When Oil and Dirt Meet

The older I get, the less convinced I am that life unfolds according to my plans.

What I usually have planned for my life, a season, or even a particular situation seems to change as it unfolds and is surrendered to God.

That is not to say I don’t make decisions. Quite the opposite. I seem to make those fairly quickly. Yet I often find myself looking back at a season and laughing at how little of it I could have predicted.

It is not surprising by this point that I decided to stay longer. I look forward to being able to turn back to this season and see more surprises of what God has done. Those things that make it my own jar of oil, a fragrant season with Him.

One of those surprises is learning to drive here in Uganda.

Wrong-side of the unfinished, and motorcycle-flooded roads, and yet I was given the opportunity to borrow another missionary’s vehicle for a little while.

When I was introduced to the idea of borrowing a vehicle, our mutual friend took me out driving. He was doing his due diligence making sure I had a basic understanding. What he didn’t count on was that while I was behind the wheel, I distinctly remembered my first moments learning to drive as a teenager. Those first moments were filled with anxiety and concern about making a mistakes and the consequences of using heavy machinery.

But then I remembered.

I’ve driven a 15 seater in NYC. I’ve driven in Chicago, Dallas, DC, Tampa, Orlando and many other crazy cities.

I could do this.

I convinced myself that courage was all that was needed.

The funny thing about this season is that many of the things I have found myself doing began that way. Learning to drive in Uganda was one of them.

Being placed in charge of a group of interns while finishing a couple projects was another.

New interns arrived several weeks ago. Clare placed them in my care to address one or two projects before the next intake of mothers arrived, and we spent several days helping restore one of the buildings at Imprint.

There is something about painting that invites conversation. Maybe it is because your hands are busy and your mind is free to wander. Somewhere between paint brushes, ladders, and half-finished walls, the conversation turned to personality.

It is a subject I have been interested in for years. My mother had a strong interest in understanding personalities when I was growing up, and over the years I have taken more assessments than I can count. Myers-Briggs, temperament studies, Enneagram, spiritual gifting assessments and plenty of others have crossed my path. Not because I believe any test can perfectly define a person, but because I find people fascinating.

As we talked, I introduced one of the frameworks I had learned years ago. It separated personality into three different areas: social life, control/work life, and close intimate relationships.

What struck me wasn’t the categories themselves, but watching people begin to reflect on themselves.

Strengths were discussed.

Weaknesses surfaced.

Possibilities were considered.

As the conversation continued, questions began to fly faster than I could answer them.

“What are you?”

“How does that show up at work?”

“What about with friends?”

“What about family?”

Several of the interns asked me to explain the personalities that I was raised understanding. Most of them knew the major four, Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic and Melancholy. But I had been taught another, Supine. With this fifth personality, that I had been exposed to, but is not common in some of the more popular materials available, several interns had a lot of questions.

“What is supine?”

“What makes it different?”

“How can you tell if you might be supine?”

Eventually I stopped trying to answer every question.

“Don’t take my word for it,” I told them. “Read. Research. Take the tests yourself. Be curious.”

The conversation followed us long after the paint dried. Later I learned it had continued among the teams even after we left the building.

A few days later, several of us made the trip to Sipi Falls.

I had never been to Sipi before, but I had heard enough about it to be excited. When I was told the hike through all three falls was somewhere between four and five kilometers, I wasn’t particularly concerned.

“No problem,” I thought. “I hike at home.”

The reality of this hike was severely different.

To be fair, I have not taken a long hike in almost two years. I am not talking about the Furnace hike, or the green path off the Catoctin trail, those are short. My last significant hike was eighteen miles over two days on the Virginia Roller Coaster. Sipi was nowhere near that distance, yet the terrain was entirely different.

The paths were obscure, narrow and at times nonexistent. We climbed up steep rocks and down slippery paths and moss covered boulders. At many times one of our guides reached for my hand as I navigated slippery rocks and jungle paths, a nineteen-year-old who had walked this trail for ten years.

The stunning views and coffee covered trails were dotted with lizards and unique plants.

Yet still, in the steepest and most wet portions of the trail one stops wondering about the dignity of not falling and embraces the drop. Dignity doesn’t take a front seat, laughter at the fall must cover the course.

