Category: What I’m Learning Page 2 of 3

A Word to My Inner Perfectionist

On October 17, 2023

It was a morning straight out of my nightmares: Fourth grade, and I arrived at school to see all my classmates carrying posterboards or shoeboxes. Adrenaline shot through me and landed in a pit of dread at the bottom of my stomach. That nutrition project: I had forgotten all about it. My hands suddenly felt extraordinarily empty.

I turned in the project the next day, and when my teacher returned it, the bright red “B” glared at me. Even worse, she had scrawled the mark of shame across the top: “LATE.” She might as well have written “FAILURE.” The mortification seared itself into my memory.

I berated myself for this lapse in responsibility. How could I have been so stupid? I prided myself on being an excellent student, and excellent students didn’t forget to do projects.

There is more than one kind of perfectionist in this world. Some want everything done perfectly; others, like me, want it done right. For this reason, I loved report cards. In tangible form, there was a black-and-white evaluation of how I measured up. I knew exactly where I stood.

Later seasons of life didn’t afford me such clarity. How could I know, really know, that I was parenting right? And when differing opinions on schooling or discipline gave me different definitions of what was right, this caused me great consternation. Please, someone, tell me the right thing to do, and I’ll do it.

Without an objective evaluation, I made myself my own mental report card. I will pack my children a healthy lunch every day. I will wash the towels on Mondays. I will water the houseplants on Sundays. I will schedule dentist appointments for everyone every six months. I am a success if I do these things; I am a failure if I don’t.

Enduring Death to Taste Resurrection

By Amy Medina

On May 27, 2023

In Re-Entry to America, What I'm Learning

What does it mean to live out the resurrection of Jesus every day?

In the spring of 2020, I stepped out every morning under the East African sun onto a piece of heaven called Haven of Peace Academy. Palm trees framed the sunrise over the Indian Ocean, as newly hatched white butterflies decorated the 17-acre campus that was my home for almost 20 years. As elementary principal, I was surrounded by children; everywhere I turned, there was someone to talk to – a parent, a teacher, a toothless, dancing first grader. I ate lunch with friends from Denmark, India and Zimbabwe; every conversation was alive with culture and rich diversity and perspective. My days were full of problems to solve, music, laughter and light.

Six months later, I woke up every morning in my small Southern California apartment with beige walls and beige carpet and drove the kids to school. Then I sat on the brown couch we bought for fifty dollars and was bombarded by silence. My new job was remote, so I faced the computer all day; my only interactions with other people were through that screen.

I sat at my tiny kitchen table and ate lunch with a magazine. I went to the grocery store, to church, to pick up my kids again and never recognized anyone. Six feet and masks barred me from getting acquainted. I was alone and I was unknown. 

A season of suffering and grief

The deaths in my life in 2020 lined up like tombstones. The death of my self-respect: being forced to leave Tanzania three months early engulfed my head in shame. The death of feeling competent, knowledgeable, relevant: starting a new job was like becoming a toddler again. The death of being known: the wealth of my relationships in Tanzania took 20 years to build.

Some of these losses would have come regardless of how we transitioned, but the pandemic compounded the grief. And inside was a yawning emptiness.

I was starting my life over from scratch. I lifted my weary eyes to climb that mountain again, and it felt insurmountable. I was restless, anxious to jump ahead, to skip the hard parts.

But it was there, in the emptiness, where a new facet flashed on the gospel’s diamond. In the descent into shame and loss, I found a deeper identification with Christ. 

Read the rest at the EFCA blog.

At Least Bugs Are Not Snakes: Contending For Contentment

By Amy Medina

On May 17, 2023

In How Americans Think, What I'm Learning

My house in Tanzania could have been an insectarium. Maybe I should have charged admission to tourists.

One year, the kitchen was infested with cockroaches. The little ones would run out of the toaster and I would smash them with my fist.

Another year, it was ticks. Like, literally, ticks were climbing the walls of my kitchen. The engorged ones would burst open and then the live ones would leave tiny bloody footprints on the floor.

Twice, guests in our home were stung by centipedes in their beds in the middle of the night.

Then there was the Year of the Millipedes, which don’t sting but, at six inches long, are unpleasant to find curled up on your wooden spoon or inside your shoe. Johnny spent months sharing Josiah’s bed due to millipede-phobia. Josiah once smashed one with a hammer, triumphantly announcing that he had killed his prey. I usually picked them up with my fingers and flushed them alive down the toilet.

Each time we victoriously exterminated one species, another moved in.

But we didn’t have it so bad. My friend Alyssa lived in a house infested with snakes, and after the seventeenth one, they finally moved. Their new house’s attic was infested with bats, and the guano sprinkled like glitter over her children’s beds. So millipedes? No biggie.

My house had a miniature kitchen sink that couldn’t fit my biggest pot. It had weird pink tiles in the living room and all sorts of half-steps throughout the rooms that guests tripped over. It had no cross-breeze, and so was hot and stuffy. The windows were always open, leaving a fine layer of dust on everything.

My friend Lucy and her family of six lived in a home where she bought 25 gallons of water each day from a neighbor half a block away. It cost her about 15 percent of her monthly salary, and she carried that water in buckets back to her house.

My house had tiled floors and polished wood ceilings. I had indoor plumbing and electricity that worked most times and a generator when it didn’t. I had an air conditioner in my bedroom to push out the tropical heat while we slept. Bugs and all, compared to Lucy, I lived in luxury.

Yet Lucy considered herself blessed because she only had to walk half a block to get water, instead of the miles that many women in Tanzania have to walk. She and her husband owned their cinderblock home. Her roof boasted a solar panel so they could run fans at night. By Tanzanian standards, they were almost middle class. “We are poor,” she told me once, with a twinkle in her eye (Lucy’s eyes were always twinkling), “But we are not very, very poor.”

So how could I whine about my bugs? Despite them, I was still freakishly wealthy. I was surrounded by people who had it way worse than we did. So I went along smashing and flushing bugs, and I was content.

When we moved into our home in California, it felt like I was living in a vacation rental. I had vaulted ceilings and large windows with a cascade of light. I had a walk-in closet. I had a giant sink and a dishwasher. Every night when I turned off the lights, I would stand on the stairwell and gaze at it all, disbelieving that I lived there. I had zero bugs.

Six months later, I was walking around my neighborhood and came to the housing development next to ours. I noticed differences: these houses were a bit larger. Nicer trimmings. More spacious driveways. That would be nice, I thought. Maybe we should have held out for a house in this neighborhood instead.

Discontentment descended in a flash.

Learning From Those Who Pray All Night

By Amy Medina

On April 18, 2023

In How Americans Think, What I'm Learning

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?

Read the rest here.

Better Than a Target Run

By Amy Medina

On April 3, 2023

In How Americans Think, What I'm Learning

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.