off the road

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Day One village view

We’d turned off the black paved road and onto red dirt. The four of us bumped along in the car, an impromptu family outing to see our friends in Bubanza. This was a workday for Claude. But the kids wanted to join, wanted to see what we’d been talking and praying about all year, wanted to see their Papa’s handiwork.

So we jostled side to side as my son pelted us with questions from the back seat. At some point Claude took a call managing the steering wheel, the phone, the cracks and clefts in smooth stride. In a quiet moment between his curiosities, I noticed how far off the road we really are now.

“Hey, do you see how far off the main road we are? This is the land the government gave our Batwa friends.” So far from the road, far from view by any passers-by and far (they thought) from the reach of goodness – my kids already knew this part of the story. But now we were on that road, making our way to Bubanza.

“But no matter how far off the road we are, God knows where we are. And He comes to us. We’re never too far…” I said to no one in particular.

How true. Life circumstances set us far back from the main road, so far we feel as isolated and invisible as the Batwa on that unseen land. Who can even see us? Who would even want to? But we’re always seen by God, sought out by the Shepherd. He hears our cry from the furthest corners and backwaters of life.

And way back, where the highway becomes a spec on the horizon, we can be surprised by God’s goodness. Who knew that way out in the far-reaches of the arid terrain we’d find wells with clean water, classrooms filled with books… a community springing to life, defying the gravity of this place. Goodness where you’d least expect it – a table in the wilderness with water and education and hope on tap.

Sometimes we don’t expect to see God that far inland. Who imagines God off-roading to get to us?  But our God, the embodiment of love, has eyes that see and ears that hear. We shouldn’t be surprised to find Him far off the road, with us in our dry places. His goodness traveling far to find us.

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P.S. The good news is that all these kids can drink clean water a mere ten feet from where we took this picture! They will start school in the fall in classrooms with desks, chalkboards, school books and teachers. And in case anyone falls and scrapes their knee – there will be a nurse on site with supplies to clean her up and keep her on the road to health. These are the kind of things God does in places where no one is really looking.

adoption: a free write

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I am from the company of the adopted, once relinquished but swiftly redeemed and daily resurrected by the care of a father and compassion of a mother.

I want my own children to feel that redemptive energy running through their veins, fortifying their sense of self, the adoptive sacrament sweet on their tongues.

I feel responsible to impart blessing on each of their days so they, too, will taste and see the goodness – not the abandonment.

I wonder sometimes, in the dark hours of the morning when they still belong to the sleeping world, if I am mother enough.

I fear I’m not.

I hope to see them celebrate their story – left for dead but now alight with life, adopted because they matter and they possess gifts to lavish in the world. I hope they’ll not hide their adopted status, hold it like a stigma, but instead come to cherish their own place in the company of the adopted alongside me.

I try to show them the way of the adopted. I try to listen to their own way, too.

I believe we hold this sacrament together, praying for birth moms, celebrating Adoption Days, knowing our belonging to one another is deeper than blood.

I dream of celebrations down through the generations in this family created by grafted goodness.

I am adopted. I am the mother of the adopted. I stand in their company with fresh gifts on offer.

***

This is what a free write can unleash – the unexpected. I began with a simple I am statement - I am from the company of the adopted. But when the next prompt came, I want… I discovered that what I want now is for my own children to follow the path I’ve worn these forty some years.

I know adoption is not a monolithic experience. I know I cannot will them to embrace it as I have, but how deeply I hope they will grow to see it as celebration and sacrament.

In the course of the free write what I discovered, as if by way of chiasm, was my own fear about mothering them well along this adopted path. What if they shun their adoption, what if they hide it in silence and carry it like a stigma? It would break my heart. Unearthed by pen and prompts was my own realization that they could grow to understand their adoption differently. And how that would hurt, how I’d feel a failure as an adoptive mother.

Free writes are good. They can be great tools not just for writing, for creative notions but also for self discovery. I encourage you to find some good friends and write together, share and cry together. Good things will come. Lessons will be learned.

