This Is Not Our Dream

The hot summer heat beat down on the farm as I watched my husband talk with our neighbor about the land, about the produce this year, about the rain and the sun and the wind. His glasses slowly slid down the bridge of his nose and he pushed them back up before wiping the sweat off his balding head.
He'd always had higher dreams than working on a farm all his life. In his younger days, Jebidiah had hopes of sailing the high seas, exploring uncharted lands, discovering creatures that were never seen by the human eye.
But at the tender age of eighteen, we married, and when his father passed away it was his duty as a son and heir to carry on the family business. I told my husband, "Go, find these lands, explore the world! I will follow you to the ends of the Earth if that is your dream."
But loyalty always won out with him. Too focused on the desires of his deceased parents, he remained stuck on the farm he'd grown up on, never crossing even the state line for the past seventy years. I wondered, as I looked into his dark brown eyes full of thought and diplomacy, did he ever wish he'd pursued his dreams? Did he ever want to escape this farm, this prison that had held him captive for so long away from the adventure that had been calling him since childhood?
He stood there, holding his pitchfork, his knuckles whitening around it's handle, and I knew the answer. The air in this place is an oven, the dirt beneath our feet, a baking wasteland. And despite the life that bloomed all around us in the corn, the trees, the stream that beat wildly through it's course over yonder, this was not our dream.

Obedience, Like the Thunder

To obey like roaring thunder,
like rain that melts the dirt
like lightning that illuminates darkness
and wind that gusts across stagnant plains.

May my heart melt in Your presence
And unshaken faith be resurrected.
May I exile my body, my will, my doubt,
So I may be at rest in my lowliness.

And like the thunder may my obedience speak out
With Your truth.

Like the rain may I melt the hearts of others
With Your unboundning mercy.

Like the lightning may I illuminate darkness
With Your light.

And like the wind may I overcome stagnant life
With Your unshakeable Love.

And as this storm purifies the Earth with its water,
May we purify the atmosphere with our presence.

Why Did I Say It?

It's amazing how emotions change
At such a drastic tilt.
First I feel a violent anger,
And Then remorseful guilt.

I wish so bad as I lay down
In my mire of sin and shame
That what I said to bring me here
Wasn't mine to blame

But what's said is said and my sin is shown
To all who witnessed it
And instead of a throne of a conquerer
In a villain's chair I sit.

Please don't judge my insolence
I'm not always this way
I try so hard to be like Christ
But I fail every day.

My Sin is Ever Before Me.

“For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.” This verse has been going through my head all week. I felt convicted at Andrew Peterson's concert Behold The Lamb on Sunday night, and my eyes were opened, as if I had suddenly realized my sin. Not anything that we humans would call ‘big’. Just little things. But sin is sin, and it must stop. As Christians we are called to be like Christ. Christ is perfect, ergo we are called to perfection. I don’t believe we can be completely perfect. It's in the human nature to sin. But we can try. God knows when we try our best, and when we pretend to try our best. Sometimes we even fool ourselves into thinking that we are trying our best. At least I do. But, alas, ‘my sin is always before me’. I can’t seem to escape it now that I’ve seen it.

Yet, as I look at my sin, as if looking at a sluggish walrus on the other side of a sheet of glass, I realize that there is hope. Heck, there is more hope when I look at my sin than when I choose to ignore it, because now I realize that there is room for change. It’s like looking at my reflection in the mirror for the first time and realizing how hideous I look. But then finding that, well, I could pin my hair up, and I could wash my face a little, maybe even smile some. That changes things up. Now I just have to continue to look in the mirror every once in a while to make sure my hair is still up and my face isn’t smudged. I don’t know why my face would be smudged, but better check it just in case. In the same way, I need to continue to watch my sin to make sure I don’t do it again. And if I do, maybe I can try to acknowledge that, yes, I’ve tripped again, and yes, I can fix it. Again.

Isn’t that the whole point of Jesus’ grace? The main reason he died on the cross was so that when we trip and fall into the mire of our own sin, we can ask for forgiveness and a renewed spirit, and there it is. Like a brand new day with the sun just peaking over the horizon waiting to greet us. As Anne of Green Gables put it, “the day is always fresh with no mistakes in it.” And so is our life every time we sincerely ask for forgiveness.

As I watch the sun peaking over the horizon, and wave my sin good bye, I find joy in the hope of a new life each day and every hour. A life without sin. And suddenly, “everything sad is coming untrue,” as Jason Gray would put it.

Isn’t God just great? To consider how tiring it is to sacrifice a lamb, or a bird, or, God forbid, a cow each day for the forgiveness of our sins, and to send His Son to do the job for us. To bear all hell so we wouldn't have to. And still, here we are, wading in our sin, thinking, “oh, it’ll be no big deal if I just say/do this (place sin here) one more time…I’ve done it a thousand times, why would one more time be any different?” So easy, yet it cost the life of God’s son. But I wonder if we were still buying and sacrificing lambs to cover our sins every day/week, would we still sin as easily as we do now?

