So long to the Mill

Saying goodbye to my family again - It's been nice to have a short time with them. Life has been such a whirlwind lately - and though it is a rather scattered pace of living, I have gotten to do so many things in so many wonderful places .... and I wouldn't have it any other way. Thank you so much to all who have encouraged me these past few months. 

Garage-sale luggage

This week I had to write a blog post for my Australian Culture class, to be posted on the ASC blog. I chose to do it on the notion of "home." I figured I might as well post it here, too: 
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 It is often our intent to provide ourselves with definable peace through objective comfort. We think we know what home is, and that we know what home is made of. We think we know how to feel, and how to act, and how to rest in the place we feel we know the best. This is why we often do things like hide behind coffee, eat at McDonald’s, and carry our own pillows with us on airplanes when travelling; trying to relocate the familiar into the unfamiliar.

I speak two languages, but can effectively communicate in neither. Growing up in Brazil, I celebrated American holidays, like Thanksgiving, with things like failed jell-o molds in 100 –degree weather and Christmas with the illusion of Santa coming down a chimney in a city that hasn’t the need for fireplaces. My dad was born in Hawaii before it was a state. My mom is Latvian. I have stuff stored in a cockroach-laden attic in Rio, a church basement in Illinois, garage-sale luggage in Nebraska, a Rubbermaid tub in Washington, and a spare room in South Carolina.

May I venture that, in fact, we do not truly know what home is until we are away from what we once thought home was?

It used to make my blood boil whenever our friends in America would refer to our furloughs in the States as being “Home Assignments.” Who were they to tell my sisters and I where our home was? Who had given them the prerogative to assume America was our home? What did they know of home, beyond their concrete establishment of space and possession? These are, of course, rash reactions from a child’s mind, but I often find myself coming back to the stubborn thoughts. We love to say that “Home is where the heart is,” but how does one come to find where their heart is unless they’ve had it taken out of them? If our heart has always been in the same place, and has been held on to with an iron grip of blind dependency, we live in delusional comfort because we think we have a notion of how dear those things closest to us are.

We don’t. We can’t. We cannot know how dear they are until they are taken away, or moved, or changed.

Oswald Chambers once said, “What is it that blinds me in the ‘my day’? Have I a strange god – not a disgusting monster, but a disposition that rules me? More than once God has brought me face to face with the strange god and I thought I should have to yield, but I did not do it. I got through the crisis by the skin of my teeth and I find myself in the possession of the strange god still; I am blind to the things which belong to my peace.”

We desperately hold on to our notions of comfort. Our ideals for calm. Some of my times feeling most “at home” were when I was furthest from family, furthest from my birthplace … furthest from anything “comfortable.” --- But closest to God, and closest to who I am. An evening spent out in crisp mountain air, escaping from being found in the same place as a roommate who was hiding from the police. The feeling of driving into an awakening sun that makes all things new as you leave behind the foul motel you took harbour in. Sitting down to collect your thoughts when you realize how close you came to losing something, or someone. These things are home. Peace presented by the very presence of God.

Being in Australia, I have come to find that each person in our group, myself included, has arrived with a “disposition that rules me,” as Chambers stated. These dispositions are not disgusting monsters. They are not even necessarily bad. But they rule over us. And now we are brought face to face with these dispositions and given a chance to yield them for the purpose of seeing things clearer than we ever have before. God is presenting an opportunity to experience “home” as we never have felt it before through the offering of peace in a way we’ve never seen it before. We get to have our notions of comfort completely redefined, and our ideals for calm controlled by Him, instead of by the environment we’ve been raised in.

I am sitting in a bed at the house of people I met for the first time only four weeks ago, with trust that they will not poison the meals I am fed or stab me in the night. God has amazing ways of constantly redefining what we see as home. I am living in this peace presented by God’s presence--- and, for me --- He alone is home.

Finish Never

I have recently been missing a lot of things that will probably never come back to me. Missing sights and smells and sounds that fade insistently as new ones cloud my mind. Beautiful clouds; but clouds nonetheless. Attempting to describe a welcoming loaf of banana bread made fresh from the excess bunches in the backyard becomes more difficult when you’ve been eating cafeteria food for three years. Recalling how a passion fruit vine smells when the indigo flowers are just about to give way to their new sleepy fruit is a challenge when genetically engineered apples and oranges are the only fruits you see on a regular basis. I was recently overcome by a desire to lay flat as a skipping stone on a tile floor in the heat of a summer afternoon; to be immune to the world in sweet stillness while thinking of nothing at all.

I guess it all breaks my heart just a little. Which sounds cheesy. But I enjoy cheese, as do church mice.

