Room for the Unknown

A week ago I was anxiously preparing for my fourth trip to the marvelous country of Brazil, this time to stay for just under three months! Finding myself in a different context than normal always gives me the opportunity to shift my perspective, and this trip is certainly no exception. Let me provide some context on my reasons for going and the events leading up to this moment. Saulo and I just celebrated our two-year anniversary. We met while I was in the state of Bahia on a missions trip, and we realized what was happening with us about a day and a half before the trip ended. So we tearfully separated, unsure of what the next few months would bring.

When I returned home, we started planning my return to Brazil to meet Saulo’s family and spend more time together. That first four-month separation felt like an eternity at the time. We were thrilled to begin this chapter of our life together. We applied for a K-1 fiancé(e) visa shortly after I returned home, and the wait began. When the pandemic hit, we had hopes that our process would only be delayed by a few months, but after a year of separation, we needed to see each other again. So we went to London for a month, as the UK was open with some quarantine requirements at the time.

I thought things would be better after our trip to London in September. I thought the waiting would get easier because the pandemic would begin to subside and/or the US government would realize that they couldn’t keep holding back visa processing (particularly after multiple judges told them that this action is illegal). The six months that followed that trip were some of the most difficult months of my life for a whole host of reasons. Long story short, we needed another solution, unable to spend another year or more apart. God spoke to my heart back in October that it was time to go to Brazil. And all I could think was, “None of this makes any sense.”

There is always a battle raging over the hearts and minds of people. Whether it’s a political ideology, a religion, or just a belief system or worldview, there are always people trying to convince us to see the world their way. In the age of social media, we can feel this pressure even more intensely, especially if our friends or the people we follow are working hard to convince us that they are right about something. In this pandemic the thing that has been particularly difficult for me is feeling that some people see Saulo and I as the “enemy.” We are traveling; Saulo is attempting to immigrate. My government was quick to shift the blame for its own mishandling of the virus onto travelers from other countries, including family members of US citizens or those who will one day be US citizens, using this as justification to keep hundreds of thousands of families separated during a global crisis.

It’s natural for us to want to place blame on others, whether it’s illegal immigrants, college professors, Hollywood, politicians, etc. But is it really that simple to identify problems and solutions in the complexity and unpredictability of life? I have been inundated with information almost constantly since the start of the pandemic. I’ve often found myself traveling down the rabbit hole, searching for the big answers about why this is happening and how to stop it and when it will stop. Do I have a better understanding of what is happening? Perhaps. Does it change the fact that I don’t understand why things like this happen? No.

Just because I have the ability to type my questions into a search engine doesn’t mean I’ll find peace in the results. I often find even greater confusion and frustration, as it seems like everything is a fight these days. When did we all become so obsessed with being experts about everything? Because we have so much information available to us all the time, have we convinced ourselves that we are entitled to or even able to have an answer to everything?

The story of Brazil and me has been the story of shifting my expectations of the world and my life every time I’m here. When I first lived in Brazil for about one month in 2014 (in Saulo’s city, by the way), I came home a different person. I can’t totally explain it. I fell in love with Brazil, and my experience in Brazil changed everything. Then when I returned to Brazil again, my life changed direction entirely, as I began planning to marry a Brazilian. I was shocked to meet Saulo when I did; I never could have predicted it. The country that changed my life forever became a permanent fixture in my everyday life, and I think it’s just more evidence that God knows what He’s doing (and He has a good sense of humor about it too).

I want to be able to embrace the mystery that comes with life. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t attempt to learn or understand the things happening in the world today. But we need to remember a couple things as we sift through all these opinions and interpretations and perspectives: 1) some of the people attempting to convince us to accept their answer may have ulterior motives for doing so, or they may just enjoy feeling powerful and intelligent (but it doesn’t mean they’re right), and 2) if we depend on knowing all the answers in order to have peace, all we will know is anxiety. Either that, or we will so convince ourselves of our own rightness that we will become completely blind to all the ways we are wrong.

This past year has taught me to hold my opinions and expectations loosely. I’m the type of person who always has a plan, always some sense of what’s really going on. Or I thought I was. Ultimately it was all a silly attempt to feel safe and to be able to justify my own decisions to myself and to others. I’m going to be transparent here. I don’t see a way forward in my own life without dependence on God. Before now, I don’t think I had any concept of what walking by faith really means.

