Single and Living Overseas

"Wow, you girls have been here 3 years, that is to be admired! That's so amazing, I don't know if I could imagine being here by myself like that..."
…………..

…Says a friend's husband to my roommate and I. He was graciously helping us with our Apple products yesterday. Two cracked screens, a fried hard drive, and a new phone. We've had it over our eyeballs with dishonest computer and phone distributers here and I'm on phone #4 in one year- NOT because I've broken, lost, or water damaged them all. Quite frankly, I'm sick and tired of dealing in broken Chinese with some 30-something year old dude who sees Laowei (foreigner) and wants to make a few extra bucks off them. I am at their mercy. I can only hope and believe when they tell me I'm getting a real HTC….or Samsung….or the other phone that I don't remember it's brand name…only to have it stop working 3 months later. But yesterday, mercy came to us- in the form of a friend's husband who graciously spent his entire afternoon going up and down low floor and high floor elevators, stairs in between, up and down, and different buildings, to help us get to the right people. Honest people. All the while coming back to, "I just think it's really amazing that you girls can do this, it's just so amazing." 

A couple hours pass and one screen is on order, the other one being replaced, no new phone, and decisions about how data from a hard drive should be extracted. Jim starts talking about how when one thing happens, it seems to cause a domino effect. "It's just one thing after another, you know?" He then went on to tell us how the week he was in Macau on business, everything seemed to go wrong at home and his wife was left to deal with it and how badly he felt he wasn't there to take care of it for her.  As he talks, I remember: This guy is American, grew up in Taiwan, speaks fluent Chinese, first came to China the year I was born, and moved here with his family a decade ago, and he still thinks living here is a challenge. The challenges I try so hard to shrug off as everyday inconveniences he classifies as straight up frustrating challenges. Suddenly I feel so much better for the amount of stress I carry sometimes. Trying to find a new apartment, looking for a good, real phone, the electric bill coming in way higher than it should, the washing machine breaking, rust in the tub, humidity making it virtually impossible to dry clothes, the faucet shooting water out of the kitchen sink and soaking both operator and kitchen. Stress. The stress I wake up to on a daily basis. The stress that has me curled up in a ball on my bed some evenings, just trying to escape life overseas…and then he says it, "I just wish I was there when it happened to take care of it, but I can deal with some of it when I get back." When it hits me, not in a discontented, envious, or malicious sort of way, but it hits me, "She gets someone to take care of all this stuff with and for her. She has someone coming back who will provide and protect her from the wiles of cultural differences. She gets someone who will call the landlord to fix the dryer she gets, or decide what to do about the dog when it gets a growth on it's ear. She has that security, that convenience. And again, almost a relief floods me. If married couples, one growing up in Taiwan, and one in South America, consider these circumstances challenging, how much more challenging is it to a single, not-yet-fluent-in-Chinese American, grown-in-America girl? I'm told I'm not a normal overseas-American and that I adapt and assimilate well, but there are some things where you just can't take the America out of the girl!

I feel sad, yet slightly triumphant about the whole ordeal. On the crowded bus home, I try to text a friend about a friend who might be able to get me a new phone and my phone, of course, decides to give me, yet another, Failed message. I retype, condense, resend- crossing my fingers that it will decide to send. I feel battered and worn. It's been a long day, apartment shopping in the morning, Computer City in the afternoon, and buying train tickets in the middle. We can't even buy train tickets without some ordeal! It's a pizza kind of night. Pizza and a movie. Then sleep. 

I'm allowed to feel this way, I tell myself, I'm allowed to feel battered by the day, the stares, the comments, the questions. I begin to process, to wonder why I never felt allowed to let reality sink in quite as it had that day. Defense mechanism, I think, Defense for survival. If I allowed myself to think of just how many frustrating things happen in the space of a day, I'd go crazy. I don't mean get-stuck-at-a-red-light kind of frustrating. I'm talking a couple of men try to talk to you in Chinese at the bus stop and when you refuse to talk back, they begin talking about you and how you don't understand what they're saying and you're a foreigner, blah, blah, blah…I'm talking, the guy assures you that you are buying a real Samsung Galaxy for ALL that money only to realize a few months later you got another lemon. I'm talking it's an ordeal to get the light bulb in the kitchen fixed, or the stove to light when you have company coming for dinner…trying to leave your apartment complex and getting hit by the bicycle built for 2 (or 3 or 4) because there are too many people on the street and literally none of them know how to ride or control a big bike like that. But they laugh because it's funny, cause they're tourists and it's not every day one gets to hit a laowei with a bicycle built for 2, 3, or 4.

