have a nice big room and I could make my own food and do my own grocery shopping. Except that that attitude was completely wrong, and inconsistent with the fact that we as humans seem to be built for community and interdependence. Even if I don’t go off and join some commune, even having a family and living in interdependence with other people means that a lot of these inconveniences are going to be relatively permanent themes in my life. and I’m learning that. And I’m learning to wake up in the morning and love feeling tired and a little sore, and to joyfully eat a breakfast that’s been lovingly and questionably prepared for me. (Side note, our kitchen is frequented by the goats, Clive and Lewis, along with the occasional cat and lizard, and has the sketchiest oven and dishwashing protocol I’ve ever seen. the fact that I’ve only gotten sick once is a minor miracle.) And I’m learning to love people even though having to put up with them on a daily basis can be a consistent challenge. And I’m finding that I’m up for it. That it’s worth it. That I can love and miss everyone back home so much, and yet not be filled with any regret or heartache because daily God confirms that this is where I am to be for this season in my life. 

Another thing that makes it perpetual summer camp is that it’s september 20 and it’s 8 in the morning and it’s 82 degrees. And it’s slowly sinking in that for me there will be no autumn. no falling leaves, no flannel weather, no scarves, and that the sweat that collects on my back with every walk to the market will still collect in november. and that makes me miss home, just a little bit. and more than anything the thing I’ve loved about fall in the past few years is that fall meant I didn’t have to worry. May was 2 semesters away, and my life was decided for me for a time. and I don’t have that this time around. I have a flight booked for leap day, and after that I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. and it’s sort of exciting that way, but there’s a part of me that wants control and wants to make sure everyone back home doesn’t think I’m being completely irresponsible, and that doesn’t like asking people for money, and wants stability. I was given a piece of advice, though, by one of my teachers. “The most responsible thing you can possibly do is follow God, even when what you’re doing makes you uncomfortable.”

“Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?”

Jesus answered, “I am the way.”

John 14: 5b-6a

The Tourist

I've written this post over the course of the last few weeks. it feels like the more I write the less coherent it gets, so I'm gonna post it and see what happens.

The first days here had a surreal element about them that stemmed from the fact that it was all so sudden. I was in Missouri one day, and I sat in a floating air-conditioned room for a day, and I was in Thailand. Air travel has this quality to it that seems to warp our sense of spacetime. Places we’ve only seen in books and on screens become real with little work and little time, and we sit oblivious to all the rivers and mountain passes and oceans and volcanoes and dusty trails and villages that it would take to make the journey without our precious flying boats. As a result in those first few days it feels like you’ve been teleported to another planet, which along with the jetlag and the new climate seems to put you in a fog that slowly dissolves as the hours accumulate. 

There’s a fairly popular youtube video that you’ve perhaps seen where a man is shown doing a funny dance. the background changes, and it’s still him doing his funny dance in some new exotic location. as the film continues, it’s revealed that he’s traveled the entire world, and in each place he’s done his funny dance. and the music is playing and it’s easy to be excited for him and have misguided feelings about the triumph of the human spirit.

when I first saw the film, I had the same misguided feelings. To me there’s always been that naive excitement of a new passport stamp, new adventures in new places, having distant cities come up in conversation and being able to gloat about how I had been there and that the local landmarks are lovely or that the socioeconomic conditions are fascinating. or whatever. I think it’s a natural human desire to look like you’ve done lots of cool things because it it gives you a reassurance that you’re living your life well. But I’m growing out of it. out of the idea that I need to have a list of objective accomplishments that validate me as a person. Now, that isn’t to say I want to do nothing, or accomplish nothing. It’s just that our generation seems fixated on this very narrow view of success that substitutes the beauty and the art of living well for a collection of certificates and qualifications.