The church is an interesting phenomenon. I am becoming a firm believer in Christians, on a regular basis, experiencing how Christians of other denominations worship, though also maintaining community within their own congregation. As I visit more churches, though, it truly allows me to step back and notice the binding agents in the family of Christ. In going to a Uniting Church here in Sydney, I have been transported back to my days in Yellowstone as the people pray prayers of Confession, or stand for a Call to Worship; acts of faith from people serving a God Who is far greater than even our words, but Who is alive and present in our words. Last night I went to Hillsong Church. You may have heard of it. : ) In being in the middle of hands raised high as they go, and lights scattering color across faces concentrated on adoration, I was transported back to a similar church visited on the East Coast of the U.S., where I stood beside my dad as I saw him raise his hands for the first time in a service, unguarded, since the last time we were in Rio together; a church where the technical perfection of a service is just as much praise to our God as humble half-tuned pianos and fading microphones might be. Uninhibited worship. Worship standing in the presence of a Saviour who swallows our stupidity and allows us to just …. Be.  

How I have missed being.

Because of many excursions and observations, the significance of the Eucharist has also grown in my life, based on simple experiences of it being practiced in different manners at different places. This last Sunday morning I went to a church that is very, very small and close-knit. Communion was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a long time, and the sheer simplicity of it nearly made me cry. Because of the small amount of people, a few at a time came up and sat in the front pew. The pastor, along with two others, proceeded to hand each person an element, along with saying a few words to each. There was no hurry. There was no production or sense of accomplishment. Just … communion. The bread was a huge loaf with the toughest of exteriors and the softest of interiors, broken in half as the pastor initially read the NT passage on the Last Supper. As it was handed out to each person, the woman giving it tore thick, unrestricted segments from the soft inside; a very powerful visual for the Body broken and given.

This contrasts with a Catholic church attended several weeks back, where the Eucharist is obviously taken only by those who are members. Some friends of mine, in their experience at it, accidentally found themselves in the line to go up and take the elements, having not been aware of the restrictions. When arriving in the front of the line, and being recognized by the priest as not belonging, they were escorted back to their seats and asked to sit down.

There was certainly a level of magnificence, though, in observing characteristics of the belief in transubstantiation at that Catholic service. The priest solemnly consumed all that was left after the congregation had partaken, being diligent in leaving no trace. As the music drew to a close, he silently began  mixing pure water into the chalice and drinking the wash, then gathering crumbs from the plate and ingesting those, as well. Then, in a long-practiced manner of ceremony and service, wiped everything clean with a persistent white cloth.

Chambers once said, “Many of us are loyal to our notions of Jesus Christ, but how many of us are loyal to Him?”

Later he said, “Begin to know Him now, and finish never.” 

I am not a mosquito

This is the 7:00am view from my bedroom window.

Though the picture itself is kind of fuzzy because of the mosquito screen, hopefully you can kind of make out the Sydney skyline. I wish there was a better way to capture how striking and lovely it is each morning. Maybe if you go make yourself some chocolate chip pancakes and couple them with some red gummy bears --- then you, too, can feel the same happy feeling I get in the mornings. 

President of the Universe

This morning I walked downstairs to the question of “Are YOU a Cylon?”

My host brother, along with a few other people, were deeply involved in a Battlestar Gallactica board game of epic proportions, commanding the entire dining room table with an expansive assertion of conquest through cards and little plastic figurines of spaceships. I popped a piece of bread in the toaster and countered with the possibility that everyone is probably, at the end of the day, a Cylon. As that slice of bread absorbed the amount of Nutella I insisted it bear, I sat down and observed their game with amusement. I learned that there can only be one president of the universe, that Michael talks less when he is the Cylon, and that playing with three expansion packs means someday the fourth expansion pack will simply be a bigger box to keep all the pieces in.

It was a good morning.

Then, after a lunch of wheat buns filled with chicken, “chips” (French fries), and gravy (I told you Aussies have many meals – see? Food is now all I can write about!), my roommate and I ventured out to try to meet up with some people who would be attending an evening service at Hillsong Church.

Our quest epically failed as we took a car, and then were told the wrong bus time, and so had to find another bus, and then took a train, and then tried to find a Hillsong bus in a huge city square, only to be told that the people we were to meet would not be coming, to then decide it was too late to try making it to the service, to then take the train back, then find out that we were going in very-much-the-opposite-direction-of-home as we realized we were going across the harbor bridge into the north, to then eventually get off, turn around, take the right train, get off the train, buy 50 cent Macca’s ice cream (mmm food), and walk to find the bus to then walk home ….

Where we then made scrambled eggs with cheese and sandwiches and juice and later ate granola bars and peaches ….

Mmm food.

Above: On the topic of food, this is a picture of a dinner outing last night with my host family and some of their friends. It was in celebration of their daughter’s, and their daughter-in-law’s, birthday. Excellent company and wonderful food! : ) 

Sahara vs. Savannah

I don't really know if it's is a camel, or a giraffe.

But its ambiguity is endearing. 

I thought I'd take some time to highlight a few things in the house that I'm living at here in Seattle. This will be the first in my series of "What-You-Don't-Know-Is-Hidden-Behind-A-Closed-Door-Is-More-Likely-To-Make-You-Smile-Than-To-Be-A-Weapon-Against-You" posts. Important life lesson. True story.