Held close in God’s loving arms

 

Have you ever felt your life’s circumstances were earthquake-y and unpredictable and mysterious? That the songs of your heart were slightly out of tune? And yet, at the same time you had an inkling that God was slogging through it with you, holding you close, smiling at you, cheering you on?

 

Often we don’t see our situation clearly until later, in hindsight.

 

I look back and see that during my first few weeks in Lomalinda, I was in a fog—not a dense one, but a fog nevertheless—and I recognize now, more than ever, that day by day, morning by morning, new mercies I saw. All I needed, God’s hand provided. Great was His faithfulness!

 

God had put His loving arms around me during those puzzling days of transition—transition out of so much and into so much. . . .

 

• God said He’d be with me and bless me as I left my homeland and instead lived in Colombia as a foreigner (Genesis 26:3);
• He went before me as I transitioned out of my home in Seattle and into my home in Lomalinda (Deuteronomy 31:8);
• His everlasting lovingkindness led me out of my Pacific Northwest culture and into two cultures new to me: (1) the culture of a missionary community and (2) the culture of rural Colombia (Exodus 13:21);
• As I stepped away from my friends and family back home, God circled me, front and back, with His hand of blessing upon me, and led me into new groups of people I’d never met before (Psalm 139:5);
• He assured me He’d be with me and keep me close as I transitioned out of my home church and into a different one—we had only one in Lomalinda (Exodus 28:15);
• He went before me and helped me fight mental and physical battles as I left behind the way I’d always done grocery shopping and meal preparation, and He led me into the Lomalinda way (Deuteronomy 1:30);
• Although I had never been this way before (Joshua 3:4), He helped me transition out of owning a car and into walking everywhere;
• He had sent me to live as a foreigner and promised to bless me there (Genesis 26:3), helping me trade the smells of forest and sea for the smells of jungle and grasslands and mud;
• Because I was a foreigner in a foreign land (Exodus 2:22), God stood beside me as I moved out of cool Seattle temperatures and into sweltering equatorial heat;
• Within each day’s spirals and whorls, and despite my many awkward lurches, with each little victory and each major triumph God was helping me drop puzzle pieces into place. He held my hand, guided me with His counsel, and transitioned me toward a glorious destiny (Psalm 73:23-24).

 

As we traveled this foreign wilderness, I witnessed God caring for Dave, Matt, Karen, and me as a father cares for his child. He had brought us to this place (Deuteronomy 1:31). 

 

Little did I know then that He was preparing a feast for me so that my cup would overflow with blessings (Psalm 23:5).

 

The Lord carried me out of despair and offered me hope: “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with My righteous right hand” (Isaiah 41:10).

 

Joan Chittister writes: “Despair . . . leads us to ignore the very possibilities that could save us. . . .

 

“Hope, on the other hand, . . . knows that whatever happens God lives in it, and expects that, whatever its twists and turns, it will ultimately yield its good to those who live it consciously, to those who live it to the hilt. . . . Hope sends us dancing around dark corners. . . .

 

“Every dimension of the process of struggle is a call to draw from a well of  new understandings. It is that wisdom that carries us beyond the dark night of struggle to the dawn of new wisdom and new strength.” (Joan Chittister, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope)

 

Hope: It’s a good thing.

 

Wherever you find yourself today,

God holds you in His arms

and offers you hope.

 

“May the God of all hope

fill you with all joy and peace

as you trust Him. . . .”

(Romans 15:13)

 

When you’re chosen and called for a particular job

 

Early in the morning on August 30, my kids set out walking to school with Dave. They were nervous, but Matt’s first grade and Karen’s Kindergarten met in the same classroom, and Dave taught on the same campus—such a comforting thought.

 

That evening we all agreed the kids had done well so I started my job the next day, mornings only, which was important since Karen’s Kindergarten dismissed at noon.

 

Gulp!

 

I worked in the administration office, a small, low, pale yellow building. Remember that hill Karen Mac drove us up on her moto our first evening? The tallest, steepest hill in our center? That’s where my office was, just feet from the radio tower.

 

Up to then, I’d thought hiking up comm hill was bad—and it was a doozy—but after I started my job, I climbed comm hill and the hill on top of it, one right after the other, each morning. (And yes, I did lose weight from all that hill-climbing.)

 

On that first day, along the way, I thought about my new boss, Rich, and that he was the top administrator at our Lomalinda center of operations. Yikes! I had pictured working in a quiet little back office somewhere.

 

On my application I’d written I had secretarial experience—jobs during high school and college—but when I heard I’d work for such an important person, reality hit. I hadn’t worked in an office for seven years and my skills were sure to be rusty.

 

I wish I’d had the maturity to pray with eloquent words but, instead, I held my breath, every muscle tense, as I hiked those steep hills.

 

How blessed we are that “God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans” (Romans 8:26, The Message).

 

And so, somehow God deciphered my wordless thoughts.

 

Maybe He knew that if I could, I’ve have prayed like this:

 

“Father . . . may I live today with the creative esteem

of knowing You have chosen me 

and called me to receive Your love 

and to serve You [in this particular job].

May Your peace flow through me, 

calming my agitated spirit, conditioning my disposition 

and controlling all that I say and do. . . .

Help me to experience the peace of a forgiven, forgiving heart,

the peace of a heart completely open to You,

and the peace of a pure heart filled with Your Spirit.

You are the sole source of perfect peace.”

(Lloyd John Ogilvie, Quiet Moments with God)

 

And it only kept getting better!

 

God, bless His heart, had arranged schedules, Rich’s and mine, so that during my initial days on the job, Rich worked in Bogotá, giving Donna Weber, his outgoing secretary, time to orient me.

