June 2013
Lipscomb University Starbucks, Nashville, Tennessee
I don’t really do yard work. When I was growing up, and this is 100 percent true, my grandmother did all the yard work for our family. She loved to ride that lawn mower wherever tall grass would take her. It is one of my favorite memories — seeing her ride around our three acres in polyester pants and a massive floppy hat.
But last week, even with my lack of training, it was high time to take on the vines, weeds, and shrubs that had taken over the front of my home. On the brightest days of summer, these two shrubs were so overgrown that barely any light came in through the windows. It was a mass of mess. Through the center of both bushes, which were both taller than me and wider than I could wrap my arms around, shot up some sort of thick-trunked leafy weed. So picture massively overgrown greenery with a seven-foot weed shooting skyward from the middle. I asked a landscaper friend of mine what kind of weed he thought it was. His response when he saw it? “Annie, those are maple trees growing up through your shrubs.”
Oh.
So. You’ve got the idea of what I was working with.
I don’t own any yard equipment per se, so I went to Matt and Amber and borrowed hedge trimmers, thick clippers, and a pair of gloves. Fully decked out and with my iPod blasting some tunes, I went after those two rogue shrubs, and their maple tree invaders, with a vengeance.
I pulled vines that took me twenty feet across my yard before they reached their end. I trimmed and hedged and chopped and clipped and carried ten armloads of weeds and all other manner of leafy strands to the trimmings pile in the backyard.
It took me two solid hours to get these two plants to look like anything manageable.
There was a remaining section of tangled mess on the right shrub that I grabbed with an “I am almost done with this” superstrength and pulled as hard as I could. The overgrowth came unattached from the shrub itself and ripped as I stepped backward until I froze.
When I heard baby birds chirping.
(This is the part of the story when you are going to realize that at times I am a monster. Not on purpose, but a monster nonetheless.)
Yep, I had just torn apart a nest full of baby birds. That’s when I realized that from the tree behind me, the mama bird had been losing her mind for the last twenty minutes as I got closer and closer to her babies, and her sound was just registering with me.
I stopped immediately and looked down into the nest. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I remembered a teacher telling me never to touch baby birds or their mama will abandon them for eternity, or something like that, so I didn’t touch them. But I released the vines and rubbish to dangle from the bush, the birds and nest tightly tangled in the middle.
I stepped back cautiously, surprisingly frightened of that mama bird wailing behind me. I found this to be just the right time to silently tiptoe backward to my front porch and take a seat and drink some water.
I watched that nest closely. The mama did fly over and stand on the top of the shrub, and as she chirped out instructions, her little baby birds wiggled and squished out of the nest between vines and limbs and hopped from shrub to ground. They flapped their little wings, all three of them alive (I thought for sure I was a birdie murderer, so I was really grateful for that), and traveled off together to what I am going to always tell myself was a very happy and productive future.
There is nothing scarier than leaving the nest, I would bet. Especially when the exit is prefaced by a violent shaking and ripping apart of your home. (Ahem. My apologies for that part, birdies.) But it was interesting to watch them regain their footing and adjust to their new location before hopping out.
And that’s exactly what they did.
I have friends who live in China. Turkey. Prague. Asia. The Middle East. Costa Rica. India. Scotland. Ghana. Brazil. South Africa. Italy. All of them are Americans who are long-term missionaries to foreign cultures.
I’m not a collector of missionary friends. International missions is just a core value that my church instilled in all of us as we grew up. I can remember being at our church’s summer camp as a fifth grader and learning every day about a different area of the world where the people there needed to hear about Jesus.
(This is also the year of camp when I learned how to sing two songs that helped me memorize the books of the Bible. I’ll sing them for you anytime. You’re welcome.)
As I continued from elementary age into youth group, we had many opportunities to travel out of the country on mission trips. I went to France, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Africa. We had to raise our own funds and attend weekly meetings, but our adult leaders were brave enough to pack up sometimes upward of sixty high schoolers and take them across oceans or borders.
Now, as an adult, I am certain they were insane.
Some of my fondest memories from my teen years come from those mission trips — riding bikes on the cobblestones of the Palace of Versailles, learning traditional dances in the church building of Ciudad Cortes, Costa Rica, after a long day of building and sweating. Our church provided opportunities to see the world that I might not have otherwise had.
More importantly, I saw God.
When Costa Rican children gathered around us during bilingual VBS and made bracelets that share the gospel to take home to their families, I saw God.
When Parisian church buildings, usually empty, became filled to capacity to see a bunch of American high schoolers do a variety show, I saw God.
When we met hundreds of Scottish students at a university student fair just outside of Edinburgh, I saw God.
