“We have weird lives,” Givorgy told me this week.
It’s true. But also, we have these beautiful lives where I get to spend time talking with people about cross cultural connections. I had to rearrange my Thursday schedule to have a call with my TeachBeyond supervisor who is currently in Kenya rather than America. I love getting to catch up with Lindsay monthly and talk about how I can be intentional in using my time for the care and advancement of Third Culture Kids. This new team at TeachBeyond is just taking off, and I love seeing how the crew cares so much about making sure we love the missionary kids in our organisation.
I consider it a real privilege to have a role on this team and the opportunity to care for TCKs and ATCKs. I had a couple of calls with a young person this week who I taught several years ago who is currently struggling quite a bit. I mentioned to him that the story I used with his name in my memoir got cut in the last round of edits. He joked he was going to be upset about it “for the next three weeks.” I laughed and told him there were still other references to him, just none that specifically named him anymore. As I sat with the latest edits and looked at the need to write up a new chapter, I was considering the different stories I could include. There are several stories I tell about this particular kid, but none of them would make a great chapter in a memoir. He recently moved to the same city as a different BFA alum, and I happened to text her this week as well because she’d volunteered to be a test reader for my memoir. I laughed as she sent me her two comments so far – one of which was just highlighting a reference to the first students invited to my house for tea with the comment “ME!!!!!!”
This week had a lot of reflective moments as I was digging into edits in my current draft and thinking about the story I want to communicate with my life. I think we all spend time thinking about how we’re perceived by others, but I find myself in this unique position of having lots of people asking to know more about the life I’ve lived. I had a gross look at how I’ve compared myself to other people in less than helpful ways earlier this week, and I want to deliberately shift my perspective.
I was reading through Psalm 73, and it begins with this truth claim about God rewarding the faithful immediately followed by several verses complaining about how the wicked get off scot free while the righteous psalmist suffers. There’s a critical turn to how the position of the wicked doesn’t last, and that God does stand beside the righteous in the long term, but I was taking a moment to face that lived experience of comparing myself to others. How absurd, as privileged as I am in so many ways, to complain, but here I was sitting alone in my wheelchair considering the people who walk around me, the adults who don’t need brolly sheets because their nerves function properly, and various other security and certainty people have which my life doesn’t afford.
I wouldn’t trade it though. Years ago, I said that to my friend Jo in the REHAB hospital. He’s not a Christian, and we had lots of fascinating worldview conversations as we both recovered from life altering spinal cord injuries. I’d posted something on my blog about how I wouldn’t trade my experience because I’d gained friends and learned things about intimacy with Jesus that I didn’t want to give up. He told me he’d throw out our friendship in a heartbeat to not have a spinal cord injury.
I hate the limitations and inconveniences and pain related to my disability, but I don’t hate the life I have. I love how cared for and supported I am. I love the way God has shown me more of his character and given me opportunity to have empathy for a wider range of people. I love how I get to live cross-culturally, and how this position in New Zealand was only connected to me because of my disability. I also love how the norm here is for people to pray with expectation of my miraculous healing. I love being surrounded by people who speak about “when you’re healed.” I love that I’m not the only one we’re praying for, but that we pray big things and see God show up regularly. The book of Acts is filled with all of these stories of the apostles sharing the love of Jesus and seeing the Holy Spirit transform lives in radical ways. My life is already radically transformed by the Holy Spirit, and we’re not done yet. My normal, everyday life involves purposeful prayer to listen to God and lean in to whatever cool things are happening in his power. I can’t make this stuff up.
