When Women Reach Out

I cannot tell you how many times over the last few years that we have been living overseas that I have found myself battling back the gathering clouds of loneliness. Perhaps a stretch of days or weeks when I just felt so isolated from family or friends or maybe even just a moment in the day when an idea popped into my head and I wanted to throw it out to someone and it wasn't possible. It can be hard this part of living as a missionary.

On the other hand, I also cannot possibly begin to count all the ways I have been blessed by women who have reached out beyond all the challenges of a friendship with someone with a sketchy Skype connection, and chaotic life and ride the emotional roller coaster of this journey with me. Some of them have shown up as strangers and left as friends. Some walked into a conference with me and now walk through life with me. Some are old friends that have had to figure out a new plan for maintaining closeness in this phase of life.

We've had to work through stuff. I've gotten it wrong more than a couple of times. But some very beautiful life-giving relationships have been born in these years and I count them among my greatest blessings.

I know social media and the blog world have their flaws, but for me, they have been a sanity saver. I have met and also maintained relationships with some amazing women that could have only been possible through their help. One of the ways I have found sisterhood and community online is through the the (in)courage community groups.

They are small groups of women connecting over something that draws them together. And oh the connections I have made! If you are looking to dig into relationships and find a safe place to reach out to other women, I strongly encourage you to check out this list of groups for the spring session and join one. Registration starts today and goes all week. If you happen to be a fellow missionary or someone working in or interested in global care, I will be co-leading a group just to encourage you! You can join us here!

Today, in the aftermath of a full scale medical mission that now looks like it blew up in my kitchen, and a house full of kids with scratchy throats and stuffy noses, I would like nothing more than to sit down with a friend over a warm cup of joe and make it all make sense. Won't you join me at our virtual kitchen table? I'll be waiting with warm Costa Rican coffee. Now that's an offer I know you can't refuse.

Birthday Blessings from Beautiful Friends

So, last week, while I was out in the jungle far away from the internets, recovering from a birthday pity party, my friend Elizabeth was cooking up a little birthday surprise for me. I am grateful to know that this had to have been imagined far before my miserably lonely e-mails from the day before arrived. And I am grateful for the heart with which my sweet friend holds me. On the good days and the bad.

What I was doing while you all were rocking my world with your generous hearts! Crossing rivers to get to the villages we shared the Word in on Good Friday.

She sent out a not so secret plea to her friends and followers via her blog and social media:

Hey, come close! Let's hatch a secret plan;-). My sweet friend, Colleen Mitchell celebrated a birthday yesterday. It was kind of a lonely affair down on the mission field in Costa Rica. Today, she and her men are off to the jungle for three days, bringing gospel joy to the indigenous folks who are their neighbors. They will be far from internet access. While they are out, might we send some birthday love her way? An anonymous donor has promised to match donations made to The St. Bryce Foundation, up to $500. Wouldn't it be *grand* for Colleen to see $1K in the St. Bryce account in honor of her birthday when she returns to the mission house for Easter?

Sharing the Gospel in the home of our Cabecar friends on Good Friday

And you responded! Oh, how so many of you responded! I am humbled by your generosity and the kind greetings and wishes tucked away in each the donation e-mails I received and I thank each and every one of you.

Elizabeth DID NOT get her wish for my birthday. I did not return home to find that grand $1K in the account. I returned home to find TRIPLE GRAND $3,000 in birthday donations! 

My darling boy and his Cabecar brother carrying the crosses during our Way of the Cross service.

And there were tears. And my darling husband was giddy with joy and amazement. And relief, quite honestly, because for perspective, here's what $3,000 can do for the work of St. Bryce Missions:

• pay our family's health insurance in Costa Rica for a year AND
• pay the electricity bill on the mission house and St. Francis Emmaus Center for a year AND
• have a bit left over to get two more beds in order to house and help more mamas and their babies

You know what is amazing about this? The large majority of the the donations were under $15. A tribe of friends spreading birthday joy in small doses made a huge heaping difference with a cherry on top.

