The Bad, The Ugly, and The You've-Got-to-be-Kidding Me

It has been a while since I sat down and took the time to write something. Many things have happened in our family. Even though, it has been really exciting and fun to have a multicultural family, the paperwork part of it really slammed us in the face this fall. After waiting for the proper paperwork for my Dominican residency to come from Guatemala, we found out that because of changes in the law, I now was unable to proceed without traveling back to Guatemala to request a residency visa. My stomach sank as I heard the immigration officer explain this to me. I felt like all that we had worked for during the year had been worthless. I felt really stupid. How had we missed this really important fact along the way? We were trying to do things right, why hadn't it paid off? Why this NOW?

As I was processing all of this information, a verse I had learned as a child came to mind, "The Lord is in his holy temple; let all the earth be silent before him." (Habakkuk 2:20). I was definitely not an immigration expert, but the Lord hadn't stopped being God. Here I was in the middle of something that felt overwhelming, yet there was an invitation to recognize His presence with us in it.

David wanted to wear his "Planes" hat for the flight.

After what seemed a whirlwind of weighing options, we moved a trip we had planned for Christmas to mid September. The whole family was able to go to Guatemala. I was really excited to go to Guatemala with the whole gang.

I was also scared. There was too much turmoil in my heart, and I wasn't sure I was ready to face Guatemala. This is a place where I can no longer shy away from hard things. It never leaves my heart unscathed; in fact, I don't think I can ever be in Guatemala without a shattered heart. I was able to live there for the first twenty-something years of my life pretty oblivious to the hard things around me and within me, but I had the incredible gift of being invited into a community that looked at the hard, the nasty, the broken, the lost, and rejoiced in Christ's presence in all of it.

Guatemala will always have plenty of hard, if you're willing to open your eyes and heart to take it all in. However, I had some additional hard to go into - my brother was battling cancer. He had found out during the summer, and by the time we got there he was getting ready to start his third cycle of chemo. He and I had shared the experience of caring for mom when she went through it. I don't think it had (or it fully has yet) sunk in that this guy under thirty was having to go through that, and I was not there to be with him. The ministry that I had worked with during the years before moving had gone through some really hard times and leadership crisis. All my dear friends were now gone, and hurting.

Getting some ice cream with tio Pablo.

So, we got there. We got there in the middle of all that. Guatemala welcomed us with the news that one of my old club kids and dear friend had been killed in a landslide. He worked scavenging at the city dump. With the heavy rains, every year, a lot of people who work at the dump die buried in landslides. They found his body a couple of days later, miles downstream of a river. His brother was able to ID him because of a tattoo. Toward the end of our trip, a whole mountain side gave in, and an entire community was buried. Over two hundred houses were buried in mud. About three hundred people died and many were never found.

Second day - still not warmed up to tio Joel

I hear the prophet asking, "Who has believed our message... He was despised and rejected... a man of suffering, and familiar with pain." (Isaiah 53:1-3). This is Christ. He is Emmanuel, God with us, in the middle of all of the hard, and terrible. The truly hard. The daily-life hard. Because who can really believe this message? Who can believe that it is not always necessary to run away from the nasty, but that God himself has chosen to walk through it with us?

Last Friday I cried for a long time. I was under the stress of a deadline, our nanny was not here because her daughter was sick, and my backup babysitters were all at the same retreat. And I was mean. I was mean to my sons while I was trying to juggle them and a computer. And I saw myself - the real ugly self, the I am selfish and let my anger have the best of me self - and I was disappointed and felt lonely. I thought of calling my brother, with whom I've learned to not shy away from the ugly, but I was too embarrassed to share that being a mom was too hard right now.

To my surprise, later that afternoon, he called me saying "hey, if I don't call you right now, I never will. How are you doing?" And so, among many things, I told him about my morning. And we had a great conversation about the subject that we cannot skip the hard seasons of life. Jesus' gift to us is not that he can just "make everything better." His gift to us it that He IS with us. Can we believe it? Can we believe the message that even in the midst of the hard, and the pain of our own sin, Christ wants to be with us? Can we dare come before this God who first came to us?

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." Hebrews 4:15-16