And the thing is, I LOVE places. I love finding myself in whole new coordinates. in a world where everything seems to be so instant and disposable, being in a whole new city with twelve million new people and countless new possibilities for adventure is great. But I don’t want it to be the idea of the place that captivates me. I don’t want to spend my entire life living in new places just so I can go to dinner parties and look more interesting than the people I’m talking to. I’m learning to love places for what they are, and how they can change me and let me learn, instead of only looking for what they can offer me. The tourist in me is dying. Or rather, the intellectual in me is trying to kill the tourist in me. In some small part of every person there’s a tourist, and that tourist needs to be dealt with. It’s the tourist part of us that can look at someone else starving or in pain and resort to taking inconsequential mental notes or feeling bothered that the universe has uncomfortable aspects to it. It’s the tourist in us that insists on being treated better than the people around us, and tells our minds to only go to places in the world that we know are safe and we know will have enough amenities or scenery to justify leaving our air-conditioned homes. Which is fine, if we’re selfish and ordinary.

Today in lecture we talked about how God is holy, and how because of that we’re supposed to be holy too. Which seems stupid on first thought, because we interpret holiness as perfection; that the opposite of holiness is sinfulness. and that would be a ridiculous request because we as humans can’t really do perfection. but that isn’t what he’s really asking of us. To be holy is to be set apart. Holiness isn’t asking perfection of us, it’s asking us to not be ordinary. It’s not about what we abstain from, it’s the actions we DO take that make us holy. And I’m learning that there are parts of me that are like this. and parts of me that are ordinary. The part of me that has spent hundreds of hours playing video games. the part of me that desired stability so much I was willing to spend my life pursuing the consumerist dream that has disposed of so much of our generation. the part of me that would spend the bulk of every prayer asking god for whatever thing or relationship that at the time I thought would complete me. 

On my wall back home there’s a map of the United States. I bought two gel pens, one gold and one silver. With the silver one I began to trace out the outline of each state I had been to. As I got farther along, each completion would only make the missing states that I hadn’t been to more glaring. The main problem was that it wasn’t that meaningful. So I had stepped foot in Idaho, who cared? I had no tangible memories or experiences of Idaho. I flirted the Idaho-Wyoming border in Yellowstone when I was seven. With the gold pen, however, I began to fill in all the highways I had been on. With every trace of line I could think of stories. The wrong turn in tennessee that sent us all the way to Indiana by accident. the spiderweb of lines between KC and Kirksville that represent every back-highway I could find that connected my two American homes. the line that ends ominously just south of Ottumwa and starts back up again near the north of town because St. Simon didn’t make it and we had to walk those few miles. The long ribbons that stretched to each coast because my parents had things they wanted to show us, and dreams they wanted us to dream too. Even the labels that indicate cities gain new meaning, and their names fill my heads with images of people and memories and mental pictures. The silver tracings that aim for completion fail miserably; even if I made it to every state there wouldn’t be much meaning to it. The gold lines, though, that spiderweb all across the continent, symbolize the things that have given my life meaning. Not because of the roads themselves but because of what happened on them. And it’s turned me into less of a completionist. If my life is a map, I don’t so much want one in which everything is filled in and colored all neat, but instead one that just explodes, with notes in the margins and little symbols and overlays that explain everything; not just where I’ve been, but how I was changed there, and how I changed others, and who was important to me there and why. 

I guess what I’m asking is, why do we do what we do? when I was younger I had this appeal of just doing things for the sake of doing them and being able to brag about them. I got into music and I did this awful thing where if I was in a conversation about music I would try to find a tasteful way to work in a bullet-point list of every great band I've ever seen. But life, dear children, is not about the pile of ticket stubs that is scattered about the room. it's about the memories and the moments and the way your mind realizes that the thing you're going through is important and begins to carve out space in your mind for all of it. And I say that after just taking a whiff of my pillow. I cleaned the pillowcase this morning and let it catch the breeze, and for some reason when I smell it tonight it reminds me of being 14 years old and being at scout camp and being terrified that I'd wake up in the morning having wet the bed. Every once in a while I have these moments where I just let the music take over and just seem to feel every good and bad thing that's ever happened to me come back to me all at once, like a crowded party filled with old acquaintances. and the reoccurring theme throughout my entire life is that all the things I once thought mattered don't matter anymore. I especially think about all the worry I've spent on wanting people to think that I'm great. I used to want to accomplish things because I wanted to be thought of as the kind of person who accomplishes things. I used to want people to love me because I thought that affirmed that I was worthy of love. God is teaching me, and changing me, to be the kind of person who loves just to love and acts just to act, to do the things that make life better for people just because those things should be done and not because I need to win some useless award and feel important. The thing about god changing you is that you have to let go of a lot of the things you thought were so necessary. 