I didn’t mean to turn this into a preachy blog, it’s just been pressing on my mind lately. Oh, how I long to be like Christ. How I yearn to be called a woman “after God’s own heart” like David, or someone who “walks faithfully with God,” like Enoch.

Maybe some day. Here’s to trying.

My Reminiscent Home School

When I lived in Ecuador as a missionary kid, I was home schooled with my two older sisters and three other missionary kids who lived in the same town. Home school was held in a two-room building that was located above the carpenter’s work-shop. We even had our own missionary teacher fly all the way down to Ecuador and ride the bus through the mountains to the very heart of the country where we lived. The small town we lived in was called Saraguro, which was nestled in the valley of the Andes Mountains. My home-school teacher, Aunt Marie, explained to me that Saraguro was sometimes referred to as ‘the bowl’ because it was located in a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides.

Aunt Marie was tall with long, graceful fingers that played the piano like a proficient musician. She had beautiful eyes that were always laughing and a mouth that was always smiling. I learned many valuable things from her in my young years about forgiveness and God’s unconditional love. She sang songs to us kids about Jesus that I still sing today as an adult.

Early every morning, Nicole, Becki, and I would eat breakfast and race down the hill to the diminutive home school. We would all three run into the door at once and tumble into the snug room where Aunt Marie would usually be waiting. Our desks formed a semi-circle around the gas heater, the chalk board behind it, and our teacher’s desk was across the room pointed toward the window that looked over the town. She would spend time with each of us, teaching our little lessons from our A Beka Books, then giving us assignments to complete during the rest of class time. We would sit there, huddled up behind our desks, wishing for just a little bit more warmth from the gas heater to drift in our direction.

We had a tiny bathroom in our classroom and frequently had to check for spiders or cockroaches before using the toilet. The bathroom had an awkward window with nothing but a Sesame Street curtain covering it. I always felt bad for our teacher whose desk was right next to it. Perhaps that’s why she kept the odor-eliminating spray bottle on her desk.

Aunt Marie was very musical. We would sometimes gather around the old organ, and she would play as we sang songs like “One Little Duck,” or “The Little White Duck,” or “Six Little Ducks.” A lot of Little Duck songs.

But my favorite part of the home school was the prestigious tiny library further back into our humble building. A musty odor of old books would hit you as you stepped through the door. Inside the cozy room, there were three windows along wall allowing light to shine in on the dusty books. Shelves filled with children’s and young adult’s books would be lining the walls underneath the windows. Beneath a little square window to the right were more serious books like Spanish textbooks and encyclopedias. I always liked the encyclopedias. They had pictures of the outside world, of countries and people and animals that we had never seen before. For fun, my sisters and I would grab the C and D encyclopedias and leaf through the thin, shiny pages until we got to Dog or Cat, and we would compare them and decide which ones looked the best and which ones looked the ugliest. The hairless cats were always a big hit for the most hideous animals.

In another part of the room were stacks of games that we would sometimes play on recreational time when it was too rainy and cold to play kickball outside. Saraguro had unpredictable weather. Some days seemed as warm as Summer, but the next day could be as rainy and cold as late Fall just before a frost.

The home school had an old computer where we could play educational games. Games where you could learn about fish and math all in one sitting. The computer sat on a worn wooden desk with only one drawer that sometimes had a half a bag of chocolate chips in it. I was always tempted to sneak a few precious pieces from that yellow American chocolate chip bag, but was too scared of getting caught.

Some of my most precious memories take place in that reminiscent classroom. Last time I saw it, the school had been fixed up into a little house where some Ecuadorian friends of ours now live, and they have two little girls who flip through the same books I did when I was their age.

The Journey This Life Was Made Living For

For my Health Concepts class we were required to write about how a patient has impacted us. I found joy in writing this assignment because I like to write, but also because it's forced me to sit and contemplate on my past experiences, something I often long to do, but feel like I don't have enough time for. Anyways, here it is:


In my clinical experiences over the past year I have met a variety of patients ranging from jolly old men to frightened little children. It was hard for me to choose which patient has had the most impact on me, when it’s more of a question of who hasn’t impacted me. Do I choose the patient who came into the hospital one day with a ‘the-glass-is-always-half-full’ attitude, or the woman who can’t remember even her name, but whose photos paint a picture of a full life, a loving family, and joyful friends? After searching through memories of past patients, both pleasant and difficult, I have decided to choose to write about a patient that my classmate and I have struggled with this semester.

This patient from the Alzheimer’s unit, whom I will change the name to Summer for privacy reasons, was not one that any of the students were all too thrilled to receive for ADL or med assignments. In fact, she was among the last I wanted to write about, but every time I thought about this assignment, it was her face that popped into my head. I decided that good experience or not, there is a lesson to be learned in all circumstances.

