Letter to a Missionary

This is a letter I wrote a few months back to a missionary friend.

Dear A-

When you said before that you’re afraid, I understood it. You’re afraid that you will be forgotten. That even though those you love will continue to love you, there won’t be a place for you in their lives, that you will be passively missed instead of actively, and that as time goes by, you will be missed less and less. That as they go on in their busy, little western lives, the flow of that will pass you by and your life, half a world away, will diverge more and more from theirs. It’s not quite so much their affection you doubt as your importance to them, and their need of you. And their memory. Their knowledge of you as you are now and as you will become and not the A they knew a year, two years, several years ago.

It’s being known that makes us feel alive. That is why the Westminster Catechism says that the purpose of life is to know God and glorify Him forever. Because we reflect our creator in that our deepest impulse is to be known and loved. Most people aren’t given a terminology or frame of reference to understand it in those terms so they look for acknowledgement, appreciation, deference, sex, subservience from other people – all the little spidery branches of love rather than love itself. We can bear anything – be alone for long periods of time – as long as we know that somewhere in the world is someone – preferably several people – who know us completely and hold that knowledge as a living and present thing. You don’t need your friends or even family with you. You know that. You just need to know that you are remembered by them. And you are, and always will be, even if only by a handful – frankly, there might be only one, at most two, outside your family who will really hold onto you. That is missionary life and human nature, and that’s okay. That’s reality.

You will be sustained. I could write a whole letter just about this topic. How you will be sustained all the days of your life. How the ways you will be sustained will change and shift all the time in response to who you are, to your needs and your circumstance. How God’s unutterable, strange grace always manifests itself. When it rains for days, weeks, months, and you can barely stand it because the weather is a constant itch at the back of your mind and you miss California sun. When you fall terribly, utterly sick and every mental and physical defense is overcome and you wonder why God would afflict his own servant so much. When you pour out over and over heart and soul into a community or congregation and they are hard and cold or deceitful and unfaithful. These three are common.

Girl Insomniac

“In July, bamboo blades rustled against
paper cranes and prayer strips; I wondered how
I’d made the cut, when I wasn’t a boy
my father wanted, wasn’t a koi princess
my mother said would magically turn
her tail into a pair of legs.
I looked for the fabled rabbits on the moon,
a family of them taking turns
to pound rice into pearly cakes
along their dark, elliptical orbit.”

-from “Girl Insomniac,” Miho Nonaka

A Room of One’s Own

So what are you going to find here? I am hoping to continue to bring home (pun unintended) the idea that your home is something you create layer by layer, adding this, removing that, collecting not only possessions  that appeal to you but memories, so that anyone that enters will be struck by how uniquely your home is you. And that an afternoon spent puttering around, moving that vase or hanging this picture or moving a book until it is precisely positioned on the coffee table can be a great form of relaxation.

–Once Upon a Tea Time

Identity

“THE operative fallacy here is that we believe that unconditional love means not seeing anything negative about someone, when it really means pretty much the opposite: loving someone despite their infuriating flaws and essential absurdity. “Do I want to be loved in spite of?” Donald Barthelme writes in his story “Rebecca” about a woman with green skin. “Do you? Does anyone? But aren’t we all, to some degree?”

We don’t give other people credit for the same interior complexity we take for granted in ourselves, the same capacity for holding contradictory feelings in balance, for complexly alloyed affections, for bottomless generosity of heart and petty, capricious malice. We can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.

Years ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”

–I Know What You Think of Me, Tim Kreider

 

 

Quotidian

“I think our entire culture suffers to hear, “I love you whether you succeed or not. Whether you’re productive or not. I just love you.” -Donald Miller

Poetry

“Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water.
And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home,
and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent, but
nothing is infinite,
not even loss.
You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day
you are going to find yourself again.”

—	Finn Butler

This yes

“Through habit we drift suspended
somewhere between being lost
and being found.”

-“Between Missing and Found,” Rattle

Quotidian

“If I’d been someone else in a different world I’d’ve done something different, but I was myself and the world was the world, so I was silent.”

Quotidian

“There is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty.”

-Steve Maraboli