Let's do this

A few days ago, I packed up my three kids and walked down to the supermarket tucked into a cinema complex, just down the dusty road from where we live. We have been blessed, in our weeks without a car, and now, when my husband needs our car during the day, to have a place to buy food nearby. But when I travel by foot and with a baby tucked into one arm, it’s difficult to estimate well the amount of groceries I can carry home. A pack of taxi drivers always waits outside the cinema, calling like seagulls, ready to pounce on anyone who looks like they could use a ride. So when I show up, a white lady with three small children, I am an obvious target. “Taxi! Taxi!” they clamor, and I tell them, “Baadaye, later,” although secretly I am praying that I can drag my kids home without getting a taxi later, that I can avoid altogether the inevitable haggling and expensive offers to travel a short distance.

Just as the children and I were checking out at the store, with a bag much too heavy for the walk back home, a friendly voice made a comment about my small daughter. A surge of hope rose up in me, and although I had never seen or met this woman before, I found myself begging her for a ride, and she quickly and kindly agreed. As we jostled our way over and around the potholes in the road, we chatted about being expatriates in Tanzania and about the early weeks of transition to a new country. I confessed that it wasn’t easy, and she mused, “Oh yes, sometimes you just have to step back and watch it all go by.”

Her insight rang true for me. Recently I have been picturing life here like a river, like a flowing current of people and language and culture, where I stand on the shore and take deep breaths and decide when to jump in. Do I engage our “dada,” our maid, in my limited Swahili, stumbling over the words I attempted to look up minutes before, feeling the embarrassment of not even knowing how to say them? Or do I try it in English and hope she understands? Or do I skip the conversation altogether, pulling my foot back out of the river and turning away in weariness and fear?

At church last Sunday, the preacher talked about Joseph the husband of Mary and the dilemma he faced before Jesus was born. In the first chapter of Matthew, we read how Joseph discovers that Mary is with child, but the baby she carries is illegitimate, and he knows it. Now he’s trying to figure out a way out, a way to minimize the social damage and humiliation of the situation. And then an angel appears to him in a dream and says, “Joseph, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife! For the child within her has been conceived by the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 1:20). In other words, God is telling Joseph, “Just marry the girl. Sure, people won’t understand. Sure, they’ll whisper unkind things behind your back. Sure, it will be embarrassing and awkward. But I’m with you, Joseph. Let’s do this.”

Friends, I don’t think that our God always calls us to live on the edge of our comfort zones. I think he understands that we need places of refuge and rest, places in which to bolster our confidence and heal our wounds. But I am feeling challenged right now to set aside my concerns about myself and how I appear, or what people assume about me, true or false. When I am being laughed at for my ignorance—for not knowing how to respond to a certain greeting or prepare a certain food—can I gather up the grace to laugh along? Or will I succumb to the voice of the little girl inside me, who wants to stomp her feet in frustration and say, “I know more than this! I really do! I really am competent in my own country!”

My tall daughter’s current favorite song to listen to as she falls asleep is called “The Sun Will Rise,” by the group The Brilliance. It’s a simple, achingly beautiful song, and the words go like this:

The sun will rise
The sun will rise
Bringing life to the earth as it springs from the ground
The sun will rise
The sun will rise
Won’t you dry all your tears, lay your burdens down

I stood outside her bedroom door and listened last night, moved by the deep reassurance in these words. Our good God, who cheers the sun along her path through the heavens, the God in whom we live and move and have our being, will bring life to the earth for as long as he wills it. He sees me, he knows me, and he asks me to lay down my burdens—my fear, my weariness, my worry over how I am perceived—and to close my eyes in trust. And when the sun rises, he asks me to rise as well. “Come, child,” he says. “I’m with you. Let’s do this.”