One Sunday morning in Tanzania, I slid down the polished wooden bench in the airy sanctuary at the church we attended. The long room sat in the shadow of an enormous banyan tree, roots dangling from formidable branches. The open windows let in the ocean breeze, the sounds of the busy street and the occasional bird or cat.
On the pew, I found a paper left behind from the Friday night vigil that weekend. It listed a structured schedule of prayer, singing, Scripture reading, testimonies and discussion. Start time: 10:00 p.m. End time: 5:00 a.m. My American eyes examined this with horrified fascination. Attending church for 7 hours in the middle of the night was beyond my comprehension.
Yet, to be a Christian in Tanzania is to attend all-night prayer vigils. Some churches hold them every weekend. For others, it’s once a quarter. It’s such a part of church culture that the church leaders at our Bible school expressed shock when they heard that American evangelical churches generally don’t practice this.
“How can they even call themselves Christian?” they gaped.
A different point of view
In contrast, American Christians might say the same thing about Tanzanians when they find out that, in general, Tanzanian churches don’t prioritize personal daily devotions. American Sunday school kids grew up singing, Read your Bible, pray every day and you will grow, grow, grow! Search “devotional books” on Amazon and you’ll find hundreds of choices. Every January, the blogosphere is littered with Bible-reading plans. In American evangelicalism, the quintessential mark of spirituality is the discipline of daily Bible reading.
How can two cultures prioritize the means of spiritual growth so differently?
I remember all the dogs at the Dar es Salaam airport. Usually people don’t travel internationally with their pets, but in the spring of 2020, nothing was normal. The dogs were restless in their cages, but the rest of us stood unusually still, tense, our faces strained from lack of sleep, frantic packing, a thousand unknowns.
I remember the recorded British voice that politely reminded everyone every five minutes: It is not permissible to bring plastic bags into Tanzania. In a dark humor, I thought, How about infectious diseases?
Just a few days earlier, we got a call in the middle of the night telling us to book a flight as soon as possible. Many in our community were making the same decision, but it was even more significant for us. We had planned a year earlier to relocate to the States in the summer of 2020. So this early, frenzied departure meant leaving a life of sixteen years with no closure, no dignity, no RAFT.
The memories of these moments in March 2020 are sharp and vivid, as if they happened three days ago, not three years.
In the five days before our departure, I can picture myself lining up my kids’ baby shoes, carefully saved for so many years, and taking pictures of them before handing them off to a friend. I remember making broccoli beef for my last meal in the crock pot I’d owned for 12 years. I remember how our feet echoed on the empty marble floors of the Ramada hotel restaurant on the night before we left.
I could list thousands of tiny, minuscule details of those five days. My focus was razor-sharp. My emotions were not.
Other than a couple of bursts of despair or panic, I went numb during those five days. And then during the long, unpredictable journey to California. And then during the next three months when we lived like vagabonds, trying to hold together our jobs in Tanzania while applying for new ones in the States.
If you had asked me how I was doing, I would have told you I was okay. I wasn’t happy, and sometimes I was decidedly unhappy, but I didn’t fall into a depression. I got out of bed every morning. I wasn’t crying all of the time. I wasn’t having panic attacks. I wasn’t having nightmares. Well, not many.
I am task-oriented. I did what I needed to do. And big feelings were not on the agenda.
But I was not okay, and that fragility manifested in unexpected ways. Suddenly, I had an aversion to anyone outside my immediate family. I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, even people I normally would have been thrilled to be with. (Pandemic restrictions made this easy.)
Another A Life Overseas writer asked me to be on a podcast of people who were evacuated because of the pandemic. A little voice in my head said, “You like things like this.” But a bigger, louder voice said, “No. No. NO. Not even an option.” The big voice didn’t give me a reason. It just bullied me into saying no.
I stopped writing. I went months where my mind was mostly devoid of anything to write about, even though it was usually the best way to process my feelings. It was like my emotions froze, and I became a robot.
I was trying to adapt to a new life, and I was restless and impatient. I wanted to feel productive and meaningful again. But I had no energy, no creativity, no mental space. I could only focus on what was directly in front of me. I was frustrated that I couldn’t do more, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t. I thought I was fine. I knew I was sad, but I thought I was handling our transition well.
I wasn’t. Not really.
About a year and a half after our arrival, my brain and body decided to shut down, and I stopped sleeping for ten days. I finally got help. I told the urgent care doctor, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know what anxiety feels like, but this is different. It’s like I’m on overload and can’t get my pulse to slow down.” That admission was the beginning of feeling better.
I’ve been back three years, and it’s taken me that long to figure out what was happening inside me during that first year and a half. I only see it now in hindsight.
There are times in life you know you’re a mess; the pain or the fear is big and consuming. Every moment of every day feels like a fight. (I’ve had seasons like that, and this wasn’t one of them.)
But other times, you don’t realize you’re in a fog. You are coping quite well. You are doing what you need to do. You don’t realize your soul is actually withering. Then one day, the sun breaks through the clouds and triggers a distant memory: Oh yes! This is what warmth feels like.
