Yoroshiku onegaishimasu!

A few weeks ago, I had my last day in my old job, and after a wonderful week of vacation, I started long-term Japanese language training. It’s fun to learn a new language in that it is interesting and quite the sense of accomplishment when you learn anything at all. But it is also exhausting and mind numbing for people like me who are not gifted at it. I spend 5 hours every day in class one-on-one. After about 2 hours, I start getting tired, and the Portuguese begins mixing with the Japanese. At 2pm I head home (yeah!), and then study for several hours (meh). The priority for week #1 was to learn one of the alphabets (hiragana). There’s another alphabet and kanji (Chinese characters) still to go. Half the time I’m thinking that this is interesting, and I’m blessed to have this opportunity, and half the time I’m thinking ARGH WHAT AM I DOING? The cat, on the other hand, is quite pleased with this new schedule, as it has me sitting quietly at home much more than I would be if I were in an office. But if anybody wants to meet up for coffee some afternoon, I would welcome the excuse for a study break!

In the realm of “interesting tidbits”:

After sharing 2 commencement addresses in my last post, I found this one by JK Rowling that is really good too. She also spends a good part of her speech saying that failure is really hard, but it can also be a wonderful opportunity.

I also recommend this blog post regarding a recent ministry at a church I was a member of for 10 years. It discusses just one way to create a structure for people of different demographics (namely married and single) to get to know each other, thereby creating community. It’s so easy for us to just spend time with people in a similar stage of life as us, but we lose so much if we do that. Some of the greatest blessings in my life are my friends who are married with children. I know it is easier for them to get together with other couples with children – people they currently have more in common with, where a play-date for their kids is built in. But mixing married-with-children, married-without-children, older singles, and younger singles is what makes church family, enriching everybody’s lives. It takes effort to do that. I know I am helped by putting something on my calendar – something that isn’t a large room full of people I don’t know, but a much more manageable group. And before I get all of the “do YOU reach out to others?” questions... Yes, but I don’t do it as much as I should. Fairly often, I ask myself what effort I’ve made lately, and I start inviting people to coffee or over to my place to play games or bake cookies. The problem for an introvert like me is knowing people to invite over, which is where dinners, community Bible studies or the like are so helpful.

I'm afraid that's all I have this time. I guess I've been taking seriously the idea of "the lazy days of summer". Enjoy the final weeks of summer!

June Update

I’ve fallen down on the blogging thing this month, and since there hasn’t been anything particularly blog-worthy, I’ve decided to do one post with a bunch of random things. Consider this as your introduction to the kind of overview posts that I’ll likely do when I’m in Japan.

I ended May with a trip out to Oregon for my Grandmother’s funeral. The positive side - I saw relatives that I probably haven’t seen in at least 20 years and some college marching band friends that I haven’t seen in 10-15 years.

June began with the end of my year in the CS Lewis Institute’s fellowship program. That year was a great blessing to me, and I am thrilled that our group intends to keep meeting once a month. 

The cat got a microchip – stage 1 of The Master Plan to get her into Japan without having to spend time in quarantine.

My office moved from one end of our very large building to the other end. It is what it is, and since I go into language training in just over a month, I don’t really have strong feelings about it.

I went to see Wicked, which was totally awesome and probably one of the best musicals I’ve seen. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it. Right now. Or at the very least, watch Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth sing “Defying Gravity” at the Tony Awards. But that’s really not sufficient… Just go see it. Not only are the music and the sets incredible, but the story – a completely different perspective on The Wizard of Oz, showing you that nothing was truly as it seemed – is really intriguing. 

Something interesting from this month – watching commencement speeches. I watched the speeches given by Conan O’Brien at Dartmouth and Stephen Colbert at Northwestern. What I found particularly interesting was that both men didn’t do the traditional “follow your dreams” talk, but rather both basically said that it’s okay if your dreams change, and that “failing” at your current dream can actually be a really great opportunity. Personally, I find that to be both pretty accurate and an interesting reflection on how American society has changed in recent decades.