This week's teachings about the fear of God ended on something of a tangent about the cost of discipleship. And it's something I've always sort of known, that a lot of the things normal people get to expect out of life I have to accept that I won't be getting, but it makes me kind of excited. because had I chosen the normal path, there are a lot of things that I could expect, but I don't know the destination of this narrow path. I only know the way. And it just seems more and more like in order to follow it I have to change what I want out of life. Psalm 37:4 says that if I take delight in the lord, he would give me the desires of my heart. This doesn't mean what I thought it did. I used to look at this as a transaction. I would do some odd jobs that God needed some temporary help to do, and I would get paid my desires like a paycheck, is how I thought it would go down. But instead I began to actually take delight in the Lord. and all of the things I once thought mattered don't matter anymore.

As I would talk to people and explain what I'm doing with my life right now, there was one odd reoccurring theme. "That's great. It's so good that you're doing this. You're young and you aren't tied down and you can do this and get all sorts of stories. You only have a window of about 3 years when you're allowed to do this sort of thing, so have fun while you can. Soon you're gonna get old and your body is going to have demands and your commitments will stack up and you're going to need to be a productive member of society." I'm learning to not just hear these lies and just shut up and let old people say what they need to say to sleep at night. that sounds harsh, and I'm sorry for the way that might make you feel if your life isn't what you thought it would be. But I have to say it, to call that attitude a lie, because it is. I come from a culture that is so addicted to stability and comfort that it is in a coma. And I will not settle down, and I will not choose myself over my neighbor. I will not stop loving, will not stop hoping, and I will not stop working for love and for justice and for intimacy with god. Soon the paper money will be worth nothing, our stuff will rot, and our bodies will stop working the way they should, and all that will be left and all that will really matter in our entire lives is the love we have for god and each other. and I'm willing to be poor and lonely and tired and sick and uncomfortable and spend my time generously in response to that truth, no matter how many reasonable people tell me I should be smarter than that. 

Details, part 2

Around the middle of our dinner preparations each day, the music is drowned out and deafened by the daily ritual of the siamese september sky, to open up and unleash upon the streets of Bangna a torrent of polluted water. Twice now I've been caught in the pouring rain running a last errand for dinner, and although I should really shower and change, there isn't enough time and too much to do to finish dinner preparations. The real heart of the storm lasts about an hour, and its' pounding on our kitchen's tin roof drowns out our voices and sends a constant breeze of strong wind that sometimes blows hard enough to wipe the flame from the burners heating our wok.

The base seems to always be in a flurry of motion and a constant state of change. People from all countries on earth are in and out in days or weeks, and even the walls seem to rise and fall with the passing weeks. This week two walls were installed, with each crack of the hammer sending echoes throughout the halls. They also installed a door one day where there was previously a cement wall. The building did a lot of shaking that day.

Another change that we're all very excited for is a new internet service provider and system of routers. However, since we've been in between ISPs, we've been without internet for a few days. I've been mildly inconvenienced, but in a room that consistently glows with the hue of several computers long after lights out, many of my roommates have been greatly annoyed. I've slipped off to the nearest internet cafe, which is delightfully orange. There are two dogs, each about 5 inches tall, who basically own the place. they run circles around the room and hop up on your leg looking for attention or at least reminding you that you're just a guest in their domain. Everyone in here who isn't with us is well-stocked with refreshments and snacks and is playing some game. the room smells faintly of incense and echoes with repetitive J-Pop music, which I'm drowning out with Ben Sollee using my headphones. the computer is filled with hundreds of applications and when I logged in it actually had someone else's torrents running. I have to be careful where I put my hands because the computer tower is definitely not grounded and if I touch the side of it my fingers tingle with electricity.