(Thanks to Claire and Idelette of SheLoves Magazine for the days of prompts as they hosted the Writers Track at Amahoro Africa‘s annual Gathering in Uganda. And thank you to my table of friends and writers who wrote, shared, listened and cried with me as we told our stories.)

In Transit: Back to Bujumbura

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airplaneAmahoro 2013 happened! More on that later…

For now we’re crowding into a plane bound for Bujumbura, Burundi. When I say we, I mean that in the fullest sense of the word! Idelette, Tina, Leigh, Claire, Carolyn, Hillary, Fiona & Rasmus, Nicole & Francesco, Claude & me all in transit together. #wow

The SheLoves journey continues on to Burundi. Tomorrow we will drink from wells in Bubanza – and dance among our friends. We’ll get to visit Matara, which I sometimes reference when I write for SheLoves (like here) and drop into Kazoza Community Bank. There will be time to catch our breath on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, to enjoy local friends and good food and maybe even see some hippos.

I’m looking forward to hosting my SheLoves tribe… my cup (and house) runneth over!!!

 

Transit Lounge Link-Up!

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Friends,

I’m just sending off this quick note from the edge of Lake Victoria in Uganda. We’re amid our seventh annual Amahoro Gathering, surrounded by African friends, leaders, thinkers, practitioners and writers. I’m also basking in the joy of sharing this with my SheLoves friends Idelette, Tina, Leigh, Claire and Fiona. So much goodness!

But this week is the time for a link-up for those who read Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire. Since I knew I’d be away and have my hands quite full, I asked Caris Adel to help host this month. She so graciously accepted! So please read her own response and link in your response to Colossians Remixed HERE!

Thanks, once again, for reading / tweeting / responding with me this month. Now you can say you’ve read a commentary cover to cover – and survived!

The read for June is No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam by Reza Aslan. I packed it in my suitcase and am eager to begin reading when I return to Burundi next week! Hope you’ll join me again – I love reading in community with you.

Blessings and Amahoro (peace) from Uganda!

 

 

In Transit: Uganda for Amahoro 2013

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airplaneHere I go again! Barely got my feet on Burundian soil and I’m boarding another flight. Welcome to my summer.

Claude and I are en route to Uganda for the seventh annual Amahoro Gathering. This is our tribe, our family of transformational leaders living the good news of Jesus across Africa. When we come together it’s a reunion. As we fill the hotel the conversations begin even before those first hugs end. We’ve got so much to talk about, to share, to ask, to explore together in a few too-short days.

This year the Ugandan Amahoro cohorts will be hosting us in Entebbe at the edge of Lake Victoria. Its not the Jordan River, but I’m expecting some pretty catalytic conversations just the same. We’ll be exploring Politics and the Kingdom of God with our African friends leading the discussions. Our Kenyan friends will talk about tribalism, as this affects their politics with each election cycle. The local legend, Bishop Zacc, will share about confronting government corruption and unpack the Black Monday movement in Uganda. Friends from South Africa, Congo, Rwanda and others will share stories from their homeland as we look at the Biblical text alongside African contexts. It’s going to be challenging and chock full of kingdom goodness!

And I must say that a special joy for me is hosting my dear SheLoves friends who are traveling in for these conversations and connections. Idelette McVicker, Tina Francis, Leigh Kramer, Claire DeBoer, Fiona Koefoed-Jespersen, Nicole Joshua and a couple new friends I’ve yet to meet! We’ll visit some local women doing amazing kingdom-inspired work in Entebbe and Kampala. We’ll walk along Lake Victoria and the Botanical Gardens to recover from jet lag and get more acquainted with one another, we’ll start conversations over late night dinners and early morning breakfasts. Then we’ll participate in the Amahoro Gathering, offering a writing workshop for our African friends and…telling stories!

We look forward to sharing some amazing stories with you, so watch our blogs for updates but also introductions to some great African leaders with wisdom to share.

So Amahoro Africa is full of so much goodness this year – I cannot wait. (But another airport, another plane, really?)

