ovens, and other life things
The fall semester (and the last week of 2014) came to a close in one lively and precious whir – all in the midst of Sunday morning dumpling making and Christmas Eve ‘Blank Space’ dancing and 4-hour Christmas party/talent show singing. I turned in grades on January 4 and then sat for a long, silent while, trying to wrap my mind around time and the pace at which it moves.
I’m five months into this wonderful Chinese life and it’s got me like: ohemgee, #chinalyfe is the #rightlyfe. I did not expect to love my little babes this much. I feel like their mother. (Related: I want to be their mother). I want to make sure they are getting enough to eat and I want to help them with their homework and teach them Justin Timberlake songs.
I love them. They are sweet and gracious and are always saving my face because I’m a clueless, obnoxious Westerner with a voice that carries. The first years of teaching are like WHOA if you speak the language and like DOUBLE WHOA if the only Chinese phrase you know is WO TING BU DONG (I don't understand).
It is no secret that in life, as well as in the first semester of teaching abroad (or not abroad), having absolutely no idea what I am doing 100% of the time is totally my song and dance. But hey, you know what? IT'S COOL MAN because I channeled my inner Oprah and I made it rain A’s up in this joint because Christmas only happens once a year and these kids put up with me for an entire semester – and they deserve it for just enduring the REDONKulousness that is the trial and error of everything that is teaching. So I had no problem loving these chillins like Oprah loves her audience when she gives away free stuff.
God’s grace has met me, and continues to meet me, in a thousand different ways and in a thousand different forms. I’m learning that, among other things, grace is also a thing of the senses – it huddles around a small wooden table on Business Street; it tastes like Hot Pot and gong bao ji ding; it zips around the China countryside on the back seat of a motor bike; it sounds like broken English and my horribly pronounced Chinese and 4 (continuous) hours of karaoke; its embrace is the tangled arms of a group hug; it smells like stinky tofu and it shyly gazes back at you from each classroom seat.
So when it comes to this place and the people God has provincially placed along this path, I feel inexplicably protective in an affectionate, parental kind of way – like I’m holding a newborn or clutching a small check worth millions or wearing an heirloom locket around my neck. I’m not simply holding a baby – but a soul; not just a piece of paper – but a fortune; not just an accessory –but a history.
Matt Chandler recently preached a series on Advent and his teaching about transformation deeply resounded with me:
2 Corinthians 3:18 (ESV) – “And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”
Chandler says, “We are transformed one degree at a time. If it were 180 degrees or 90 degrees or if Jesus just spun the dial, it wouldn't produce all that just one degree at a time tends to produce. One degree changes everything. With the Lord, it is one degree, day after day. This is a polar opposite mindset in a microwave world and culture.”
It’s an oven world, y’all. Microwaves are just living in it.
When it comes to these 1-degree days, I’m learning that the most important hour is the one I am in and the most important days are the seemingly invisible ones. No one with a solid Asian squat says they will start using an Eastern toilet tomorrow, am I right?
I want to pay attention to and live under the weight of what God is doing in the seemingly insignificant moments – in this place – in others – in me. I can’t see it, of course, but I feel it. And it doesn't feel how the wind feels or how the sunshine feels or how the sacredness of a wedding day feels – (even though all of those are some of my favorite kinds of feels).
Instead, the invisible work and the weight of it lives and moves and has its being in all the tiny moments before the culminated moment – the kneading of the dough before the dough becomes bread. The watering of the dirt before the seed becomes peonies or hydrangeas or succulents. The obedience in the garden before death became eternal life.
God is a God who finishes what He starts – He who begins a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus (Philippians 1:6). God calls and carries. He equips and empowers. He saves and sustains. The person and work of Jesus Christ is proof that God is with us for each degree as well as for the long-haul, which says a lot because God is eternal and eternity is a mind-boggling amount of time.
A year ago I was on my couch in Manhattan, Kansas, reading about the Chinese church – and just a few days ago I sat in and shared communion with one.
I giggled like a school girl as I sat on the pew and listened to voices rise and fall to songs in a language I've come to love even though I don’t understand or speak it.
God (is so in control that He) is out of control.
He is wild and always working, creating something special in the ordinary days, doing something important within our soul in the hours of the difficult ones; weaving a sense of awe through the fabric of the beautiful days, the sacred days, the days in the desert and the days by the waterfall.
I hope you choose to believe in the 1-degree days, regardless of how they might come to you. There will always be a temptation to believe that they don’t matter – particularly when you feel stuck in neutral and it seems everyone else is effortlessly zooming along in life, instagramming their awesomeness as they go. No one effortlessly zooms, okay? No one. Except Beyonce. And Tami Taylor. But Tami Taylor is fictional. And Beyonce is so talented I sometimes wonder if she is fictional, too.
So I don’t know where you are, but I want you to know that where I am now has a lot to do with where I was this time last year. God was working 1-degree at a time then, just as He is now – and His sovereignty has brought me to a place I love and it has left me giggling in a Chinese church pew, shaking my head, informing God that He is bonkers, absolute bonkers – an oven-loving, long-suffering Lord all about the long haul, all about eternity and all about preparing us to live there with Him, one degree at a time.
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1 comments
YES. Matt's last 10 minutes of Glorious was a pivot-point for me too. Transformation happening degree by degree and the tr impact of that little degree over time being unthinkably enormous. (Also cultivating gratitude, but that's a discussion for another time)
ReplyDeleteLove hearing your reflections, both in light of your current environment, and also in light of what the Lord is cultivating in your heart. It is so generous of you to loop us in on this journey.
Loving you dearly!