The young man on more than one occasion turned to face me with surprise as I landed in mud and instead of saying “ouch!” or “oh no!” I busted out laughing.

One of my dearest friends about four years ago told me to embrace the dirt. We were talking about the mess the human heart makes, but as I landed more than a few times I was jostled back into that memory.

“Might as well embrace the dirt.”

The desire to remain upright, graceful and dignified has been challenged over the years. What may appear outwardly as dignified, diplomatic or obtuse, is not because my heart sits that way towards people. It is the reality of honoring relationships and the natural growth that relationships must take to truly blossom.

So when these thoughts about embracing the dirt came to mind, I sat there and felt like, “Lord, I feel like this is not a metaphor anymore.”

My socks, however, have yet to recover.

When we achieved all three falls and steep hike, everyone went back to where we had parked our rented taxi van. We had preordered our dinner and sat down to eat.

Honestly, for me eating was the last thing on my mind. A small salad and an honest to goodness Coke was what I wanted with a very large glass of water.

While everyone ate I cut my burger into half and discharged it to others at the table before making the little climb back up to the van that awaited us for our three hour drive back to Jinja.

During the time that the interns were with us, I had provided music while we worked, talked, and finally at the end of our long day of hiking. It was one of our final times for me to play DJ.

I was happy to do it.

We listened to everything from 70s rock ballads, 90s pop like Spice Girls to today’s worship and of course Forest Frank and Josiah Queen. Multiple times while we were together someone asked me to add a song, or the name of the current song playing.

My heart just bopped along listening to “Country Road” and “Sweet Home Alabama” while introducing those who were new to Ntaate and Babirye, Ugandan artists popular today.

The reality was that after we returned to Jinja, it was very late and we stiffly, all of us, dragged ourselves to our respective places for rest for the evening.

One of the questions I have carried through much of this season has been, “Lord, where are You taking me?”

The reminder I have in this is not some big cosmic lesson, rather it’s because of a Bible study I joined when I arrived. 1 John, 2 John, 3 John talks about loving the community, building and growing but multiple times John speaks to the fact that in order to do those things like Christ you had to be attached to the source. Attached and abiding in the Lord and how he related to us, and we were called to resemble him.

The reality of working at Imprint is not the fact that there are consistently new things to talk about. Mothers and children come to stay, they learn they progress and they graduate.

The things that remain with me are the small moments, the morning when picking up a small child who is crying calms, or falls asleep. Moments when my doing seems to be caught by my desire and understanding that being is more important, the abiding is more important.

I learned to slow down a different way, not my comfortable version of slowing down. Some of these children struggle with mobility, or are non-verbal, or all of the developmental issues involved. Sometimes slowing down doesn’t look like relaxing, while it may be momentarily, but finding ways to interact with children that cannot interact outside their current circumstances.

A child who might lack mobility making small movements as I sit there and say, “Kuba,” and watch as they slowly aim for a ball or balloon, rocking their whole body for one goal: to hit the object.

Those slow small moments were all that needed to happen. And God knew that the right people with the right vision would be around. I’m so used to performance, I’m used to corporate goals, I don’t particularly enjoy it but sometimes you need someone to let you know it’s okay to slow down. And keep those small things as priority.

Perhaps that should not surprise me.

By the end of the journey, only God knows how things are supposed to look. Unromantically, but practically, there are things that I know I would not connect on my own.

I suspect that as time goes by, the challenges, the joys, the things I can’t say here, and the small moments will slowly fill my jar of oil, and those fragrant things will return to me years later.

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NOTE:

A quick note because several people have asked about Ebola:

Yes, Ebola is in Uganda. The cases have largely been centered around Kampala and were connected to cases that crossed from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ugandan health officials have generally responded quickly, and most of the cases have been identified and handled with relative speed.

I have not been to Kampala recently, and the district where I work is not directly connected to the capital’s district. Because of that, I remain mostly unconcerned.

Honestly, it seems far more likely that I would injure myself hiking down a muddy trail than contract Ebola.

My track record at Sipi Falls certainly supports that theory.