Extended Analysis of Childbirth, etc.

I don’t presume to know much about pain, except that I’ve felt it and seen it and caused it. But I don’t know why it’s here.

In Shanghai on Monday evenings the girls of the program gather together for Block Party. It is an hour or so set aside for community and for identity, for Clementine oranges and dark chocolate chip cookies. We talk, we laugh, we look into our stories and share them with each other.

This week we had Open Mic Night. We sat at a round table and cut flower shapes out of origami paper and listened to three girls tell their stories. Each story, like each girl, was beautiful in its own way. Beautiful and painful.

All of our stories are dappled or drenched in pain. But I’ve been thinking. There is a part of my heart (soul?), deep deep down somewhere, that I don’t think could be touched by anything except pain. But when it’s touched, the result is beauty. Sort of like how a tongue, when touched by a lemon square, tastes sour.

I know…I don’t get it either.

My metaphor can only go so far. It is flawed, as a lemon square naturally produces a sour taste in the taste buds. Just as a chocolate cake would produce a sweet taste, and a pretzel a salty one. It would seem, then, that a painful story would naturally produce a pain in the deep depths of my heart. And it does. But, there is something else it produces. Something I can’t explain. Something that causes me to love the girl who shared her story more than I loved her before I tasted her pain.

I don’t know. Maybe the idea of pain resulting in beauty is a naïve idea. I have never been starving. I have never been assaulted. I have never seen someone murdered. I don’t know if I could see beauty in those sorts of pains.

But then again, maybe there is a beauty that is coming that is bigger than any of those pains. Maybe there is a beauty that is coming that could only be the result of a tremendous pain.

Childbirth is painful and produces something beautiful.

So are relationships. So do relationships.

So is faith. So does faith.

So was the cross. So did and does and will the cross.

            I don’t presume to know much about pain. I don’t know why pain is here. But maybe one day all of us who’ve felt it and seen it and caused it can sit down at a round table with God and share our stories. Perhaps He might share His own story, His own pain, His own beauty.

           He might even give us a lemon square or two.

John and Me

My husband’s name is John Johnson.

My husband’s name is John Johnson for two reasons. First, I enjoy alliteration. And second, I know no one by this name.

My husband’s name is John Johnson. But the truth is, I’m not even married.

I suppose I do think about marriage quite a lot. Enough for me to transition from the childlike creation of imaginary friends to the more refined, adultish concoction of an imaginary husband. And John suits me just fine. He likes banana toast in the morning, and outdoor porches, and he smells like mahogany.

The thing is, John protects me from the other men. Or perhaps, rather, John protects the other men from me. Because I, like every other single female alive, like to daydream. About marriage. About dating. About men. And when I daydream, I tend to project my Disney fairytale ideals onto those men. In fact, I recreate an entire man in my mind, a man who loves Jesus and me and running and the Middle East and appreciates a good book now and then and listens well and speaks intentionally and hates divorce and wants to adopt and travel and likes pancakes for dinner. I recreate this man, and then I give him the name of a man I know. He could be someone I’ve barely met. He could be my best guy friend. Anyone I think may have one or more similarities to this “Disney” man. He may not like running, but oh! He likes pancakes. He is a potential.

And then I think I like the guy. I think I like him without realizing that I like who I’ve created him to be, that I haven’t given him a chance to be himself. That I haven’t given myself the chance to like his true self. I haven’t been fair. I haven’t been honest. I haven’t been real. I have succumbed to the female daydream that puts unrealistic expectations on men and destroys perfectly beautiful relationships.

And thus I’ve decided to marry John instead. He suits me just fine. Now, any time I feel the urge to daydream about marriage, I can picture John and me, rowing along a random flooded forest in the midst of thousands of white ducks, like in The Notebook. Anytime I think I like a guy, I can think about John and how he smells like mahogany and likes the Middle East, and I can project every ideal quality I have onto him until he goes to take his afternoon nap in my mind.

Once I have tucked him in and turned out his light, then maybe I can go on a date with a real man and actually give him the chance to teach me who he is.

And, maybe, I might just like what I find.

成

成 (chéng).

It is a word that means, “to become.” As in, he and she have become good friends. That pear has become a Thanksgiving pie. My nose has become snotty. And the like.

It is a word I have been pondering, a word that has etched itself in my mind grooves since my mandarin exam yesterday morning.

To become indicates a process. A journey of the heart or mind or body or pear from one sort of thing to another sort of thing. It might be painful or painless, it might be soft or hard, long or short, noticed or ignored. But it is a process, this 成.

For me right now, 成 involves a heart movement from one sort of thing to another sort of thing. It involves questions and anger and doubts and concerns and riddles and jokes for God, or perhaps for people’s definitions of God, and it involves these forty days of Lent and relearning how to not just think about God and use Him as vocabulary, but to talk with Him. Sit in His lap and thank Him for taste buds. I would have much less details in my posts if not for taste buds.

成 also involves teaching 8^th graders journalism at an international school in Shanghai every Tuesday. And reading books like Beatrice and Virgil, books that seem to be about one thing but are really about something else. It involves one of my roommates writing Isaiah 43:1-3 in red Sharpie on my back the night before my RA interview. 成 involves scary things, and rejection, and finding bits of me that I don’t really like, and Skyping my mom late at night crying, to confess that I might not agree anymore with some things I grew up believing. 成 involves realizing that she loves me anyway.

It is an interesting word, an interesting idea. To become. And that is what I am, here, now, in China. I am become. My heart is become. My mind is become. My hair is growing longer, it is become.

I will respect the process, knowing that God has let me become.

In the House of God, Forever

Tonight, squished on the top bunk, Emily and Alicia and I. It was a simple gathering. In the center of the room, attached to the ceiling, hung a single dusty light bulb, and its glow created shadows of our profiles along the back wall. So we made shadow puppets, me a snake, and Alicia a spider, and I ate her over and over and over again. And gradually snacks would appear and disappear beside us. First a gulpful of honey-coated peanuts, and then a bag of barbecue chips. Emily gave me a satchel of blueberry poptarts. They smelled like breakfast and home and happy. Alicia and I watched as Emily ate an entire apple in five bites, even the core. We talked about heel calluses, and fart putty, and flowers, and how we three are little girls in Asia. God’s little daughters. Squished on the top bunk with blueberry poptarts in Hong Kong.

Two weeks ago our program director in Shanghai asked us to think of a moment in time, a memory, in which we were truly happy. So I did.

I was in Los Angeles with Craig and Tom and Gifford, and we were celebrating our unbirthdays before Craig and I left for China. We went to Olive Garden and shared garlic bread and cranberry juice for communion. I remember our table, and the clear sparkle of our drink glasses, and the laugh on our waitress’ face when we asked her for grape juice. We went bowling afterward, and we stopped and danced in the road on the way home.

These memories, these pockets of happy, seem to be little snippets of a world that could have been, a world that is yet to come. It is in these little gaps that I forget time, and trouble, and worry, and Chinese literature essays yet to be done, and I rest fully in the present, knowing there is no place I would rather be.

Our director calls them memories. I call them my fields of green.