The first time I had Summer as my patient, she was the polar opposite of what the students who had had her in the past described. I remember walking into that nursing home room at 7:30 in the morning to greet her. She had a big smile on her face as I introduced myself, and we had a pleasant conversation while I adjusted her covers and moved her breakfast tray closer to her bed. I made sure she didn’t need anything else, checked that her call light was in reach, and left the room in high spirits as I went to introduce myself to my other patients.

When I came back into the room an hour later, she was still in a fair mood. I took her temperature, pulse, and respirations, and she was extremely easy to comply with... until I brought out the blood pressure cuff. Her eyes immediately got wide and she started screaming that she wanted my instructor to take her blood pressure because I was a student and didn’t know what I was doing. Her screams could be heard down the hall, and I remember walking out of her room full of embarrassment while I looked for my instructor. When I found her, she explained to me that this was normal behavior for this patient, and that Summer would eventually let me take her blood pressure. Of course my instructor accompanied me to reassure her (and me).

After that day I learned that I would have to tune into Summer’s attitude and how she would react to procedures each day in order to get work done effectively. It was difficult for all of us to handle her. She was incontinent, obese, and refused to get out of bed. It took three of us to clean her up, but that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was her screaming in anger and fright as we rolled her from one side to the other. I think the time that it ‘clicked’, the moment that I actually felt her grief and pain and saw her as a human more than just a patient, was one day when a few of us needed to clean her up. After hurling insults at each one of us, she grabbed my hand, and with tears rolling down her face she asked God to take her away from this painful world.

I wanted to weep. So what if she’s bipolar? Who wouldn’t feel fear and anger at the world when they were stuck in a nursing home bed with three nursing students cleaning parts that only their mother had cleaned when they were just infants? When weakness has taken over the body and confusion has consumed the mind, who wouldn’t ask God to take their very soul away from this sorrowful planet?

Of course we nursing students have all learned the art of talking in a soothing voice to calm our patients, but it doesn’t always come easily. It sometimes comes as a duty, something we have been taught to do. But I can say that in that very moment my heart went out to Summer and I wanted to comfort her. I wanted to soothe her. And I wanted to cry with her. It wasn’t a duty of a nurse any more to speak to her in a calm voice, it was a pressing desire for her to feel safe.

After that I was able to see every Alzheimer patient the way I saw Summer: as a vulnerable human being who has been moved to a strange place with strange people, and has little control over their lives due to their confusion that they don’t really know about. My eyes have been changed from seeing patients who wouldn’t remember me from day to day, to seeing people who have lived full, satisfying lives. People who were wrapping up their journey in this world, only to begin their journey this life was made living for.

Carboncillo

Carboncillo was the best place any 9 year old kid would want to live. Set in the mountains of Ecuador, and surrounded by forest and meadows, Carboncillo was a 30 minute drive away from the smallest town, and then another 15 minute walk down the rocky road from where the bus let you off. I remember waking up in the cold cabin room with the amber sun peaking through my window onto my wrinkled, faded sleeping bag. The warmth in the living room would hit me as I walked out of my cold room to the fireplace to warm myself up. Cafe con leche would be heating on the stove, and the smell of eggs and toast would drift past me, drawing me to the kitchen where breakfast was waiting. After breakfast my sister and I would run out to the meadow, the crisp, morning air caressing our faces and hands. The mist would be so thick it was like walking on a thin cloud with the tips of the tallest grass peeking through the the top.
We would run along the clay trail past the creek that emptied into the watering hole where there was buried treasure waiting to be discovered. And that trail would lead us to the endless meadow. The meadow surrounded by hills on all sides but one where the sun set at 6 every day, painting the skies bright colors of orange, yellow, pink, and purple. Our little cowgirl hats would bounce on our heads as we ran through the wide expansion laughing and twirling in the wind. We would take the trail through the S shaped pine tree forest and come out on the other side of the meadow where the horses were tied up. Rolling up the rope into one hand , we would hop on bare back and go wherever the horses took us.
I remember talking about the hard life of a 9 year old kid, not realizing how easy I really had it back then. We would do tricks, my sister and I. We would see who could stand on the horses rump the longest, or who could turn from facing frontward to facing backward while the horse was running. Sometimes the horses would take off running with us on their backs, and we, having no reins, would have no choice but to ride where they took us.
After a full day of riding and exploring new, unfound trails, we would tie the horses back up in the meadow and head back to the cabin, the sun setting behind us. A warm fire would be going when we walked through the door, and dad would be fanning the flames with and old newspaper. We would take our boots off at the door, and hang our soaking wet socks above the fireplace to dry. Mom would be in the kitchen cooking chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese sandwiches with hot chocolate on the side. After eating, we'd all curl up in the living room where the fire was going, and we would get lost in our books, in the cabin, 15 minutes from the road, where the bus would pick us up the next morning and take us 30 minutes back to the nearest town.