And finally… Tomorrow is my birthday, when I will turn 29 (for the 9^th time). Being a summer birthday, I found it rather disconcerting the first time I realized that people work on my birthday. Isn’t it like a national holiday or something? No? Oh well. The older I get, the more it becomes like any other day – where the “specialness” of the day largely depends on what I make of it.  But that’s good, because that means I can create all sorts of “days of fun” and justify them all in the name of my birthday (as long as they fall within an acceptable date range). This is a good opportunity to reflect on the blessings of the past year and embrace the coming year – a year when I will be fully occupied preparing to move to Tokyo. Can't wait to see what happens!

Memories of a lady

My grandmother passed away this evening.  While I’m thankful that she lived a good, long life and went before the Alzheimer’s got really horrible, and while I know that I’ve been slowly losing her for years, I mostly just miss her right now.   

She was the grandparent I was closest too. The one I saw multiple times per month growing up and every spring break in college. She was steady and strong-willed, in a petite little package. Feisty, in the best sense of the word. I went to college in part because of her absolute determination that her children and grandchildren should have the opportunity that she and her husband did not. Those memories of me playing a superhero were in her home on Mercer Island. I can see her reading on her chaise lounge or puttering around taking care of her plants. Her parents divorced when she was a child – a rarity in those days – so she understood me in ways that other grandparents could not. Over the years, I made her spend hours telling me stories about her life and showing me her old photo album. We would get to the two pages covered in wallet-sized photos of young men, and she would sweep her hand over the pages and say “and these were my boyfriends”. Flip. (GRANDMA!) 

I loved that she could laugh at herself – like when grandpa would tease her saying that she was getting so jumpy as she got older that he couldn’t walk up the stairs without things flying by his head. I loved how she took care of my cat for me, just like her grandmother took care of her cat once. Every time I talked to her, she’d tell me the cat bit her that day, but I think she was relieved that I didn’t ask for the cat back when I graduated from college. I loved how she got on the plane to come visit me in DC grousing about the trip and how old she was, but by the time she was part way up the Capital South metro escalator, she was WALKING up the escalator with her head turning left and right like it was on a pendulum. 

I will miss her.

What is that to you?

When I was in high school, I didn’t have a plan for my life per se, but I did have an idea of a good scenario – namely, go to college, work for about 5 years, then be married for a few years before beginning to have 2 or 3 children. The only thing that went according to that scenario was college. The older I get, the more it appears that I may never have a husband and children. There are more Christian women than men, so statistically speaking, a good number of women are never going to be married. All of the single Christian men I know who are around my age are getting married to girls 10(ish) years younger than me. Men who appear interested in me either lose interest when they learn what my job is or are nearer in age to my parents than to me (a line I’m not willing to cross at this time). 

Do I doubt that I am where God would have me? No. Do I doubt that where God wants me is the best place? No.Can I look at my life and see numerous ways in which I have been blessed beyond measure? Absolutely. Should I turn away from what I believe God is calling me to do right now and put my life into a holding pattern in the hopes of getting a man to love me? What a waste of my life that would be.

When Jesus appeared to a few of the disciples after the resurrection and told Peter that he would die a martyr’s death, Peter looked back at John and asked “what about him?” Jesus’ reply was, “what is that to you? You must follow me.”

I suspect that often my dissatisfaction with singleness is because I look around at apparently happily married couples with several children and wonder why I haven’t been given that. But, at least for today, that is their calling, not mine. I spend too much time looking around rather than looking up. Over and over again, God has had to ask me “What is that to you?”

There’s always something to be discontent about. If I was married, who’s to say that I wouldn’t struggle with infertility? If I had children, who’s to say that they would be perfect healthy little angels? We all have our struggles, some more visible than others. We have to fight discontentment. We have to actively choose joy, choose to trust God and rest in His peace.