 

{ ShePonders: Her Way }

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Train children in the right way, and when they are old, they will not stray.  Proverbs 22:6

I grew up understanding that there’s a right way and a wrong way to train a child. You only need look around at all the wayward people to see training gone amok, lackadaisical parenting resulting in children who shun youth group or adults who steer clear of any church.

So when I became a parent I knew training my children in the right way, in The Way, would be a priority. I wanted them to grow into their faith and contribute goodness to a hurting world. So I bought Children’s Bibles with pastel-hued pictures to ensure they’d learn the Jesus stories. I took them to Sunday School to engrain a Sabbath rhythm. I prayed bedside prayers each night to teach them how to talk to God about everything – good grades, mean words, hurt feelings and even our fear of the dark. This was all part of my attempt to train my children in The Way.

I always thought this proverb was about instructing my children in God’s way of life. And to my ear it sounded like a promise – if I taught my children to follow God’s ways from the earliest of days, then I could rest assured that they would forever follow Him.

Then I read a commentary on Proverbs and discovered the translation from Hebrew into English changed a key word and thus changed the entire meaning of the passage.

Read the rest over at SheLoves Magazine HERE !

(NOTE: As you read this, I’m still in transit to Burundi. Seriously, it’s a long journey.)

In Transit: Burundi

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airplaneSo I am navigating multiple suitcases and carry-ons, multiple airports and flights and with two children flanking me. I’ll be trying to keep it all in the original and upright position… because the Nikondeha Trio will be in transit for 36+ hours!

The good news – my kids love to travel. They love the backpacks I load with surprise snacks and activities (Mad Libs are a first this time!). They enjoy the movies and games onboard the international flights. And, God bless ‘em, they love plane food. They’re reliably good travelers, so I shouldn’t worry, but as a mama I think I always hold my breath a bit, trying to keep us all together as we taxi between terminals, locate our gate and settle into our seats (three times over).

Today’s our annual trek to Burundi, place of their birth and my second home. We look forward to a summer filled with family, pineapple ripened to sweet perfection, drummers beating throughout the city like a heartbeat and days soaked in sunlight from beginning to end. There will be birdsong in the morning, afternoons on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, evenings out on the porch with friends where the laughter will make our bellies sore with goodness. The call to prayer will punctuate the day (and mosquitoes the night). The colors, sounds and smells will all remind me I’m on red soil.

Claude and I will be close enough to hold hands. We’ll host a bevy of friends from Canada, Australia, South Africa, Luxembourg and America. My in-laws will stay with us for part of the summer. We’ll travel to Matara and dance, then to Bubanza and drink from fresh wells. We’ll be in and out of Kazoza Community Bank, watching people access banking services and grow the local economy. I imagine all the great conversations with Claude as we host another summer full of good news.

My Burundian summers are also times when I dive deep into books, ideas, words. Plenty of books accompany me to Bujumbura, and there’s a reading chair awaiting me. This is when I read commentaries from cover to cover, tackle tomes like The Theology of Liberation and meet new authors like Ched Myers, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Reza Aslan. There will be familiar friends like Walter Brueggemann, John Dominic Crossan, Natalie Goldberg. There will be the poetry of Rumi and Wendell Berry and Mary Karr. This space is generous to me each summer, so fertile for my mind and gently on my soul. I long for these quiet hours hidden away in my Burundian cloister among the palm trees and birds of paradise. Sometimes Burundi does beckon…

We’re in transit now, but anticipate our arrival. My hewe awaits – and after hours crossing the globe there’s nothing more satisfying to my soul than his smile and that first embrace.

NOTE: TransitLounge tribe – I will be amid Amahoro Africa Gathering the last week of May. Caris Adel has graciously offered to host the link-up for Colossians Remixed over at her place, so watch for tweets or check out her site!

Week With Walter: Closing Ceremony

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week with walter_1What a privilege it’s been to host this week, this time of reflecting on The Prophetic Imagination, on the words of Walter Brueggemann and on deeper things that trouble us and give us hope.