It doesn't feel like I've been here four weeks. I don't understand why life seems to work like a train. Some seasons just seem to drag and crawl, and then others seem to bolt like a bullet in the night. There's a part of me that thinks it has something to do with being closer to the equator. The metaphysics of that are dubious, though.

Reminder to self: A life shared with others is ALWAYS more beautiful than a life serving one's self. even if it's less convenient.

Routine.

I’m not just being lazy about blogging.

I can explain.

The thing about DTS that is taking me a lot of getting used to is that from Monday morning at 6AM to Friday night at 9PM, most of my life is decided for me. I get shook out of bed by one of my more chipper roommates, and by 6:15 every morning I’m downstairs stretching. We have a 20-30 minute group exercise, breakfast, and some combination of morning group-time and lectures (varying by day) that keep us busy until lunch at 1PM. After that I have work duties. At the beginning of DTS we were allowed to choose which chore we had for the term. We work in teams, and the other Austin and I are assigned to the roof. I’ll write about the roof some other time. It’s my happy place. That keeps me busy until 2. We have dinner at 6, which gives me free time a few of the days but there are events and activites and group meetings peppered throughout the week that suck up chunks of our afternoons and evenings to the point that I have an average of only 3 or 4 hours a day of free time unless I’m willing to cut into my sleep. And on top of that there are food duties; they switch week to week. You might get lucky and get lunch prep, which takes 5 minutes, or cleanup for any of the meals, which takes 15. But last week I got breakfast prep. It meant I spent an hour of my precious evening time shopping, and an hour of my precious sleeping time waking up at 5AM and cooking. By the end of the week I was running ragged and I ended up needing to spend all of my saturday in and out of napping to recover. This week I’m on dinner duty and the two hours before dinner are erased. It’s kind of discouraging. 

And it’s difficult. The days go fast and begin to run together and weeks go by in what feels like moments. When you only have such a limited amount of time you have to make hard choices because I’ll have four hours of time and about 7 hours worth of things I want to get done and another two hours that I’d like to spend sitting around recuperating from the frenzy of the day. It’s causing me to have to be a lot more decisive with my time-management. I have a tendency to be flippant, to spend too long deciding what to do and ending up procrastinating good chunks of time away. And I just can’t do it, so I'm getting better. But still, I long for a time with no hourly schedules. Schedules, perhaps, but ones that bend in the rainfall. Schedules that allow for an evening digging my hands deep into the city and finding myself in some new corner of my neighborhood that cries out to be explored. My nature is developing a certain longing to be free, or at least to be able to improvise. 

The first two weeks I spent a lot of time online. It was kind of a waste, not only because nothing happens on the internet but also because the internet is really slow here, so you spend twice as long and hit refresh a lot and get frustrated at everyone else. It’s not that the internet is slow in Thailand, it’s that we have 30 people on one internet connection, and any given night just about every single person is on at the same time. And one person decides to skype home and you burn inside because it just destroys the bandwidth for everyone else. Garrett Hardin is mocking me from his grave every time this happens. And I’ve noticed that it’s not really making my life better to be online for an hour unless it's because I actually have something online to be doing. So I'm trying to be more constructive. I’m getting really diligent at reading. I’ve finished three books so far and am making progress on a 4^th. I’m playing guitar again and getting better at ukulele. There are so many thoughts that pass through my head that I want to spill out to you dear readers like a bowl of polluted water onto a potted rubber plant that I'm fighting for every minute to put thoughts to word for. They will have to wait, though, for my firm thai mattress, whose complete lack of pliability and cushioning is becoming more and more homely to me, beckons.