A few years ago, I tried to go see Macchu Picchu. The problem is that, in order to go to Macchu Picchu, you have to go to Cuzco. People with asthma are strongly advised against going over 10,000 feet. Cuzco is at 11,000 feet. I’m stubborn. God is stronger than my stubbornness. Everything that could possibly go wrong (safely) with my trip did. After 48 hours of travel, I never even made it to Peru. I only got as far as the airport in Santiago, Chile. I travelled across a continent and got a blueberry muffin. But I never saw Macchu Picchu. Maybe it would have been a bad idea for me to go to Cuzco.

There are several times in the Chronicles of Narnia where Aslan tells one of the children that it is not for us to know what would have been if… But I look back at how I’ve grown over the years and I think maybe it was good that I didn’t get married when I was younger. And even though I still want to be married and to have children, I must choose to live in the present, to follow the path that God has laid before me, to fix my eyes on Him instead of looking around me and asking “but what about her?” For what is that to me? I must follow Him.

Please don't call me

One of the less exciting aspects of being a Foreign Service officer is when you serve as duty officer. Those are the weeks when all the after-hours “emergency” phone calls go directly to you. If an American gets arrested during non-business hours, you make sure they are treated no worse than anybody else in that jail. If an American dies, you try to track down next of kin. If an American is mugged, you help them contact family to wire them money. It’s an important and necessary job. But I would spend those weeks praying that I wouldn’t get a phone call, and especially not a phone call in the middle of the night. Or if I did, that I would wake up and answer the phone right away! (One excellent way to get in trouble is for the DCM to get woken up because you didn’t answer the duty phone. Praise God, that never happened to me.)

When I was in Brazil, more often than not, those “emergency” phone calls were not actual emergencies. On the rare occasion when it was a legitimate call, I was lucky enough to have them fall under other consular jurisdictions, so all I had to do was call the duty officer in Rio or Sao Paulo or Recife and pass on the info. Hallelujah! But the majority of my phone calls were not emergencies, and I had to tell the person that we couldn’t help them or to call back during business hours. Tokyo, on the other hand, is a major city that actually gets a fair number of American citizens, so I suspect I will not get off so easily when I am stationed there. In an effort to make my life easier, here are just a few tips to keep in mind before you call up the Embassy after hours if you or a loved one are in Japan sometime between September 2012 and August 2015. (And PLEASE remember the time difference!)

* The fact that you are leaving for the U.S. tomorrow and you just realized that you forgot to get a visa for the nanny is not an emergency. (This obviously only applies to citizens of countries for which we require a visa.)

* The fact that your husband has enrolled your kids in school and declared that you will be staying is not an emergency. (People watch too many movies. The Marines are at the Embassy to protect classified material, not to swoop in on a helicopter to pull your teenagers out of school.)

* The Embassy does not have a fleet of planes waiting to be used by American citizens with various medical conditions.

* The U.S. government does not have a fund to fly friends or family to the bedside of somebody who got the flu/malaria/etc while in a foreign country. (I’ve gotten this one the most. Would you ask the government to fly you to another state? No. Under certain conditions, this would be a “welfare and whereabouts” call, where we would locate the person and make sure they are still living. That's about it.)

* While I don’t encourage people to get their pictures taken with alligators, getting your picture taken with an alligator while you are drunk and in the middle of nowhere is NEVER a good idea.

My secret identity

I’m sure everybody reading this blog knows what a big geek I am, so it should come as no surprise that I love superheroes. One of my clearest memories from childhood is running around my grandparents’ house pretending to be Firestar, working with Spider Man, the Wonder Twins and Ice Man to beat the bad guys. (I was an only child, so to say I had an active imagination might be an understatement.) I was somewhat conflicted in my desire to be a superhero in that I occasionally would get captured (damsel in distress!) and have to be rescued before going back to beating up bad guys. But I loved pretending to be a superhero. I still love superheroes, although I think I've come to love warrior princesses more. I never pretended to be Snow White or Sleeping Beauty (well, except for singing slightly operatic songs around the house), but Princess Leia was awesome, and even now one of my favorite LOTR characters is Lady Eowyn.