The map can take you anywhere. Absolutely anywhere. My friend Shireen moved to Africa to teach school right after college. We mailed letters back and forth, and I remember thinking she was living the kind of life people write books about. She gave her time to educate people in other parts of the world and share Jesus while she was at it.
I know people who have lived outside of their country for months, others for years, and still others for decades. Not everyone is Amy Carmichael, a missionary to India in the early 1900s who didn’t go on furlough for fifty-five years. I personally maxed out at five months and twenty-eight days. Being brave doesn’t have a predetermined length of time that says success. My bravest moment when I decided to move to Scotland wasn’t the last day; it was the first. I could have gone home after a week and still would have known that I had done the brave thing.
Tammy is a missionary in India. She’s been there for fifteen years. When she arrived, she had eighty dollars in her pocket and a few connections for doing ministry. Now, many years and many miracles later, Tammy has forty-eight children in her care and a staff of ten, and God shows up for them all the time.
She’s not brave because of the length of time she’s been there or the amount of children she and her staff care for (though both of those things are amazing). She is brave because she went. Because she decided to forgo her life here in America for a life she didn’t know.
This isn’t to say that America is the best place to live and if you live anywhere else you are sacrificing. Nope, I don’t think that’s the case. Courage isn’t leaving America for another part of the world; courage is leaving home. Leaving the culture you know for one you don’t know. Because every day in that new place will provide opportunities for you to come face-to-face with something you don’t know, and yet somehow to choose joy. Because you chose to be there. Because you chose to be brave.
I got injured in Scotland. It’s a bizarre story really, but not too shocking for the people who know me. I pay for health insurance not because I get sick but because I get hurt. A lot. I’m clumsy. My mind moves better than my body, and I’m far too distracted, usually talking, when I should be focused on walking. Also, at times I have managed to forget that just because I could once do an activity — say, a cartwheel when I was ten years old — doesn’t necessarily mean I can do it now at thirty-three.
But on this late summer day in Scotland, when I had only lived there for a month or so, I was merely getting up from the couch and walking to put a DVD in the player when somehow I managed to get my legs tangled in my computer cord. It was almost like some tiny troll had come and tied the cords around my ankles so that when I stood up, I couldn’t take a step. I tripped and slammed the front of my left shin into the corner of the coffee table and knew immediately it was bad.
Not to be dramatic (clearly, I’m never that), but I thought I might have broken my leg. I knew for certain it was a deep cut because it did that white thing right before it started bleeding out. And I’m talking bleeding out.
I skyped my mother immediately and tried to show her, but it came across looking grainy and wouldn’t stop bleeding so she could assess the damage. I was totally panicked.
In Nashville, I would have known to go to the ER and what to take. As a matter of fact, a few years before when I had fallen off my porch on 11th Avenue South in Nashville and tore all the ligaments in my left ankle, that’s exactly what I did. But in Edinburgh? I didn’t know the first thing to do.
To cut (ouch) to the chase, I didn’t do anything for a few days but just tried to control the bleeding (that didn’t stop for nine hours, y’all). Finally, I went to the pharmacy down in the Bruntsfield neighborhood drugstore, where the Asian-Scottish pharmacist informed me I had made a huge mistake by not going that first day to the A&E (I didn’t even know what that was but learned it stood for Accident & Emergency) and that I was going to have a massive scar (I do). It looks like a fat, brown caterpillar right smack on the middle of my very pale shin. It’s ugly, but I guess it was cheaper than getting an “I will always remember living in Edinburgh” tattoo.
Going into the world means giving up your neighborhood ER to learn about an A&E. It means not having access to some of your favorite things or people or places in order to make somewhere else your place and make new friends your people. It means you may eat something weird every day, or, as in my case in Scotland, it may be close to what you are used to but just a bit off — and that can be infuriating when you are homesick.
I don’t care if you are there for six days or six months, when you go into the world, you are trading your life for a foreign life. And that takes courage. That’s a new map, a map that may have a language you don’t know or street names you can’t decipher or cars on the wrong side of the road.
If you’ve never gone, go. If you’ve never had a moment when no one around you speaks your language or shares your pigment or knows how elementary school works, you need to go. You need that. You need to see that the world is big and diverse and maybe God doesn’t look or sound the way you always thought he did because the world has a lot of different-looking and different-sounding people, all who are made in his image.
Save up your money. Raise your money. Connect with a mission-sending organization or a nonprofit organization. Be brave enough to send that first email that says, “Can I go to Africa with y’all?” or “Yes, I’d like to be on that mission team to Mexico.”
Do whatever it takes to expand your map. Because if you will go where you’ve never gone before, you will see God like you’ve never seen him before.