Here are some highlights…

Single Sentences:

Do our poets speak in 140 character tweets? – Russ Graeff

I had to make a conscious decision to surround myself with the very pathos our empire pretends isn’t a reality. — D.L. Mayfield

We are at the same time both hopeful and heartbroken over the state of the world, and still, all we know how to do is weep. — Luke Harms

Something struck a chord in a room of unreligious artists. They identified with the fight to imagine an alternative to the dominate narratives of the day… — Jenny Flannagan

The un-tethered-ness of God is precisely what gives God the ability to anchor near to us. — Emily Maynard

I so appreciate each friend who not only read with us, but responded and lead un into deeper conversation and reflection with their offering. These friends served us a feast.

Best Tweets:

Writing about God and Twilight and Brueggemann for @knikondeha #transitlounge on Friday. My apologies in advance. (@emelina)

Dang, @d_l_mayfield can write. Love her. “The Prophet-as-a-hot-mess situation.” (@jrgoudeau)

But my favorite, without question:

@knikondeha what are you DOING getting us to read this WB book?? Are you trying to stir up a revolution or something??!;) (@JoannaCDobson)

We did tweet more about this book than any others thus far… lots of quotes, comments, retweets and favorites. But these few really stood out, because humor does carry the day!

Giveaway:

And with a final drum roll… our week will come to an end. But first let me thank all of you for reading and then engaging with one another in content-rich conversations. I noticed how many of you traveled from blog to blog, talking to each other, and it made my heart sing! I hope you made some new connections with Brueggemann’s ideas, but also with one another. I hope this is only the beginning of some friendships and new prophetic imaginings.

But after the drawing the winner of The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann is Jamie Wright Bagley!

Let’s grieve so that we may find our prophetic voice and move toward hope together with energy, compassion and love.

 

 

 

Week With Walter: Emily Maynard

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There’s just something about Emily. We met through a mutual friend on Twitter – really. But the first time I read her words I recognized the shine – she’s a gem. Emily braids together intelligent commentary, unvarnished candor and a huge hunk of humor into her reflections. She feels like your best friend after one read, drawing you close as she tells her secrets out loud, making you feel less alone. Even talking about Walter Brueggemann – she got me laughing, letting my guard down again…

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Sometimes, on those rare days when spiritual practice turns into spiritual presence, I sense that God is with me.

And on those even rarer occasions when we linger together, it’s in the meadow from Twilight.

Yeah. For real. Twilight.

I know.

Of course there’s a romantic meadow in Twilight. Who hasn’t imagined lying in a field of flowers with their Love, unhindered by the reality of uneven ground and biting insects. Who hasn’t dreamed up a beautiful place, secluded by towering pine trees, to shelter and reconnect with wonder. I understand why Stephenie Meyer wrote her characters into that idyllic scene. It’s laughably terrible, but I understand it.

What I didn’t understand for a long time is why God meets me there. I don’t have weird romantic vampire fantasies about Jesus, but we still end up in that meadow.  It’s ridiculous.

It wasn’t always like this. My faith used to make a lot more sense.

I grew up a Baptist and as Reformed as they come. I was taught that God was found mostly in the right belief that led to the right, dutiful practice. Imagination, and even Justice, was the realm of crazy Pentecostals, liberal pretenders, and Christians who backslid carelessly into the tepid waters of New Age spirituality. Dreaming was the thing of The World, but thinking was the stuff of the people who really took God seriously.

And I did.

I wanted to take God seriously, and I’m naturally inclined towards the study, the standards, and the systematic theologies. So I worked at those things, and I was good at them. Instead of Vampire Novels, I threw my teenage self into apologetics and proofs of God and correct doctrinal statements and all the American public policies that God himself endorsed. I shunned emotion and built my life out of logic. The systems were set and locked into place, of course. My parents’ generation had figured them out, and my generation was going to embrace their work and make sure we got it done for God.

There was very little left to discover, but much to obey.

But three years ago, in a fit of spiritual exhaustion, I gave up. I told God that I was done trying to love a taskmaster and critical, note-taking thought-voyeur. I couldn’t live in a world where I proclaimed that God was good, but couldn’t find any goodness in the theology around him.

