Friday, June 8, 2012

We're Home!

At the present moment, I am laying on my green couch in my own living room.  I just took one of the longest, hottest and best showers of my life.  My husband's welcome home gift to me was a professionally-cleaned house.  Have I mentioned lately that I married WAY above my pay grade?  It's great to be together as a family again.  I am joyful in spirit and weary in body.  Just wanted everyone to know that we made it home from Guatemala safely.  Just in case you are not yet sick of reading these blogs... here's one more entry I wrote on the plane ride home.  Thanks for praying us home.



At the time of this writing, we are on our Delta flight headed for home.  It’s a strange combination of feelings – as any of you know who have been on mission trips before.  At this point in the journey, our bodies are running on fumes.  The only way I know to describe the fatigue is “shaky tired.”  Yet our emotions are on overdrive.  We’ve begun to try to process all that we saw this week, and all that we saw God DO this week.  It was NOT an ordinary week. 

Our hearts are filled with anticipation to reunite with those we hold most dear back home, and at the same time, our hearts are already dreading the airport goodbyes with our newest friends.  This team assembled at Hartsfield last Friday as awkward strangers, but at departure time on that same sidewalk in a couple of hours… there will be sadness.  I’d give a kidney to anybody on this team. 

Individual strengths have been on display – it’s amazing to see how God assembles a team.  Some are nurturers, some are take-charge types, some are humble servants always in the background, and some are natural born leaders always up front.  I’ve learned from my two mission trips that you can check your snap judgments of your teammates right along with your luggage and forget about them.  One of God’s hobbies, I think, is shattering our stereotypes.  This week I watched a man I “figured” would be the most detached and stand-offish from the group jump into the kids program during the clinics like nobody’s business.  He blew up 487 million balloons and turned them into animals if he did ONE.  An amazing man.

I watched another member of our team, an accomplished airline pilot, heap praise on a college kid among us who showed the pilot how to fly in a counseling station.  I watched a mother on our team weep repeatedly in a counseling station as the life circumstances of each patient took another chunk out of her heart.  She confided in me later that she believes her emotions are “getting in the way” of her effectiveness.  I beg to differ.  I think it’s exactly why God HAD her in those counseling stations.  How often do you think a Guatemalan villager experiences the tears of a gringo?  Isn’t that a testament of the unity of God’s global church?

It will take me a couple of weeks to “decompress”.  I learned that last year.  My emotions will be all over the place during that time (and not from hormonal swings this time!)  As is my tendency, I will journal my way through those times.  Some I will choose to share with you, and others will be just between God and me.

I wanted to leave you today with one last God story.  I wanted to write it last night, but I just couldn’t.  It was too raw and my heart needed some time to just treasure the moment.

During the final moments of Clinic 4, our last one of the week, I finished up in my counseling station a few precious minutes before the others.  I immediately seized the opportunity to grab my camera and take some shots of a “clinic in action” to share with all of you on the blog.  I hastily laid my Bible and my Journal down on the concrete floor beside my counseling station and ran around the room snapping photos as fast as I could go.  I was thrilled to be able to do that.  Watching the dentist teach the village kids how to brush their teeth was priceless!

Once a clinic is over, it’s all-hands-on-deck for repacking and reloading the supplies and equipment back into the fleet of Suburbans.  It’s a frenzied time.  But that day was different.  The mission team was treated to COLD beverages from a restaurant about a “block” down the street.  We had packed coolers full of lunch meat and bread to eat, but to have a cold Coke to go with it felt like a day at the spa!  We were laughing and talking and sharing stories a mile a minute.  The Guatemalan Ministry staff stayed behind to pack everything up – just to serve US.  When they were done, they drove the Suburbans to the front of the restaurant to save us the trouble of back-tracking.

About an hour into the five hour drive home… I reached into my backpack to get my bible and journal to start studying and asking God what He wanted me to share on the blog.  That’s when the wave of nausea hit me.  I immediately knew in my gut that my Bible and Journal never made it back into my backpack after my “photography shoot.” 

I cannot describe to you to the depth of my anguish in that moment.  The Journal was one I use exclusively in Guatemala.  It had two years worth of Clinic Notes and Devotion Notes from Dr. Hermann’s Worship Time with us each morning.  The name of  every single patient I had seen the last two years in the counseling stations were written in that journal, along with a brief synopsis of their circumstances.

