Waiting in Vietnam

I expected my time in Vietnam to have its frustrations. I know the limits of this kind of work, of helping people, helping out NGOs, especially with only a three month time frame. I’ve read enough books to know this would be a culture that didn’t value efficiency like I did. And three months is not a lot of time to settle in, establish working relationships and get things done. I was prepared for that. But I wasn’t quite prepared for this.

There was a week or so of settling in, getting to grips with culture shock, the noise, the crowds, the rocket fuel strength coffee. Then work began. Ok, a few hiccups, the website they had asked us to produce turned out to already exist. No worries, we updated it and added content. There were communication difficulties over other work. I could work through those, more time drinking coffee and talking things out. There were the doubts over the long term effectiveness of what we were doing, but again such are the expected limitations with a short term stint.

Then there was the frustration of three weeks sick in bed with shingles, my tiny hotel room getting smaller by the day. And then one of the NGOs failed to come to the ball and get organized to use my husband’s and my time here, leaving us with a spare month to sit around. I didn’t expect things to be quite this quiet.

And so I find myself in week ten, waiting.

I confess, most people don’t like waiting, or delays, but I really, really don’t like waiting. I like control. My personality type likes being able to set goals and met them. Efficiently, effectively. I’m not ok with doing ‘nothing’ on an ongoing basis. I love to get things done, to achieve, to think big and go after it. I get a high from being busy and productive. I’m a product of my culture and I don’t mind one bit.

The thing is though, I’ve been waiting in some form or another for the last four years.

I graduated University with a law degree and a job at a top firm. My future was bright, albeit it turned out not to be one that I wanted. I was bored, and the next three jobs brought more of the same. I was restless and moved around, trying to find something that would fit my strengths and give me something worth working hard for. I was always waiting for something, this job to end, to move cities, to start the next job or volunteer opportunity. Frustration turned to depression and a vital fear of never achieving something of worth. You stop trying, you loose sight of what you want, you stop living in the present. You know that in the midst of it you should work out a way through, but you’re so busy with jobs you don’t like and activities to keep you sane after those 40 hours, that you don’t find the time.

This three month stint was a desperate grasp at control. Here, not dictated by the need for a pay check, I can achieve, do some good, something worth doing. Disappointment doesn’t begin to cover it. God doesn’t always meet our expectations does he? He doesn’t go along with our timetables, or provide dream jobs or drop our life direction in our laps. He works to his own timetable.

There is a tension in me that lies at the core of my anxieties – does God even have a timetable for me? Do I just relax and trust God to ‘use’ me, does he have all our steps worked out and is just biding his time? Or do I need to take initiative and push through to bring the most good to the broken world I see around me? A difficult theological question. There is no doubt that God does indeed have specific good planned for some, the Bible being a record of many of them. But for all of us? For me?

I simply don’t know, and after struggling with this question theologically for some years, am not sure I’ll ever know for sure. I do know however that one thing we can look to God for, is that “God works all things for the good of those who love him”. (Rom 8:28)

Here in Vietnam, in the space and the time I find myself forced to live with, I’ve ended up spending a lot of time talking to God. I’ve started to journal and blog, therapeutic disciplines I never quite get myself together to do. I’ve spent more time than ever in prayer over my next steps at the end of my time here. I’ve spent time reading books. I’ve reflected on the past two years I’ve spent overseas, thought over lessons to be learnt. I’ve worked through what I‘ve learnt about myself, about what I want from life. Sure, before I would think things through and through until my head hurt. But I never had time on my hands like this, to just think, to really process.

One book I’ve been reading is Henri Nouwen’s ‘Reaching Out’. At one point he gives the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice to a young poet who is struggling with the question of what to do with his life, to become a poet or not:

“I want to beg you as much as I can…. to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer… “

(p 41, emphasis added)

I’m not ok with all that is unresolved in me. I want to know where I am headed, I want to know that I will achieve something worthwhile with my life. But maybe, just maybe in my enforced solitude, in my waiting, I’ve begun to be ok with letting this evolve out of me. I’ve begun to see a little worth in the waiting, and the desperate need to live fully present, even if it is not the present you want.

I think I have to approach life with initiative, pushing forward, but with one ear cocked listening for that still small voice at all times, even looking for what he has to say when things are not as you want them, and being ok with the ‘downtime’. Maybe it will be ten years or so before I work out what unique contribution I can make to the world. In the meantime I can learn to take steps towards developing my strengths, to thinking about what it should be, and most importantly to learn to live in the waiting period.

grief

Sometimes I feel as though the heaviness of this world is too much. That I couldn't bear to open another newspaper, or watch another news cast. That evil and pain is so irrevocably rampant and evidence of God thin on the ground.

Just this week my friend has had another tragic miscarriage and another friend has died. Some weeks it seems as if the deaths, the miscarriages, the depressions, the broken dreams, will drag me beneath where I can breathe. I don't want this sadness. I don't want to grieve, to have to handle this suffocating emotion. I just want life again.