But where is grace now? I do a double take and realize I'm retreating. Retreating inside my fortress and slamming the gate shut. Safety, I just need to take cover. Block out all the noise, the stares, the lies, the disrespect. But didn't I just realize and commit to breaking down those walls of protection? How am I supposed to protect myself of life outside my front door if I'm tearing down those walls? How am I supposed to survive, without a protecter and provider of my own in China? I hear it, I hear it creeping in over me. I hear the words, I'm your Protector, Joanna. I provide every good and perfect thing for you. I want you to run to me, my child, like a little girl battered and bruised, run to me and seek shelter and safety. It does not please me to see you pained like this and as a father does not rest until his daughter is avenged, so I will not rest. I will take you and dry your eyes and clean your wounds, but run to me small child of Mine, run to me and I will engulf you with my love and rest.

Shelter, shelter in Jesus. Safety in my Father. Is this what it means to live "safe" with walls down? It doesn't mean we don't get hurt, but it means He binds up our wounds (Psalm 147:3) So then how should I look at this challenge smeared life? So so differently than I have been. It's like I have to relearn how to live, how to walk out the front door- forget that, how to walk into my bathroom which has had a new distinct smell every time I walk in from my new wonderful upstairs neighbors (Granted, the day it smelled like peppermints were all over the place I didn't mind so much.). This is a new way of life and I'm so unfamiliar with it. How do I live with walls down? No more wall of complaint. No more wall of fear. No more wall of hurt. No more wall of frustration. No more wall of singleness. Crash! No more walls! I feel exposed…and scared. I fear that if I do not protect myself that nobody will. I'm afraid I will walk out into this Labor day holiday on the rainy beach and be flattened by a local fish deliverer who could care less whether I was dead or alive. I might vanish, I might be abused- and badly. Fear, hands rugged from building the walls begin to appear out of no where and start repairing the wall. Aiyo! Frustration, these hands appear too- it's like mutiny of my heart! How do I control them? How do I say to them "Enough is enough! Leave the walls down!" A glimmer of hope as I look up and see the deep, fresh green of trees six stories below. The Little Things, I tell myself, it's the little things in life. The gifts. This is where everything starts to come together. We've been reading a book called 1,000 Gifts by Ann Voskamp and it's all about one word: Eucharisteo. Remembering to see all as an act of grace and give thanks.

But how do I see the student lying to my face and defending themselves in Chinese to their teachers who dismiss it and move on as eucharisteo? I wonder. How do I see the tourists invading my introvert bubble as eucharisteo? How do I knock down the walls and demolish them so well that I can finally see clearly through the eyes of Jesus…the eyes of Grace? This is a complete cleansing, a revamping of total way of life, no, total way of thinking. This is a heart and mind renovation. An eye renovation. Once I can give thanks for the challenge, the frustration, those walls can no longer be built. Once I follow my Shepherd to shelter from the storm, the wall of fear for protection can no longer be repaired. The old walls come down and are burned and I can experience the freedom of this life that God has so abundantly given me. I can run and dance and sing in the green pastures because I see them for what they are, and I see the valley of the shadow of death for what it is, just a moment. Just a moment in exchange for the eternal joy- the ultimate purpose in life- Life with the Father.

…And it won't be the last...

"It wasn't my first puddle," said my friend's Mom chuckling, "and it won't be the last, I'm sure." The rest of us looked sympathetically down at her now soaked black Bob's and tried not to think of what was growing in that milky red dirt puddle. Then it hit me,

"How can you really be sure?"

…………………..
Why is it that such seemingly minuscule moments seem to impact me so deeply? When I was in high school my dream was to become a published photographer.  I was going to publish a book, and the title? The Little Things. Throughout high school and into college God awakened my senses to the small every day "gifts" as author Ann Voskamp describes them. I wanted to capture them all with my camera and show the world, because I knew that so many of us walk right past the veins in a leaf so intricately placed, without even stopping to notice their existence. I too, in these last few years started walking right past such miracles and blessings without stopping to think about them- until this weekend. Those last 7 words my friend's mother uttered almost physically stopped me in my tracks.

