It Has Begun

Between 24-48 hours ago, It began. "It" may hereafter be defined for this post as "the total loss and control of emotions, specifically that of tears." It is, in a word, rough. I have taken extra precautions. I am beginning to let people know this will happen sporadically and I will be unable to do anything about It. I have stopped wearing mascara on my bottom lashes and may stop wearing it altogether, depending on how the next 48 hours of diagnostic testing go. It connects to very little logic other than what is going on in my head and heart, which if you can figure the logic out of those two, you get a prize. It happens when I realize I'm doing something for the last time--like swimming with Moulin participants, enjoying a firework spectacle with the Prevotes, encouraging again the JAO leadership transition team, getting with students for what may very well be final goodbyes, bike rides to places that in a couple weeks time will no longer be in the my life, eating betterave rouge (red beet) salad that I once detested but I now long for, going to dinners in L'Arche foyers, etc, etc. It happens most pointedly when I'm all alone, sitting on my favorite church garden bench to savor my holy space or washing my face in the bathroom. Without warning, as It's definition suggests, I am all apart.

I've had visions too of chaining myself to something grounded and inanimate and pitching an "I don't wanna fit," which I rarely did as a child but now the moment appropriately seems to call for it, to protest my departure. People keep bringing up what date it is, and this does not help. At all.

Yes, yes, as I go, I am doing so in peace. But that doesn't mean every now and then I can't just be a human and grieve and lose it and pitch a fit. I just hope they can drag me out of the car July 8. We have no idea how that day will go.

Not One for the Dinner Table

Islam, Virginity, and French Law

This article raises so many issues on so many levels I won't even attempt to articulate my thoughts. Read it all please.

It is Time

Final GBU Bible Study at UTC

The ladies (sans Natacha)

I finally looked at the calendar today and promptly fell into a panic attack. I've been putting if off for a while now, counting specifics days and weeks and all, and was only made aware of it being a month away from my July departure on June 8th when someone told me. That was not a happy moment, and I can't remember who you are but you shouldn't have done that. Oddly, I am not weepy but stalwart, resolute in pressing forward with my various calls which brought me here until the very end. It's what one has to do, or at least I have to do, to not do the following...

I'm canceling my ticket home. I have mulled it over for multiple evening conversations with myself and honestly, it's not that I don't trust God to be faithful to continue his work here without me. But it feels, I think, quite selfish to leave. Christian Americans who read this blog (and any others of course), I would like to say this to you (and myself as well)--you've got it good. In fact, easy. Pick a corner of a town and you've got a church before you. I recently read an excellent book which records the following: "For a religious marketplace to exist, a society cannot have state-established, supported, and regulated churches." The authors follow with this a few paragraphs down: "...when religion becomes disestablished, it opens the doors for creative religious entrepreneurs to market their alternative faiths to religious consumers. The general public, likewise, is freed--at least in ideal--to choose among options. Disestablishment in the context of a new, pluralistic nation [America] led to a religious marketplace."* I will be the first to admit I am guilty of this on many levels and deciding on where to attend church is a very serious question for me. But, welcome to America. On the other side of the Atlantic, however, welcome to France, where there is no marketplace but rather a population cynical of church due to a sordid Church-State past (among other reasons) and maybe oh, 4-5 Protestant churches within my town or an hour+ beyond. My wrestlings with selfishness become clear. I also leave behind this--

Yesterday Corine and I plopped down on the grass next to the Oise River. We began to talk and she shared what she was learning from her quiet times, how it's "bizarre" that the particular questions she is asking every day continue to be met with response in her Scripture reading and meditations, encouraged by a Lecteur de la Bible her grandmother sent her from Cameroun! She began unfolding to me the story of Job and this was not my time to ask questions but to simply listen. To have this young, sincere, tender woman of Jesus teach me from her heart what God has been teaching her through Scripture of himself.

Earlier in the day, during lunch with Natacha, Corine, and Marie-Pierre, Natacha delivered as promised the teaching and worship of Passion: Paris. With great gusto and laughter, for which she is now in my mind famous, she covered all the points taught and again, this was not my time to talk. It was my time to listen and encounter this dear, fervent young woman teach her sisters of how God would use them.

So you see. I am leaving a lot. And it is selfish. But maybe you also see that it is time. A year is too short, and I struggle with a bit of jealousy reading of a brother leaving an Asian country after 3 years. Three years, I thought, what a dream! Time to really sink into a place, a people, to know the rhythms of the lives of those we love far deeper than I can within a year. This week, however, the same moments that made me want to cancel my ticket also told me, You can go. You can go.

In peace, then, I will go. And leave in the hands of my most capable God the lives, the hearts, the unfolding stories of those whom he said before time, I have knit them into your skin Jennifer to love but I have knit them into my hand to keep always.

In love, I came. In peace, I go. And for this I am a most grateful woman.

*Divided by Faith:Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America; Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith

GBU Update--Whoo-hoo!!!

Tonight GBU students gather for the last Bible study of the year. We are beginning the great spring wind down, followed next week with a night of worship and prayer and the week after with a big end of year, invite your friends party. God has been good this year, has made us numerous, has equipped students, and has begun galvanizing an identity for them together.