And that might just be the best present I have ever received. I am blessed and grateful and counting each and every one of you who participated among my #1000Gifts.

This is what my wise and wonderful friend had to say to me the day before she hatched her secret plan, when I zipped off a tearful e-mail about how sad and lonely I was and what a mess up I was feeling like on my birthday, and how it had zapped all my desire to strike off into the jungle the next day to serve God:

My inch is that God will shine forth in obvious ways in the jungle. He’ll show up and you’ll say, “Hey!” and y’all will kiss and make up.
He makes all things new, even when we feel old and defeated.
I’m praying for you!

Know what? She was totally right. And He showed up in the jungle and He showed up in my heart and He showed up in my inbox because you all said "yes"! So a million times in a million ways, thank you for being Jesus to me and with us at St. Bryce Missions! 

Day 17 of Giving That Gives Back: Lovely Links From Friends

So have I ever mentioned that I have been blessed to know and meet some really super cool people? God seems to just know who to bring in to my life to keep me inspired and buoyed with hope that we can use our gifts to shine His light into the world and transform lives.

Back at Idea Camp in September, I spent a very hysterical and enlightening few hours with some amazing women. Today I want to share with you links to some of the causes they are passionate about and some of the things they are doing to change lives.

First, let me introduce you to my friend Britany. She and her family are waiting for God to add a precious person to their family from Ethiopia. If you have followed an adoptive family through the wait for a referral, it can be agonizingly difficult and easily lead to listless despondency. But that is not how Britany and her family are doing this waiting thing. They instead have launched a campaign of love in Ethiopia, to take care of vulnerable children and make sure they are cared for. Just look at these faces. They started out with 155 kids needing sponsorship. But because THEY TOTALLY ROCKED IT, half those kids are now sponsored. But there are still 88 waiting. And 100 more kids they have not yet profiled because this first batch was priority. So if someone would please go get sweet Mimi and then tell me what her letters say when you get them, that would make my world. Or Bethlehem? Because, seriously? That is some Christmas joy right there.

Now, let's talk about another cool chick I know, Lindsey. She is mama to two beautiful kiddos from Ethiopia too. And so part of her heart is in Ethiopia. And she has some pretty awesome talents she's using to bring transformation to families there. Like writing a book about a little boy's search for water in Africa to teach, inspire and engage kids about the global water crisis. I Walk For Water is lovely to look at, fun to read, and every child I've shared it with has enjoyed it and begun thoughtful discussion immediately afterwards. And every book purchased provides clean drinking water for one person in Africa for seven years. Double awesome. Lindsey shared this link today to the Children's HopeChest shop on Story Company. I'll take one of these flower cuffs in every color, please. And the chevron necklace made by deaf artisans in Kenya? Need it for sure. Lindsey also introduced me to LOPA Art which promotes and sell original art by Ethiopian artists and some amazing leather bracelets as well. Poke around their photos. Beautiful.

Are you starting to see why I loved hanging with these ladies? Just wait. There's more.

Erika came along on our taco and guacamole adventure as well. She and a friend just began an amazing project called Somebody's Mama that is linking women up to learn and engage with global women's issues. That tribe recently rallied to provide a mom from our St. Francis Emmaus Center with a year's worth of formula for her baby. It's a great tribe and I highly recommend you jump in! Somebody's Mama is in partnership with 4 H. I. M. Just go check out this video about their poultry project at a school in Togo. Amazing. We are hoping to learn more from them as we develop our Chicken Run project in the future.

And then there was Jen. She's responsible for the partnerships behind the beautiful products that are turning up in the (in)courage marketplace. She led the development of the lovely new tableware line from Dayspring. And she recently went to India to hang out with the team from JOYN India and meet their artists. Because she's awesome like that. I love JOYN's products and was so happy when they were featured in the new TOMS marketplace. Don't you love that TOMS page? You could make a homeschooling day out of following all the graphics there!