This is what it feels like to be creative, my mind brimming with ideas. This is what it’s like to live without a constant sense of being overwhelmed. This is what it feels like to be happy.
I didn’t recognize that I wasn’t doing well until I started to feel better, and to remember what it feels like to be fully alive.
Today, I love being with friends and meeting new ones. I’m doing seminars for small and large groups. I was a guest on a podcast. My brain comes up with way more things to write about than I have time to get them out.
I don’t think I anticipated the jarring effect the transition would have on my body, mind, and soul. Or that it would last as long as it did. Seeing this in myself has given me empathy for others around me who are in transition: the new parents, new empty-nesters, the immigrant. How can I show them grace? How can I help to bring light into their fog? How can I walk alongside them for as long as it takes, knowing it will probably take longer than anyone anticipated?
But also, I want to remember to give myself grace the next time. To be more patient with myself. To remember that some of the hardest parts of life must simply be faced a day at a time until they get better.
This morning at church, a song unearthed a sweet memory of Tanzania, and I cried. For what I left. For what I’ve missed. For what I’ve gained. For how far I’ve come.
I’ve always been a fan of yard sales and thrift stores, but a couple of years ago I discovered something truly marvelous: estate sales.
Are you familiar with estate sales? This isn’t your ordinary yard sale where you’ll find mostly junk and the occasional treasure. An estate sale is when the entire contents of a house is for sale. Like, the door is open and you go into the rooms, the closets, and cupboards. You can buy anything that isn’t nailed down.
I find these sales using EstateSales.net, and there are sales posted in my area every month – sometimes every week.
Estate sales have taken the palace of Target runs for me. I barely ever use Amazon either.
Gil and I keep a joint running list on our phones of things we are looking for. Buying things this way means that we often have to wait a while before we find it. But if we’re patient, we can find almost anything. Here are a few examples of recent purchases:
Paper shredder Trifle bowl Beach towels Deck box Shoe organizer Waffle iron Dog harness Mini crock pot Suitcase & duffle bags Flatware utensil set (an extra set for hosting large groups = no more plastic forks!) Whirley Pop Popcorn pan (I was so excited to find this – I had been looking for over a year!)
All of these things were purchased in excellent condition and at a fraction of the original cost. Almost every item in our home was pre-owned, and we have saved thousands of dollars this way.
Plus, it’s fun! Our city has lots of old Victorian homes, so even if I don’t end up buying anything, I enjoy getting a peek into these exquisite houses.
But there’s one more reason why I’m a fan of shopping this way: Estate sales provide me with a built-in caution against buying things I don’t need.
I can’t get rid of a faded brown pair of socks that I got in Arusha at language school in 2016. Arusha is much colder than Dar es Salaam (where I hardly ever wore socks), so I bought them at an open-air market.
I’m not sure why I even brought these socks back to the States with me, except that we left with five days’ notice, so not all my packing decisions made sense. I knew it would be sock-weather in California in March. Maybe I thought the pandemic would make socks scarce.
In three years, I haven’t worn them. But I can’t get rid of them.
Gil is not as sentimental as me. I recently found his Tevas in the trash, his favorite ones, the ones he had re-soled on a Dar es Salaam street corner – the Maasai way, with old tires. Which meant that he walked with tire tread marks instead of shoe prints. I fished them out of the trash and protested loudly but they were indeed kind of gross. So I took a picture instead. Still, a piece of my heart went into the trash with them.
“It’s such a shame that they failed two of their children.”
I was in college, and my friend was referring to a Christian family with adult children, two of whom had gone off the rails into drugs and unwed pregnancy.
My friend had young children of her own, and as someone several years ahead of me, she was a mom I greatly admired. She and I both knew that she would certainly not fail her children. I tucked away this lesson: My children’s choices would be a reflection of me.
***
Around the same time, I attended a large children’s ministry conference where a seminar speaker declared that ADHD was not a real condition – a child who couldn’t pay attention or sit still was the sad result of bad parenting. As an elementary teacher, I suspected the speaker was wrong, but it didn’t stop me from being marinated in the idea that I was responsible for my children’s behavior.
“First-time obedience” was the mantra of my era of Christian parenting. None of this “count to three” stuff; you were not a good parent if you had to ask twice. If they didn’t obey, it was on you. Being a responsible, perfectionist person, I took this seriously. I was up for the challenge.
When I first became a parent, this worked. I’d been trained as a teacher. I knew how to hold children to high expectations without raising my voice or losing my cool. And my stubbornness could match the most strong-willed of children. I remember a fellow mom responding with amazement at how quickly my kids complied when summoned from the playground. Yep. I was not going to fail my children. No siree.
It worked, that is, until it didn’t work. Then it became a dumpster fire. And demanding “first-time obedience” became the gasoline that made the fire explode. With one child in particular, the more I dug in my heels and expected obedience, the more the opposite happened. As I increased the consequences, so did my child’s unhinged behavior.