Praise be to God as well for the following. Natacha has decided, after the Passion worship conference, that she wants to go the GBU camp, the very same one I started out at last August. Over sandwiches on the yard today with her, Corine, and Marie-Pierre, Corine softly interjected as I told Natacha I would get her all the sign-up information, "Me too, I want to go." Hooray!!!!! Pray that the two of them will definitely sign up and go and that we can figure out some help financing their participation. (If you're interested, don't hesitate to contact me.)

This all is indeed good news. Pray that as I work with Nari and Armel to call out leaders for next year they would come together and continue the vision and work of GBU at Compiegne.

Please pray for us. This can't be done without the prayers of the people!!!

And the Wall Came Tumbling Down

This morning after church Nari and I were walking to join Natacha for sandwiches down by the river. Natacha was in charge of an information display for Mozaik at an all-city garage sale wherein students were invited to participate. To the point, on the way Nari and I passed by an entry to a cyber cafe next to UTC that I pass all the time. Today, however, I heard loud “hallelujahs” and worship echoing out into the street from within. Nari kept walking, on the phone with Natacha and not having heard the praises. “Nari!” I called, “listen.” She came running back and then we just turned to one another, quickly forgetting our sandwiches and waiting Natacha, “Tu veux voir?” [do you want to see] A simultaneous, “Yes.”

It was a gathering of no more than 10-15 adults and children in what would be labeled a small ethnic church. A handful of the women were dressed in traditional African wear, which we later found out was more specifically Congolese. We were welcomed in and took our places at the plastic porch chairs, standing and praising. As the pastor powerfully began speak of the Father God, in whom we have victory, and by whom the disobedient devil was banished from heaven, and because of whom we have hope and joy because of the death and LIFE of Jesus Christ, I began to cry then weep. The pastor was loud and powerful, then at other moments tender and inviting, and I realized. I realized I have forgotten what a powerful God we serve. I wept profusely as Nari laid her hand on my back then I, mine on hers, and I saw Xue. I saw the walls of Jericho. I saw crumbling unbelief. And I saw a God who is capable. Who is powerful. Who has the victory and it is my great sin to not believe and follow obediently in the great conviction that he is tearing down walls. As worship continued, we were invited to take the hand of our neighbor or place our hand on the person in front of us, something I haven’t done in church since I left America. A member of the church prayed and again, more profuse weeping as I heard so much of God’s joy and love in his prayer to a God who is glorious, worthy, powerful. Forgive me, for I have sinned and forgotten.

I love church. And even though I’ve gone through rough spells, I always have and will need church in a way I can’t explain. Today I was reminded of the place wherein God has established the Church in the living out of Christian faith, of identifying with a people and learning of a God corporately. Church affects ministry. In its timidity, church teaches us as well timidity. In its carefulness, it teaches us to be careful. In its boldness, it teaches us proclamation. In its teaching emphases, be it stoic intellectual recitations, inspired and informed textual exegesis, proclamations of Gospel through spoken and sung word, it teaches something about the person of God beyond what is simply stated. Through the implicit curriculum of form and function and method of Sunday mornings, or Saturday nights or Friday evenings or whatever, we as members of a church and ministers of the Gospel are equipped, or ill-equipped, to know how to go about our weeks of living with others in his name.

While my job here is to support and not criticize, this morning I realized the French church has as many walls up to a powerful and liberating God as the culture. God is moving in the church, there is no doubt. Nonetheless, values and identities such as homogeneity in form, fear, safety, carefulness, not thinking outside the box, are just as much at work in churches here as they are in the culture. And both church and culture are bound here in a way that saddens and teaches me how to direct my prayers and encouragements. I am not basing this realization off of one morning’s experience in an ethnic church, for there are other instances, and one this week at Passion has led me to see God’s hand in placing these pieces of comprehension before me. Knowing Americans as I do, knowing the energy-expectations of Passion as I do, I realized this by reading the body language and encouragements of the Passion stage—France was and is a tough crowd, even the passionate Christians. Because of so many national wounds, they have learned to play it safe. And sadly, I think, this life becomes best lived with a safe God.

This morning, as Nari and I walked out of this small little church gathering, jaws to the ground with how awesome God’s presence was there, I told her, “I forgot that we serve a powerful God who can tear down walls.” And in further reflection I am reminded of the oft-quoted because it’s SO true line of C.S. Lewis in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe concerning Aslan, the lion who symbolizes in this series Jesus. “Safe? Of course [Aslan] isn’t safe. But he’s good.” I serve a good God, who is not safe, who is not timid, who demands that I shout and pray that walls come down.

Note: It is a known fact amongst French national Christians, mission workers, and ethnic Christians (in France this normally means of African origin) that ethnic churches may at times not always have the clearest theologies, namely that there can be incorporated into their beliefs and practices remnants of spiritism and animism. Another visit will help me in discerning, but this morning I heard three in one preached--Father, Son, and Spirit--and did not hear nor discern worship, praise, or pastoral direction that would place me ill-at-ease. Several points in fact confirmed a sincerity and Spirit-led gathering.