faith – Page 2 – Another Adventure

It’s that time of year again.

Yes, it’s spring time, and somewhere outside of Bangkok there are flowers blooming. But the time I’m referring to is decision time. Transition time.

I have always associated the months of March, April and May with stress, stress, stress. As a student, this is crunch time: exams, final projects, papers, recitals, formals, etc. etc. etc.

But on top of that, at the end of spring comes the highly anticipated yet simultaneously dreaded summer break, which we are taught must be for furthering our still kind of amorphous career aspirations. Get an internship! Volunteer! Go abroad! Then come with just enough time to kiss your family and head back to school.

Man, I’m glad that’s over…

Except, here it is again, nearing the end of March, and it’s my decision time again.

Do I stay in Bangkok?

Do I stay in Thailand?

Do I go home?

I admit that, as thoughts of summer time pools and hugging my dogs fill my mind, I get so overwhelmed that I want to pack my bags right now and hop on the first plane to Tennessee.

Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

I’m not exactly homesick, or even nostalgic. I’m just trying to find my place. Sometimes, I think home is my only place.

I thought about home, and what it means to different people. A line from the Hobbit [movie, unfortunately] popped into my head as a young Bilbo Baggins admits to his courageous friends “I do miss home. I miss my books. And my armchair.”

I feel ya, Bilbo.

Everyone around me is soaring off on grand adventures and making wild summer plans, and I just want to go home. Not because I’m lonely, or unhappy, or disappointed. I just love home.

Yet the word “home” also stirs up something else in my mind: a popular song by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, bearing the same name. When I studied abroad in Israel a few years ago, this song became our anthem; not only because we were young students half way around the world, but because home, in Israel, is a contested thing, not always permanent, and often transitory.

I struggled with homesickness a lot in Israel, and my close friend and counselor reminded me of the lyrics of this song:

Ahh, home
Let me come home
Home is wherever I’m with you

He doesn’t say “home is a two story brick house in Mississippi with a front porch swing and a lot of dust bunnies.”

Anyone who’s moved a lot can tell you that a home is much, much more than the infrastructure; it’s the people.

And though my biological family isn’t in Bangkok, God has given me many satellite families. He has a way of bringing everything together in ways that are impossible by ourselves.

With men, this is impossible.
But with God, all things are possible.
Matthew 19:26

I’ve been blessed with many friends and new family members who, like me, have uprooted themselves and replanted in a crazy new country. A very wise friend reminded me recently that “lemongrass and celery plants” can regrow in a new pot one they are uprooted and replanted.

Maybe this is us, she thinks. Uproot, replant, grow. This is the transition time, which comes from the decisions we make that we may never be completely confident in. But somehow, God keeps giving us soil, water, and sunlight. We just have to have faith.

What happens when you move into the outside of your comfort zone??

Having passed the six month bench mark of living in Thailand (actually, I’m going on month EIGHT already…amazing..), I recently found myself in a self-prescribed “funk.” After the country-hopping adventures of Christmas break, I was back into teaching, finding myself caught up in a routine of “get up, go to class, come home, eat, sleep, repeat.” I was reminded of the late David Foster Wallace’s college graduation speech given at Kenyon back in 2005 on the importance of remembering to look up from the steering wheel every once and a while to appreciate where you are.

Even though I am in a different country, I still fell victim to that nasty habit of taking everything for granted and becoming weary of the everyday, the “mundane;” the repetitiveness of work and the pressures of life got to me. I was “in a funk.”

So what do you do when you suddenly move into the outside of your comfort zone? What do you do when everything that was new and strange becomes normal, routine, and slightly predictable?

I struggled to answer this question. For a few weekends I hibernated, shut the world out, watched Youtube videos and ate bowls of noodles. And sometimes, a girl just needs a curry-noodle-Boy-Meets-World kind of weekend. I’m okay with that.

Me on a Friday afternoon.

But eventually, I had to emerge from my hole in the wall and breathe in the smelly air of Bangkok, because at a certain point I ceased to recharge, and I ended up hurting myself by isolating myself beyond what was necessary. This is something, I’m noticing after many years, I tend to do.

Fortunately, life has a way of meeting you where you are, grabbing your hand and pulling you along when you least expect it and most need it. And, by the Grace of God, I found amazing ways to cope. I reached out to friends who, it turned out, were experiencing similar feelings. Together we vowed to make the most of our time here, and a few weeks later, I can honestly say that things are picking up with amazing speed!

It was not an easy transition–but I wonder if any transition is easy. But, when you pick up your head long enough to realize “this is water,” you will be amazed at what you can discover. So, in my case, I decided to take a walk down a street I had never been down before, and guess what I discovered?

WATER!

Yes. I had been staying with a friend in a local area of the city, and last Friday night I found myself alone and on the cusp of another “funk.” So I left the apartment to go to 7-11 for some milk, but instead, I turned right instead of left and set out on a nice, long, solo walk.

I began to notice things I had never noticed before, like coffee shops and karaoke bars (no surprise there), apartment buildings and even a university–who knew? Then, I came to a bustling, unpaved intersection with no hope of crossing it. So I watched the cars and semi-trucks whiz past me at break neck speed, and I thought to myself “this is so different from home.” And I was happy. I was happy to be looking at a traffic scene, witnessing a cross-section of local lives before which point I had never come into contact. And I felt different…calmer…more accepting of my current reality.

Finally, when the traffic ceased, I raced across the road and continued my journey. It did not last very long, because I came to a dead end. How strange, I thought, that this seemingly busy road suddenly dead-ends. Why would it do that? I could have just turned back and accepted this peculiarity, but I was not ready to go home. So I kept walking, and that’s when I discovered the pier.

There’s a PIER at the end of my street. A pier, where boats and water taxis come and go, where people get on and off and are swept away down the Chao Praya into other pockets of Bangkok, unbeknownst to little ole ignorant me. Of course none of these occurrences depended on me seeing them; they, like everything else God made, existed before and without me. Yet to me, this pier is special, because I learned something very valuable that night.

I never have to accept things just as they are, or resign myself to the fact that “this is all there is,” because “this” is never all there is. Somewhere down the street, there is a boat dock waiting to float me down another river I never even knew existed.