Suddenly the entire world started spinning. I look around me, there are cars lining the small mountain road and I think, "What if one of them hit me right now?" or "What if we don't make it back to Xiamen tomorrow because of some freak accident?" Neither worry nor fear birthed these questions, but rather the realization that we cannot make the assumption that we know what the next day, let alone the next moment will hold for us!

You would think I, of all people, should know this, as my own Dad was taken home so suddenly my sophomore year in college. And I did know it then, but I never really grasped the goodness of this truth. I viewed the truth through lenses of hurt and fear. You never know what is going to happen, I would tell myself so live life to the fullest and leave no regrets.
And so my life's motto was born:

No regrets

None. No regret in your last interaction with anyone. No regret for what you ate or didn't eat. No regret in buying that things or not buying it (which my Mom tells me gets her into trouble sometimes :). No regret in the choices made, no regret in deed done or left undone. No regret in what was said or left unsaid. No regrets. I don't want to look back on my 20's full of regret (or any stage of life for that matter). I want to live life open-handed and with abandon- this is my goal, yet on that red dirt road in the middle of the Hakka Tulou villages, I realized how tightly I've closed my hands.

What closed them? I wonder. Fear. The word came instantly. Fear has been my teacher and constant companion. Fear of rejection,  fear of the phone ringing and hearing that someone else in my family has been taken suddenly. Fear that I would miss God's best for me, fear that I would lose my family because  my calling and choices have taken me half-way across the planet. Fear that someone might actually mean it when they said they loved me, not because of what I could do for them, but because of how we are truly like "iron sharpening iron". What was the cause for this dominating fear? Hurt. And so I have gone along building up walls of protection with the words No Regrets stamped all over them. Thinking I had done myself a great service, surely I would not regret something I never let myself feel or experience. I would be safe. I could be happy. Hold one, I would tell myself, just hold on a little bit more, they will leave and you will realize, they were just like all the others. But it's okay, because you didn't trust with abandon, so you're safe. It won't hurt as much this time.
Hold on, be strong, in no time you will be stronger from holding on. Just another day of this and then the sun will come out. They will listen to reason and understand…
Leave the conversation till tomorrow and explain it again, then they'll get it…
I'm missing something. The hurt strangles my joy and I realize I have a fortress. The temporary surge walls I've built around my heart, I realize are not just surge walls, but thick walls. Walls that keep me from seeing the white circle just inside the big brown circle on the wing of the white butterflies that have just recently emerged from Spring.  Walls that let me say things like, "I'll have tomorrow to fix that." "I've been hurt before and it certainly won't be the last time so get ready for the storm, look for the storm, protect yourself for the storm." Walls that shut the Light out in the name of holding on to truth. My self-proclaimed truth. Walls that keep Truth Himself out.

I've spent most of my life "filling in the blanks" for God. He allows us to live in some realm of mystery in that He has our days numbered and written down in His book, but we have yet to live them. We don't know the end, we don't even know the whole story- yet sometimes we fill in the blanks so that we can maintain some sort of control over our circumstances, or at least our reactions. But again, in filling in the blanks, we determine our own destiny. We determine our will is better than God's. We take our life into our own hands and proclaim our own wisdom and sovereignty to steer our lives. Such a life is foolishness! What is that verse from the New Testament?

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.  James 4:13-17

So I've grown up hearing. Yet how much of my life is really lived through this lens? The lens of Scripture: the lens of today, no tomorrow. My Redeemer lives and redeems my days and my hurts and fears, thank God. Thank God my Redeemer lives! But it's time to trade our sorrows, Christian. It's time to trade our sorrows for the joy of the Lord! Lay it down. Lay down the fear that keeps you holding on to your life,

For whoever whats to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake, will find it.   Matthew 16:25

Find your life, my dear friend, find it in Him. This is where freedom is. There is no fear where the Spirit of the Lord is. No malice, envy, jealousy, pride, or hurt. There is no room for such attitudes or characteristics. We call ourselves Christian, yet keep the good fruits locked up in our fortresses to rot. Today is the day to break down the walls and open the orchards of good fruit to all we meet. Let them taste and see that the Lord is good. Oh how would our churches change if we all opened ourselves to each other to taste and see that the Lord is good. He inhabits the very soul and being of His disciples. We can hoard or we can share. What will your response be?