something different

My sister and her husband have been in China for the last 6 weeks, specifically the area that was devastated by a massive earthquake. I'm not sure I can mention exactly where they are, they always have to be so careful, but I wanted to share a post with you that they made last week. They refer to each other by their Tibetan names.
Anyway, I wish this post could be shared with the world at large. I am so humbled by it.


Tonight I am feeling maybe one million things. Here’s the deal. I need to brush my teeth and all before I go to bed but there is only one bathroom in the house we’re staying at and our friend is taking a shower. So here I am, 12:49 am, mind reeling, teeth fuzzy, thinking and pondering and so so tired but still aware. So until the bathroom is free, here I am with you.

We leave in 4 days. FOUR DAYS. The sound of it makes me sick in the pit of my stomach. Oh if only I were enough like my Lord that a day was a thousand years to me… I just feel unfinished here. I have a strong suspicion that much of that has to do with the fact that I didn’t make it down to the earthquake city… and therefore did not really get to say goodbye to the friends I lost and the city I lost in the way I think I had hoped to. But strongly thematic of this trip has been a request from the Beloved one to die every day to my own poorly scrawled plans and accept with joy the thing He gives me to do for that day. I cannot judge His plan as unfair, incorrect, or insufficient. He gave me a lot of love and a lot of people to give it to in this city and oh, I just HAVE to be okay in that. 

I’m just… how can you explain love? I have wanted a million times to explain perfectly to my family why it is that I come here. Why it is I can leave them for months on end even though when I do it feels like I am being torn limb from limb and I miss them like crazy while I’m gone and so on and so forth, if I were them I would wonder why on earth I do this. Sometimes even while I’m here I wonder why I do this. Why make life so much harder? Well… I have tried now for years to condense this into a charming anecdote but am hereto unsuccessful. I will tell you instead that:

It’s sitting here in the dark, chilly mountain night with my toes close to the breezy window and the tiny smells of incense and butter on the air and the little floating song from somebody else’s window.

It’s laughing hysterically with a total stranger taxi driver who slugs Dondrup and says “Hey did you watch that American soccer game last night?” and makes fun of how the Americans played. It’s getting to know a little of his life for 9 minutes, learning he has a son that’s 10 years old, learning he was born in this city, learning where his child attends school.

It’s sitting for hours in a living room with 30 nomads I can hardly communicate with and playing language games and absolutely rolling on the floor with laughter when one of them hollers out to my husband (in English) “You are handsome boy!”

It’s drinking the 8th cup of tea in a house where the family can’t afford new clothes to put on their own backs. It’s their offer to feed you dinner. It’s their attempt to give you a small trinket that is really something special to them, just because they consider you their friend.

It’s dressing up in their clothes just exactly the way they would wear them and being told you look absolutely beautiful instead of being scoffed at.

It’s seeing a teenage monk on a bicycle chasing a younger monk who is running down the sidewalk, both of them laughing so hard they threaten to crash, red robes billowing behind them, their humanity laid bare like their tiny muscled arms.

It’s holding a sweet baby that’s almost the same age as my new niece at home and thinking, how different, how very very different their lives will be.

It’s spending hours and days at the hospital with a beautiful precious girl who, short of a miracle, will never live a normal life, will never learn to read, will maybe never leave her home, because of something that’s quite treatable where I come from.

It’s seeing my Aji do something so thoughtful and sweet for a Chinese woman he doesn’t even know. It’s seeing the look of revelation on the Chinese woman’s face and the micro-scale reconciliation between the two ethnic groups there in that moment in that noodle shop.

It’s acquiring a friend and a dear brother and meeting his family. It’s spending time in their home and drinking their tea. It’s climbing mountains together. It’s taking long bus trips together and playing Uno to pass the time. It’s living in the same house. It’s cooking his meals. It’s getting a call on April 14th that his house collapsed in the earthquake and he is gone. It’s grieving deeply. It’s throwing up from sadness. It’s coming back here and deciding to honor his death by loving the people he loved. It’s doing good in his memory.

It’s the other life I live over here. These things are a fraction… a FRACTION… of the million ways that this place has my heart. I’ve seen, and I’m responsible. And I’m ruined. And I wouldn’t want to be rebuilt. I am ruined for life that is not life at all. And I am in love to the hilt with life that is real, true, sweating, bleeding, breathing, painstaking, breathtaking, REAL LIFE.

The bathroom’s been free for a long time now. But the can, it is opened, and the worms, they are everywhere.