 

I still take delight in the way God had gone before me to prepare the circumstances of the first few days of my new job, which seemed overwhelming. I experienced the truth of this:

 

“The Lord will personally go ahead of you. He will be with you; he will neither abandon you nor fail you” (Deuteronomy 31:8, NLT).

 

By scheduling Rich’s days and mine, God went ahead of me and made potential rough places smooth and crooked places straight (Isaiah 45:2). 

 

In the beginning, my clumsiness troubled me—I was out of practice—but soon I caught on.

 

Later, when Rich returned and the office sometimes ran at a hectic pace, I recalled the blessed quietness of my first days and thanked God I got acquainted with the job when I did.

 

Donna tutored me in duties few secretaries in North America carried out. I learned city and town names—Mitú, Caño Colorado, Cobaría, and Acaricuara—and their locations in departamentos (states), names like Meta, Vaupés, Amazonas, and Nariño.

 

I also learned names of some thirty indigenous languages in which our people worked, names like Tucano and Guambiano and Muinane, and I forwarded messages to our radio crew who kept us connected to linguists working in those distant locales and to our planes and our staff in Bogotá.

 

And I typed correspondence in Spanish and used rocks and coffee mugs as paperweights because wind blew through doors and windows, open because of the heat.

 

When I thought of a few of my previous bosses, words like persnickety and curmudgeonly and stuffy came to mind, so I wondered what to expect in my new boss. Donna assured me he was a gem, and soon I discovered she was right. Courteous, approachable, and unassuming, he had a way of putting people at ease.

 

Rich and I worked well together, partly because he was a grace-giving soul and partly because he was organized. “I want this office to run like a well-oiled machine,” he told me, and it did. Since Donna was a real pro, the two of them had the place humming like that well-oiled machine.

 

We had two types of personnel and during my first day on the job, I needed to sort that out.

 

Rich, as Associate Director of Language Affairs (ADLA), helped the first group, linguists—those carrying out Bible translation and literacy among indigenous groups. Rich and his wife Karis had worked as linguists among Colombia’s Wayuu people for more than ten years but, when colleagues elected him to the ADLA position, he set most of that translation work aside to serve all the linguists.

 

The second type, called support personnel, carried out jobs that freed linguists to concentrate on their work—people like pilots, mechanics, medical staff, finance office staff, school teachers like my husband Dave, and many others. To succeed, or sometimes even survive, linguists needed support people, those with skills and personalities willing to fill such roles. Both linguists and support personnel joined forces on behalf of Colombia’s minority language communities.

 

And so it was that I began my new job in Lomalinda.

It was a good day, better than I could have imagined.

(From Chapter 11, Please, God, Don’t Make Me Go: 

A Foot-Dragger’s Memoir)

The view from our yard: My office is to the right of the radio tower.

 

Longing to get over the bad stuff

 

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going,” wrote Thomas Merton. “I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.” 

Merton’s words sum up my state of mind that afternoon at Lomalinda, our out-of-the-way mission center. I’d been fighting to survive the next few minutes, and then the next few minutes. 

“Nor do I really know myself,” continued Merton, “and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. 

"I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this, You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.

“Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost. . . . I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone." (Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude) 

Merton penned such encouraging, hope-filled words for desperate times.  I didn’t know him or his words back then but reading them now offers me comfort. 

Back on that unforgettable afternoon in Lomalinda, in my distress—flustered, discouraged, troubled, lost—somehow God impressed upon me what Elisabeth Elliot discovered and then shared with the rest of us: “Sometimes life is so hard you can only do the next thing. Whatever that is just do the next thing. God will meet you there.” 

So I kept doing the next thing, one baby step at a time—unpacking, arranging, cleaning, caring for the kids, and planning what I’d cook for dinner that evening.

And just as Elisabeth said, God did meet me there. Sometimes He remains very quiet, settled calmly in the background. He was on that day—but He was there. Oh, yes, He was there with me that afternoon. 

He was not angry with me. He would not reject me. I was His child in need of comfort and grace. A weary child of His in need of a new perspective that would lead to hope. 

To arrive at that new perspective and grab hold of that hope, perhaps I needed to grieve—grieve my loss of home and family and country, grieve my inability to properly, healthily carry out my responsibilities in my new house and to nurture my husband and young ones. And to grieve my meltdown and angry outburst at my husband. 

Even grieve the loss of who I had thought myself to be. “Nor do I really know myself,” Merton wrote. 

Dr.Henry Cloud says when we voluntarily enter into grief, it can lead to resolution. 

He says grief “is the most important pain there is. . . .  It heals. It restores. It changes things that have gone bad. Moreover, it is the only place where we get comforted when things have gone wrong.

 

“. . . Grief is the way of our getting finished with the bad stuff in life. It is the process by which we ‘get over it,’ by which we ‘let it go.’ . . .

 

“. . . It is the process by which we can be available for new things. The soul is freed from painful experience and released for new, good experience.” (Dr. Henry Cloud, “Why Grief is Different from Other Kinds of Suffering”)

 

Yes, looking back now, I believe I needed to grieve. Though I couldn’t have put it into words, I longed to move on, ready for new, good experiences in Lomalinda. I longed to be a happy wife, mother, and missionary. 

I think again of Thomas Merton’s heart-wrenching cry and how it captured my state of mind that afternoon: "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.”

But that’s not the end of the story. 

When we are disoriented, unable to look to the future, when we flounder, fail, and fall apart, we have many promises of God’s unfailing love and patience with us. One of them is this: “It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; He will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deuteronomy 31:8).

With the Lord going before me, I just kept taking one little step after one little step, doing the next thing.