And sometimes when it gets too hard, maybe there are just one too many things that have gone wrong, or you're blind sighted by some tragedy, it feels as if you fight against it, but deep down where you won't even admit to, you wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to stop fighting, to let the sadness suffocate you, to just lie down and give in to it.
Just sometimes.

How do we grieve well? How do you move through grief, when just functioning takes all you've got? I fear that I mean by that, how do I just grieve so as to move as quickly as possible from that place. Is this cowardly? It feels placed somewhere in that vein. I feel at my weakest in this place.

Grief is an inescapable part of life, but a rhythm, a stage to pass in and out of, not to become mired in. Usually I just want out or I want to give up, I don't want to process, I don't want to examine and turn over this toxic emotion. I don't want to think, to feel.

I suspect to move on we must process, we must pick up our grief and interact with it somehow. We can't sleep through it, or busy it away, we still have to live, to put one foot in front of the other. The Israelites were given 30 days to mourn the death of someone, to wail, to give in to grief. There is a place for being overwhelmed and paralysed. After the 30 days they were to start life again. We must also face up to it, not give in.

In the face of the depths of grief some people will be facing, it feels incredibly feeble to offer this, but I have found a few threads that have helped me get through things before and process...

MUSIC
I remember reading with surprise on the jacket cover of the Dave Crowder Band 'B Collision' album about how they thought music and grief had a special relationship, how music can reach out and touch your grief in a way no other medium can (to paraphrase wildly). You may or may not agree. For me I find music bypasses my head and hits home with my emotions like nothing else. Not all music, and I can't necessarily connect a thread between music that does, from classical to rock, and I don't know why, but it does. I've been in places where I'm frozen, I haven't reacted, I haven't cried, but when I hit the right track somehow I'm balling my eyes out. Processing. Sometimes it helps that the artist has been in a similar place. Other times it is just enough to remind me of the things that are worth moving on for.

ART/CREATIVITY
Creating unleashes something in us akin to sparks of life. Whether it's painting or cooking or fixing a car, creativity can generate hope. Winston Churchill, who struggled with depression throughout his life, termed his 'black dog', found that art, painting, was the only thing that could fight this.

Try it, get out a canvas or drawing pad. You may just create something beautiful, or you might seek to express the darkness you're experiencing. It's not about the end product, it's about the process.

TALK
A more common strategy that never fails to surprise me how I fight it. It always seems to feel like the last thing I want to do. I don't want to make myself vulnerable in this place, I don't want to process. But, with the right person, someone you can trust, who will listen, it unfailingly helps. It helps remind you there are people who care, that there are people who have been through similar things, and survived, that there is life after grief.

Aloneness in relationship

My personality has a melancholic edge to it. The type that often lures me away from the crowds, to a quiet place, to ponder life, to ponder meaning and my place in it. At the same time, I find myself often surprised by myself, by my lack of awareness of what really makes me tick, of what things I enjoy for the pure sake of enjoyment. I neglect balance, often focusing on efficiency and values and achievements, rather than creativity and joy and spirituality.

I am however very open about my inner workings, whether to husband, or friend or passerby. I've always been brought up with transparency and honesty as virtues. So the following passage took me a little by surprise, the idea that perhaps a careful cultivation of "inner mystery" is in line.

Henri Nouwen in 'Reaching Out', writes:

"But real openness to each other also means a real closedness, because only he who can hold a secret can safely share his knowledge. When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love. An intimate relationship between people not only asks for mutual openness but also for mutual respectful protection of each other's uniqueness." From 'Reaching Out' (US, Doubleday, 1975, p 31).

Perhaps most challenging are our intimate relationships, where we seek to grow close by sharing everything of ourselves, each confidence traded in the hopes of further intimacy. We're so desperately scared of aloneness, not just physically, but of being alone while in a relationship, of not connecting, not being real.

But upon reflection, this is surely a dangerous gamble, with so many relationships ending with one lover feeling crowded out, disliking the now perceived 'clinginess' of the other. In a popular wedding reading, Kahlil Gibran speaks to this:

"Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each one of you be alone.
Even as the strings of a lute are alone
though they quiver with the same music.
Stand together yet not too near together
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
and the oak tree and the cypress
grow not in each other's shadow."

How well do I "protect with great care [my] inner mystery"? How well do I cultivate my self, apart from my husband? Apart from my family and close friendships? Yes, I take time to be alone, but why, and what is the outcome of this time?

Over the past year or so, I have spent more time than ever with my husband. Traveling has meant we often live in each other's pockets, with little opportunity to be alone. Perhaps the failure to prioritse time alone, away, drains us of our creative ability to come together and give to each other something new. To remain separate, a distinct person with distinct things to bring to the table. Of course this can never be our aim, to cultivate aloneness and uniqueness, for the sake of the another. That surely runs the risk of negating the whole purpose.

To successfully be in close relationship with someone for a lifetime, surely necessitates this cultivation of a self apart from the self that exists in relationship. Not only simply to bring something new to the relationship, but to retain your unique self, as you were meant to be, to ensure it is not lost in the expectations of others or ebb and flow of a relationship.