Jake doesn't fit in a Baka house

 

 

Our friend Jake doesn’t fit inside a Baka house. Taking a look at the picture I’m sure you can understand why. I’m sure Jake could bend and fold a little to get in there and visit with the family for a while but eventually he’d be pretty uncomfortable. ….

I wrote the first draft of this blog a few years back when I was feeling pretty uncomfortable myself. I had a lot of pain and uneasy feelings. I thought I understood the cause to be simple change in my life: kids leaving, mission changing, friends hurting and so on. But the other day I read an entry in a website called, “A Life Overseas” and it clearly described and gave a name to what I have been going through for quite some time now.

Culture Pain and Culture Stripping

Culture pain is when you have spent enough time in the host culture to consider it a home and are therefore deeply affected by people who live there and events that take place there.

Culture stripping is after culture shock, after the settling in, after the acceptance and adaptation. It is what happens when you are invested in the second culture and you still don’t quite fit in but have changed so you don’t fit in your previous culture either. Understanding this reality helped me be more free to write the following. …

So, to re-cap….Jake could turn himself into a pretzel and stay a while to visit but eventually he’d be in pain. That is what has been happening to me since pieces of my heart started scattering all over the world – pain. (Yep, I am partly writing this to make my kids feel guilty about growing up and leaving home. But that is not all. I’ve made friends now that are all over the world and sometimes missing them causes that pain too).

I used to fit just fine here on this warm, strange continent with my family all tucked in around me. I knew what I was to do and learned how to make it happen. I made new friends and they became important to me. It hasn’t always gone perfectly. Some pieces of me have been broken along the way. However, I knew how I fit here. Anyone that has known me longer than 10 minutes knows that me and kids go together. ( I subbed in the Grade 3/4 class just yesterday.) So as these days of young ones in my everyday life keep getting shorter and shorter in number God is having to reshape me. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes I fall apart. I have been broken as my children have left home and gone oh so far away. Nobody warned me about how much this would hurt. Nobody warned me about how it would redefine me.

This season of my life happened to coincide with a season of other sources of pain and I couldn’t describe then what I know now about fitting or not fitting in any culture. Pieces of me have also broken as I simply go through life here interacting with people under intense circumstances. Nothing in my personal upbringing prepared me to see children hungry because their parent simply cannot work enough to earn sufficient money. Nothing prepared me for so much disease (not even being the daughter of an ER nurse and knowing that hospitals are full of sick people). And nothing, absolutely nothing, could prepare me to learn that my Cameroonian brothers and sisters’ families are forced out of their homes, due to armed conflict, into snake infested bush with little or no protection from rain or sun. Or perhaps they somehow made their way to another city to arrive at their relative’s homes for shelter (bursting the walls of the home made for 8 that now must hold 17).

And another thing that has caused a bit of broken pieces and falling apart, nobody warned me that after 20 + years on the mission field we would experience loss and grief with our colleagues. (They warned us that we might not get along with them but they didn’t tell us about the bonding and consequent breaking that would happen). People come and go frequently now. The school we love has had to change with the changing circumstances of the missions we serve. The mission organization we have been devoted to has also had to change with the times. And simply being here has changed and shaped me. I don’t drive the way I used to (good or bad – jury is still out!). I don’t eat like I used to. I don’t speak like I used to. But, so what? People change. Well even through all that’s happened, all I’ve learned, I still don’t fit in here. And because of so many changes, so much time away, I don’t fit in where I came from either. I love both places, both groups of people. I would sacrifice myself for any of the ones I know and yet, neither group fully connects with me anymore. Culturally Stripped.

So what now? Do I just accept that I will live in the in between forever and feel lost? Do I go “home” and start over to reconnect with loved ones? Can I thrive again in either location? Maybe. Probably getting all broken like this has brought me closer to the heart of Jesus and that is a good thing.

God has been reshaping me, bending me and sometimes allowing brokenness for me to be fitted into the spaces He has planned for me. I think I’m learning that.

I sit and think about the image of Jake visiting the Baka. It was just that, a VISIT. We Christians, like Jake, and like Jesus, are visiting this sphere we call home but really, we are being fitted, shaped, bent, broken, re-made to be with our Father forever.

Meanwhile I will stay culturally stripped, a global nomad, a wanderer following God and my children around this globe – between however many cultures that takes me through.

A "Never Ending" Story (emojis are fun)

One day an unsuspecting mama👩 was walking in the woods🌳, along the side of a mountain in Tennessee or Georgia where the two states collide. As God had planned she slipped that day. It was so strange; she rarely fell while out walking; it was even stranger that no part of her body was injured save a place on her hand✋ that was scratched.

As the hours passed after returning from the walk🚶, however, her shoulder began to hurt – more and more. The homeopathic remedies that she had taken many times before, for bumps, bruises and the like, were not effective against this pain. She reached out to her friend who also treats injury and illness with homeopathic remedies to see if she had a different or more potent remedy. The mama’s friend 👩provided some help but also suggested she go to see the chiropractor in the morning.

The next day the pain was just as severe so off to the doctor 🩺she went. By the time she arrived the mama could barely lift her arm and grasp a pen✎ to fill in the required forms📎.

To move the story along let’s jump to the end results of that introduction to the work of a chiropractor. One little slip in the woods 🌳created an incredible chain⛓ of events. It is not often that one can trace such a God ordained event.

The mama returned to her home in Africa🌍, healing from the previously dislocated shoulder, and sought further care to complete the treatment begun in the States two weeks earlier. She found Dr. Eric, an internationally trained specialist of multiple areas of medicine and learned about the immense potential for healing that this doctor, gifted by God, could offer. And the chain of events started:

• Dr. Eric confirmed that her shoulder was still correctly aligned and she began the process of getting treatment to correct the damage that occurred to her spine, years earlier, as a younger mama.

• She brought her friend in to begin treatment for a severely painful condition for which others had said she needed to have surgery😟 outside of the country.

• Because of the mama’s recommendation, another friend sent her own friend to Dr. Eric's to begin treatment for long standing, debilitating pain😧 and now she uses him as a primary care physician.

• Mama brought another friend for help.👩

• And a colleague👨

• And another friend👩

• And has encouraged many others to go.👨👩

• Learning that Dr. Eric’s wife 👰was traveling led to conversations about COVID testing and she learned that there was another option, a lab, to get the testing done rather than the busy, unpredictable location most people use in town. This paved the way for a family that needed to evacuate to the States because of a medical condition.The chiropractor called his connection with the lab and the technician came directly to the hospital🏥 room where the sick little girl 👧was waiting with her family to get the tests done.

• And, most recently, the mama recommended another friend👩 take her husband👨, suffering from intense headaches to Dr. Eric.

How many more people👩👪👨 will God bring in this story starting from a slip in the woods?🌳