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.