So, yeah, it was a pretty cool lunch. Did I mention we got lost, invited ourselves through the back door and traipsed through the kitchen to get there? Yeah. Because awesome is as awesome does. I hope you learn as much from these ladies as I have. And I am so grateful God brought each of you into my life!\

How to (Not Really) Make New Friends

You know how your life is just normal to you and so you just run along most days doing what you do and not really thinking that much of it? And then you have some experience that brings light to the fact that the rest of the outside world may just not perceive your life as exactly normal? Yeah, me too.

One of the things we long to find here in our mountain mission post that feels so isolated to us at times are a couple of friends who might just "get us" culturally, speak English even, know what life is like where we are from and understand the struggles that come with adapting to life in this place. And, in all honesty, who might crave pizza regularly too and rejoice when they find peanut butter stocked in a local store.

So the other day when we were in the grocery store in the city and a gentleman spoke up in perfect English and asked us if we lived here, we got a little excited. We later figured out we might have been slightly over eager for his conversation. And maybe, just maybe come off as a little "oh, please, please, be our friend creepy". Greg and I chuckled at ourselves as we relived this interaction afterwards.

After the initial introductions, he took us to the car to meet his wife (she grew up in the town where we live) and his daughter (she grew up in Connecticut where they have lived for the last 25 years until they moved back to Costa Rica a few months ago). They explained they are living in the city so she can attend the private high school our oldest son attended last year. But that they come to visit her mother in our town often.

Us: (Holding bags full of crackers and juice boxes) Oh, you should come by and visit us some time when you are there. We live right across the street from the soccer field. We're almost always there, we're just in town right now visiting the indigenous mom who has been living with us awaiting the birth of her baby. She's in labor right now. We're bringing her juice boxes....

Them: General conversation with the overall theme being "we've heard those indigenous people are weird".

Us: Generally awkward response the gist of which was "yes, culturally they are very different from us and difficult to understand at times but we let them live with us and sometimes we go live with them because that's what God told us to do and so we've gotten over it"

Them: Awkward response about how maybe they'll come visit some time and how they have a deacon friends in the States who might think what we do is cool

Exchange of information

Us (Over eagerly offering additional options to hang it with us): Yeah, and we should get together some time when we are here in town. You guys should come with us when we go visit the orphans (you know, for fun, on Friday nights). Or maybe you want to come feed the homeless with us (you know, because sometimes you need more than one fun thing to do)...well, we have to go back to our friend now.

Them: Yeah. Maybe we'll come by tomorrow when we're in town.

They didn't. Is anyone particularly surprised by this? I mean, in hindsight, perhaps inviting them to meet up for pizza with a casual nonchalance might have been a better plan?

Or maybe they would have preferred to join us to tie up live chickens in sacks in their Mass clothes? Because that's how we roll.

I mean, you'd want to be our friend, right?

A Common Depravity

So I stepped off a plane in the U.S. mid to end of September and then made my way toward Austin, TX. Without really knowing why or plumbing the depths of it, I had felt a magnetic pull to get myself to the States to attend Idea Camp/Human Care the moment I read about it on Jen Hatmaker's blog (which I present to you because if you don't know about it and you like to laugh while you love Jesus and ask hard questions, you should). I had already been trying to get to New Orleans in early October so this opportunity sealed the deal. I jumped on it and what developed was a month long whirl wind tour of the States for which I left my husband and five children behind in our mountain mission post caring for a 37 week pregnant woman and her four year old (a story for another day). I told you, there was not much in-depth forethought here...a blowing of the Spirit, a tongue of fire, and BAM I was off.

It wasn't really until I woke up the morning of the first day of Idea Camp in my friend Nickie's house that I started to question myself. First of all, my most wonderful hostess allowed me to prevail upon her and her family even though we had only reconnected since high school on Facebook. She jumped to open her home to me when I zipped off a message saying. "Um, if I randomly come to Austin in September to go to this thing (insert Idea Camp link), can you provide me food, lodging and transportation for free?" Because she's a good girl and she loves Jesus and a NOLA girl so loves company, she was all, "YES!"