I was terrified. So I threw in an asterisk: if God wanted to show up for me differently, or prove that she was different than I’d been taught, I’d listen. God, if you’re good, then show up for me. I prayed over and over.

In that bold and final act, something old died and something new began to grow.

This new faith was centered deeper in me, inviting back all the pieces of myself that I’d tried to remove. It engages my imagination, emotions, brain, mouth, and my hands.

This wild new God is consistently surprising me.

Walter Brueggemann, in The Prophetic Imagination, sets up this idea of a surprising, free God. As I blazed through the book over Easter weekend last month, I kept scribbling my own yes in the margins and circling the word free. I have experienced so much of a free God over the past few years.

For Brueggemann, this free God shows up as a contrary force to the settled and satiated social order of Egypt. The task of the Prophet, Brueggemann says, is to imagine and incite God’s alternative society where justice and compassion reign instead of placid security and control. We celebrate and energize the work that God is already doing to make things new. We do this as we marvel and wonder and live out this new reality.

This imagination and action is essential to the Kingdom of God, where we will not “have a politics of justice and compassion unless we have a religion of God’s freedom” (17). God, in wildness and freedom, shows up to invite wildness and freedom and life in us.

I keep circling around the idea of God as the “Lord of freedom.” I grew up so concerned with a God who was predictable and would act according to my expectations and behaviors. I thought I knew a God who was glorious, but could be captured in a certain set of doctrines and politics.

A free God cannot be captured like that. A worshipper of a free God trusts in something bigger than predictable outcomes. Bruggemann says of these people: “We have not yet finally given up on the promise spoken over us by the God who is free enough to keep his promises” (45). A God who is free, but shows up to show us freedom.

Understanding God as free, and myself as free in God’s image, is absolutely radical. It brings me into the kind of wonder that I can only call worship. It makes me sing a bold song and makes my heart crave Justice.

The Lord of Freedom is autonomous, dynamic, self-defining, advocating, able to attach, and capable of relating individually and corporately. That blows my mind. The un-tethered-ness of God is precisely what gives God the ability to anchor near to us.

But it is also a dangerous thing to relate freely to a free God. Sometimes you end up in unexpected places.

Sometimes, when I finally stop rushing around my days and I curl up on my bed and invite myself near to God, I imagine a meadow surrounded by trees and filled with flowers. It’s absent of vampires and vampire wannabes, but I always recognize it.

Twilight.

Ridiculous.

Free.

For a while I raised my eyebrows. It seemed so undignified and petty to engage my spirituality in the most vapid sort of literary images. Are you kidding me, God? I asked on multiple occasions. Why here? You’ve read Twilight and agree that it’s terrible, right?

The answer I got again and again taught me more about God than a lifetime of sitting through three hour church services: Because it’s funny and you like it.

That answer is simple, silly, engaging, and so darn personal. Of course. Of course a free God is like that. Because it’s funny and you like it.

Only a wildly free God could be that funny. Laughter, the deep kind that doesn’t slow down until your stomach hurts and you can’t breathe and snot is running out your nose, is an act of letting go. The best humor gives up control, removes structural barriers, and clears the rank airs of social formality. It’s surprising and equalizing. Laughter breaks down barriers and gives up power instead of trying to take it. It celebrates the freedom that a safe, sedated faith could never offer.

Of course a free God is like that with me, when we sit together.

 

Emily 1Emily Maynard is an outgoing introvert from Portland, Oregon. She is a big picture thinker who gets excited about questioning, exploring, and watching people find their voices.

She writes for Prodigal Magazine, A Deeper Story, and blogs at Emily Is Speaking Up. She is not the Emily Maynard from The Bachelorette.

You can follow her nonsense and truth on Twitter: @emelina and Instagram: @emelinapdx

 

It’s not too late to link-up with your reflection on The Prophetic Imagination! Come on over HERE and share with us…

And remember that today is the final day to be eligible for our giveaway: The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann! So link up. Comment on any of the posts – on this website or any of our friends who linked up their responses. Each comment just increases your chance of winning…