And my Bible.  It was the one held together by heavy-duty Scotch Packing Tape.  (I would have used Duct Tape, but I didn’t want to cover up the words “Holy Bible” on the binding.)  The fake leather is fraying at the corners.  It’s certainly not pretty to the casual observer, but to me, it is beautiful.  Like most Americans, I have plenty of other Bibles.  I have newer ones and bigger ones and ones with helpful study notes.  But THIS was my travel bible.  Anytime I’ve left home in the last 15 years and needed to have a Bible with me, THIS was the one I took.  It’s got six years of BSF notes written in it.  It’s been to every Bible Study I’ve taken, and every Bible Study I’ve tried to lead during those years.

In short, this Bible has been where I’ve been… both physically AND emotionally.  I was brokenhearted in the back seat of that Suburban. 

We did all the things you do when you realize something valuable is missing.  We checked with all the other team members to see if someone picked it up.  We checked all the Clinic Supply Bins, once we arrived back at the Ministry Center, to see if someone had crammed it in there while packing up.  No luck.  It was just gone.  I knew in all likelihood, it had been swiped… perhaps by a child hoping to sell it.

With the combination of extreme fatigue, heightened emotion from four clinics in rapid succession, and the loss of my beloved Bible… I will confess that I sat down in the Ministry Center and had myself a cry.  I was sitting at a table by myself in the common area at the time.  I’m not much of a crier, so when I do… it’s more of a silent thing.  Just tears spilling over the banks and down my cheeks.  In the Ministry Center, there is NO WHERE to go to have a private moment, so I just sat where I was and gave in to the emotion.  Unfortunately, Braxton strolled up in that moment.  He’s not used to seeing his mom cry, so when he realized how upset I was over my bible… his banks flooded too.  We were a pitiful pair!  So we decided to do what we’ve done a lot of this week.  We prayed that God would help us find my Bible.  Our small group family member, Cameron, joined us in that prayer.  THEN we called it a night.

The next day, our team leader (TG) told me that she had told Dr. Hermann about the Bible and he was going to make some phone calls.  I’ll confess that it didn’t spark much hope in me.

Three hours later, word came that my Bible and my Journal had been found back in the village of San Marco!!  Oh ye of little faith!  The very BEST part of this whole ordeal was seeing my son’s reaction to the news.  He immediately connected our prayer to the miracle of finding the Bible.  THANK YOU JESUS!  It may sound like a small thing to you, but to a parent anxious to see signs of spiritual growth in her child… it was a gift. 

At that point, we had no idea how the Bible would make its way back to ME from a village five hours away (it’s not like you can just throw it in a FedEx package and drop it in the mail.)  But I wasn’t even worried about that part.  I was JOYFUL just knowing that what was lost had been found.  I figured it would take a few weeks to make its way home to me in Atlanta.

But our personal miracle wasn’t over yet.  At our celebration dinner on our last night in Guatemala (the Guatemalan Ministry Staff traditionally grills out for us), TG casually strolled up to me and put a plastic bag in my hand.  It was a black bag, so I didn’t immediately make the connection.  But it didn’t take long.  My Bible and my Journal were back in my hands!  I felt like that verse of scripture in Matthew 13:44 that says,  The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.  When a man found it, he hid it again and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.    “How in the WORLD?” I asked her when I finally stopped jumping up and down.  GET THIS.

A 2nd dentist, (Monica), who occasionally volunteers some of her time to the Ministry, was working with another team out in the villages.  She had called the Ministry Center to ask permission to run a personal errand to the village of San Pablo at the end of the day’s clinic.  Dr. Hermann’s brother (Dietrich) helps coordinate the staff, so he gave her permission to do her errand.  Shortly thereafter, Dietrich was pulled into the communication loop over my missing Bible.  He was allowed to place the last piece into the jigsaw puzzle God was putting together.  When he heard about my Bible, and that it had been found in San Marco... he realized that Monica would be within shouting distance of San Marco as she ran her personal errand.  He just started laughing with joy over how God goes before us and answers our prayers.  He called Monica and asked her to pick up the Bible from the village pastor before returning to the Ministry Center. 

Twenty-Four Hours after praying about my missing Bible, I was clutching it to my chest.  Perhaps having not seen the villages for yourself, you can’t appreciate the magnitude of that miracle.  But I can.  God is personal and loving and He answered the prayer of a weepy mom and two young men who took the time to pray.  The sheer sweetness of it buckled my knees.

You can be cynical if you want to, but I’m sick of not giving God credit for the things He does for me every single day.  I don’t want to live that way anymore.  I want to open my eyes to the workings of my Father in the world around me.  I want to open my eyes in AMERICA.   I want to experience His grace EVERY day, not just for one week in Guatemala.

So as the flight attendants hustle me off this computer, as we make our initial approach back into Hartsfield-Jackson, I want to thank you for praying for us while we were gone.  I value prayer MORE than I did a week ago.  I hope I’ll be able to say that same thing next Friday.