I have often daydreamed of being something bigger than myself, preferably with the talent for the awesome and witty one-liners. I LOVE awesome and witty one-liners. I’m sure I’m not the only one, or nobody would have saved the reported response of the Spartan King Leonidas when told that his comparatively tiny army should lay down its arms at Thermopylae – “Come and take them.” Or the Spartan who, when told that the enemy arrows would be so numerous as to block out the sun, said “we shall have our fight in the shade.” Or Maximus, in the movie “Gladiator” – “what we do in life echoes in eternity.”

Don’t we all want to feel like our actions echo through eternity, like what we do makes a difference? You often hear about mothers making such a difference, but I’m not a mother. I would love to be a warrior princess with the awesome one-liners. But without pain. I don’t like pain. And without fear would be good. A little fear is okay, but nothing too serious.

And this is where I acknowledge that my desire to be a witty warrior princess is completely divorced from reality. Because let’s face it, I don’t go to the gym enough or have sufficient hand-eye coordination to ever be a good warrior princess. There was one time I was really in a position to help make the kind of difference that would echo through the years – when I was leading a pastor search in a city where intense spiritual warfare is pretty much the norm (there are groups that pray every week for the destruction of the Christian church in that city). I ended up curled in a ball on my bed crying to God that I can’t do this thing I’ve been set to do and if He wants it done, He’ll have to do it through me and in spite of my many weaknesses. 

But you know what? He did!

That’s the amazing thing about all of this – God is the ultimate “superhero”, who doesn’t just operate outside natural laws in a few areas, but who created all of those natural laws and operates outside all of them. And He chooses to use His people – mere jars of clay – to accomplish great things if we’ll only let Him. 

You can only go forward

Maybe this is incredibly self-absorbed of me, but I always find it to be a bit surreal to leave a job or a home. It always seems odd to me that after the goodbyes are said, I quietly walk away and people go back to living their lives. Life goes on without me, and the role I played in that relationship or organization is filled by somebody else.

Moving on is a part of life, and I can never really go back. I can remember my time there with fondness, but it can never be repeated. I’ve changed; those people have changed; the circumstances have changed. We can get together, relive old memories and catch up on what has happened since then. But our ability to pick up as friends again depends on whether they like and accept the changes in me since our last meeting and vice versa. If I’ve turned into a brat while I’ve been away, no amount of fond memories will entice my old friends to hang out with me again.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in meditating on Psalm 119:3, stated, “With God one does not arrive at a fixed position; rather, one walks along a way. One moves ahead or one is not with God. God knows the whole way; we only know the next step and the final goal. There is no stopping; every day, every hour it goes farther. Whoever sets his foot on this way finds that his life has become a journey on the road. It leads through green pastures and through the dark valley, but the Lord will always lead on the right pathway (Ps. 23) and he will not let your foot be moved (Ps. 121:3).”

Looking at my life, I can say that it definitely feels like a journey. My hope is that I’m always moving forward in the direction that God is leading. My trust is in the understanding that God has a plan and a purpose, that He is working my life into what will one day be a glorious tapestry.

This may seem like a non sequitur, but…  Loving people is risky. You make yourself vulnerable. What makes such a risk possible is the knowledge that God loves me dearly, is always by my side and will never leave me. May I carry this knowledge always in the depths of my soul. But people come and go, and at this moment in time, I know that person will be me. 

I’ll be leaving in a year and a half, and I know that leaving friends and family will hurt horribly. Any friendships I now have will be put at risk of fading away into fond memories. True, there is email and skype and facebook and any number of other ways to maintain the friendship when you don’t see the person on a regular basis, but that takes effort that is not seen much in this day and age. However, if I try to protect myself from pain by locking up my heart and not developing deep friendships, I will miss out on the most precious moments of life, and I won’t be the woman God has called me to be, a woman who loves God and loves others. So I must continue to build relationships, to love. Lord willing, my dear friends and I will be close for decades to come. At the very least, I must treasure these moments of the journey and hope that I have touched lives in a positive way.