But I woke up on Friday morning to get dressed and await the ride she had arranged for me with a neighborhood friend and had a moment AKA freak out. What the heck was I doing? My family was far away, my husband holding the home front and ministry fort, while I was about to head to some hybrid conference/conversation thing with people I did not know to meet other people I did not know who did really awesome things I did know about. And all I could think was 1. I'm way out of my league and 2. Don't genuflect and make the Sign of the Cross when you get in the pew at that Church because you are totally going to creep these people out.

You see, I was pretty sure that I was going to be the only Catholic girl at this rodeo (That's a Texas reference, get it?) And that freaked me out because...well, I don't really know why. I think it's because I really do not care. I feel comfortable, inspired and hopeful about the future around Jesus-lovers and world-changers of all sorts. But I am never quite sure if that feeling will be reciprocated. I feel like I have to awkwardly work the fact that I am Catholic into the first line of every conversation to allow people the opportunity to walk away from me if they like. So I did. And they didn't. Not one person walked away.

What I found was a space where there was a unique commonality among those gathered. It went way beyond our antiquated "we all love the same Jesus" platitude (which by the way does nothing to cross ecumenical bounds and reach out to our deepest common places and is really just kind of dumb). It took me a while to figure out what it was that was there.

There was a van ride where two women became my instant friends. There was praise and worship that just felt right. There was a room and a conversation where I felt confident that I had something worthwhile to say. There was the lady who slipped into the pew beside me and then it turned out calls Costa Rica her second home. There was excitement about the work we are doing, and ideas and thoughts and offers for collaboration. There was lunch where we broke every health code and walked straight through the kitchen to our table. And where smart women had insightful conversation.

And that was all really, really cool. But it wasn't quite the heart of the matter. There was something deep happening in the hearts of the people I watched and listened to and talked with and prayed with over those two days. Something that bound us together differently than I had found myself bound to a group of people before. I heard in their voices, sensed it in their countenance, watched it glisten in their tears. We were not made brothers and sisters by some vague same Jesus we believed in.

If you heard the conversations that took place in that space out of context and without being surrounded by that atmosphere, you would have likely though the lot of us crazy. We cried and we were angry and we were disappointed and we were confused and we felt like we had no answers. Yet we were hopeful and we were brave and we were raw and we were in the fight. And we had been broken. Fallen in love with a real God who did the hardest thing for us, broke Himself wide open. And who had in turn sent us into the world with bleeding hearts that had broken for the least of His people. And we stood there together with the pieces in our hands and wondered what came next. We shared a common depravity.

And in that broken, depraved place where we admitted that we had fewer answers than we ever thought we could and that when we really were honest we knew less now than when we started, there was a new hope born. A hope that in admitting to our common depravity we could find ways to help each other keep being brave, keep asking hard questions, keep walking through the muck and the mud of relationships and Church and Christianity and charity and what the heck does it all mean. That the blind leading the blind often find their way in the dark faster than those who think they see and so need no one.

I left that space a little timid to face the world again. There was something so, so nice about being a mess among messes and knowing it was good. And knowing that even after we had quietly admitted to our common depravity in that space, we would take the pieces of our hearts, go back out into the great wide broken world and dig in again. Do the hard stuff. Ask each other questions. Invite one another into our craziness. It framed the entire rest of my time in the States. It changed me. It gave me new friends. Friends who love my Jesus, but not only that, love Him to that point of broken wide, messy crazy. Friends with whom I share a common depravity.

I have made many friends in the last couple of years with whom I do not share denomination. And yet I am drawn deeply to them in so many ways. This is my final explanation of what it is that draws me. It may not make sense to you. That probably just means you're not crazy. Yet.