Signs of Hope

For those of you who know me well, you know that my default outlook is not set to the "Pollyanna" way of viewing life. But for today at least, I am aware of signs of hope.

I am again starting to make plans to travel to Cameroon this summer. This trip was scheduled to happen in January and literally days before leaving was cancelled due to a herniated disc in my back. The road to recovery has been long and tedious, but today it appears as if I will leave June 8th. I have a ticket on hold through my travel agent. My contacts in Cameroon are in the process of composing another letter of invitation so I can apply for a new visa. The insurance company is re-issuing my medical evacuation/repatriation card with the dates of coverage adjusted; Fuller is re-submitting my registration packet. The plans are again becoming concrete and I cannot help but hope.

I walked for two miles today. While a year ago this would have been a rather mundane fact for a long-distance runner like myself, it now symbolizes a milestone in recovery for me. I have not been able to really exercise for months (a crippling fact since exercise serves as one of my coping mechanisms.) Some time ago I got permission to begin walking from my chiropractor and I have been slowly working my way up. The first weeks I would only walk 10 minutes at a time before I began to feel pain; then the next week I could walk for 15 minutes, then 20 and now more than 30. I still can't run but I am grateful for my chance this morning to be out in the fresh air, strolling down the country roads with my headphones set to NPR.

So for now, I bask in the warmth of hope and breathe deeply of its fragrance; next week (or maybe even tomorrow) there will probably be moments where I will need this lingering memory.

You know you are teaching in the midst of Amish country when...

-you live 12 miles away from work and there are no stoplights on the "commute" to work
-you have a school fundraiser and there are twice as many buggies tied to the hitching posts as there are cars in the parking lot
-there are lots of homemade pies and cookies at said fundraiser
-you have 4 Yoders, 2 Bontragers, 3 Millers and 1 Mullet on your class roster
-you ask your students what work means to them and one boy responds "pulling the horse into the barn"
-the class is making a list of economic wants and needs; overalls gets put under needs
-your students come to school wearing stocking caps but no jackets
-the girls have to take off their coverings to put on the headphones during computer lab
-the principal rules out wheelbarrow races on field day because it's impossible for the girls to participate modestly
-the students are so well-behaved that if you would (hypothetically speaking, of course) leave your lights on in the parking lot at school, you could trust your class to do their work quietly while you leave the room for several minutes to turn them off

High expectations

This week I cooked supper a couple of times. I made Indonesian shish-kabobs with vegetable stir-fry, rice and blueberry buckle when my Ecuadorian sisters came over. I cooked spaghetti and meatballs to take to a busy young mother and her family; I baked potato pizza and a quick ceaser salad for my parents and me. Yet I realized that when each meal was over, I would mentally check off the things that went wrong. The shish-kabobs tasted dry; the spaghetti had too much paste; the potatoes were too thick on the potato pizza. Instead of noting the things that had turned out well or resting in the affirmation that I recieved from my visitors, I ended up berating myself because it wasn't perfect.

I realized that this constant self-critique is not just confined to my cooking escapades but ends up being a bigger life pattern. I have these extremely high expectations that I place on myself and those close to me. When I leave a social gathering, I'll spend the trip home mulling over all the things that I wish I would not have said. When I look in the mirror, I zoom in on my worst features. When I play piano, I remember the scattered wrong notes instead of enjoying the melody. If I run four miles, I think I should have pushed myself to do five or six; if I get an A-, I'll spend days lamenting the loss of a "real" A.

Although high expectations can be good on occasion ("personal best" is in fact a lifelong guideline that we teach in elementary school), it seems as if these must be coupled with a healthy dose of grace and what a friend recently dubbed "self-kindness." So that's my quest for this week (one that I consider deeply spiritual)- to minimize the amount of time spent in mental belittling and chiding, to interrupt the negative self-talk, to linger in the moments where my strengths are evident. Initially this seems rather arrogant or at least self-indulgent; but when I think of the second commandment-you know the one where we are told to treat our neighbors like we treat ourselves- I'm not sure that my neighbor is looking for the kind of garbage I'm dumping on myself.

Why Wanderings?

As a regular blog reader I have often mused about what I would call my own blog. Then impulsively last week I opened my own blog. I thought about a trendy, Latin phrase as a title or the word peace in Greek or Arabic. In the end those ideas were discarded in favor of something more down-to-earth.

There are many reasons why it seems as if wanderings may be an encompassing description of my life to date. In the last 10 years of my life, I have moved a fair amount (more than a dozen times in fact). It has been a time of exploration. I spent a year of voluntary service in Ecuador and three months learning Spanish in Costa Rica; I completed my Bachelor's degree in education and moved to California to pursue my Master's degree in Cross-Cultural Studies. I have lived in many different kinds of communities- some co-ed communities with no structures and high ideals regarding simplicity, some purely-functional "communities" where rent was cheaper if we all put up with seeing each other in the kitchen and sharing our bathroom in the morning, some mentoring communities with faculty housemates, some organic student communities with written covenants, chore wheels and family-like interactions. It seems to me that much of my adult life can be summarized as wanderings, not the wanderings of the frustrated kind where one is completely lost but rather the stimulating kind where one may stumble upon new sights and smells, people and foods, sounds and languages. It reminds me of the kinds of wanderings about which one of my second graders just wrote a story- a stroll in the woods where she found a magic red shoe that allowed her to fly with the birds. To borrow from Lord of the Rings, it seems to me that "All who wander are not lost".

I also like the word wandering because it serves as an image for my spirituality. It's an image of a journey and a process where one is not to be so fixated on the destination as much as enjoying the relationship along the way, where one is not the navigator and in fact, has never seen the big map. Often I have wished that my path would be a straight shot to some fulfilling ministry or 10 quick tips to figuring God out. Instead, for me, my faith has been full of bends in the roads, some breathtaking views, some detours, a few wrong turns, forgiveness, grace and hope.

Finally, I hope this blog can be a place where I process some of my future wanderings. I am planning to spend a couple of months in Africa this summer, Cameroon to be exact. I am planning to post some of those happenings here as well as a few of the wonderings that I'm sure will stem from that experience.