Walking by faith means remembering that I don’t have the answers, but I know the God who does. Walking by faith is understanding that His answers often don’t look the way I expect. Walking by faith is taking steps forward when I don’t understand what He is doing or why. Walking by faith is embracing the mystery of life and letting it lead me into trust, remembering that none of us is entitled to an easy journey. All of us put our faith in something, and I choose to let go of the burden of being the expert. God’s specialty is working beyond my ability; for the first time in my life, I have no other option than trusting that He is.

Someday When it’s Right

When asked in various surveys or personality tests whether I am a procrastinator, I will always answer no. In some ways, this answer is an accurate one, but the past several months have made me question how accurate it really is. I have always been extremely motivated to complete tasks as quickly as possible. Maybe it’s a sense of accomplishment, or maybe I just need to feel like I have a clear head that isn’t cluttered with tasks. In elementary school, I raced to complete my schoolwork during the day so that I wouldn’t have to bring any of it home. Then I would spend the rest of my time reading, trying to squeeze every last moment out of my day.

College was the same way, believe it or not. Knowing that there was some assignment or test lingering on the edges of my consciousness was enough to make me lose sleep long before any due dates. For me, there were no all-nighters. Trust me when I say that nobody wants to see or deal with me after I’ve stayed awake all night. For papers and tests, I had tried-and-true strategies that I completed over the course of a few days, and most of the time I could hold to these little routines I had.

And even after describing myself that way, I would deny being a perfectionist. I would think to myself, “No, I’m not a perfectionist. I just want things done correctly. I know it can’t necessarily be perfect, but it can be right.” This was a convenient piece of denial that kept me from seeing the way my insistence on “right” was my greatest stumbling block. It was a powerful piece of denial.

At the end of December, I started reading and working my way through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. The book hit on many of my hangups when it came to my own creativity, and I’ve been able to reflect on just how wrong I was to think I was not a procrastinator or a perfectionist. Coming face to face with this was just the first step. I liked to think of this obsession with doing things right as a commitment to excellence; but when it comes down to it, I was only committed to appearing excellent in all I did, rejecting the idea that bumps and mistakes are part of the process.

Case in point, I have five blog posts sitting in my drafts on this blog (and many more I thought about and never started). I did a 30-day writing challenge last spring to try to get myself in the habit of writing every day, but once I lost the structure of that, I feel into that age-old pattern of saying I was going to start writing soon but never following through.

I would start writing a post, a song, a story, etc. I would judge it too quickly and lose my courage and motivation to finish it. This is the story of my whole life. I have drafts of stories I wrote when I was ten years old, some several pages long, and never finished. If I have an assignment, a deadline, or some external force waiting for me to finish something, I will finish and do everything to the best of my ability. Oddly enough, the deadline releases me from waiting to call it complete only when it’s perfect.

It might not be immediately apparent, but I am very aware of how far from perfect I am. Yet there’s this striving. And unfortunately it’s not a striving for excellence; my standards for myself are much too high. They are laughably unrealistic. I have found so much freedom in taking a breath and realizing that I don’t need to be perfect to be valuable. I don’t need to be perfect to be good (there’s a whole other blog post waiting in that statement). Not only that, but this whole issue rests on my own assumption that my idea of perfect actually represents perfection.

There is a lot of freedom in discovering the places in which you are your own worst enemy. I have had plenty of people in my life speak discouraging things to me about my own creativity, about my personality, my attitude, etc., as many of us have. For a long time, I blamed those people for my creative and personal hangups, all the while remaining blissfully unaware of the part my own inner critic has played in it. The truth is that I often don’t accept myself, and at this point, that’s not their fault. It’s mine. I chose to agree with them and continue the legacy of their words in my life. They may have given me some bad ideas about myself, but I incubated those ideas into beliefs and behaviors.

So for the first time in my life, I’m doing my best to set my own judgment to the side. The voice of my inner critic at times serves me well. My own judgment and problem solving skills have helped me through many challenges. But they’ve also ruled me tyrannically, made me miserable and anxious, and kept me from pursuing the things I’m passionate about. We have the power to choose our own meditations. And meditating on creation and possibility in the light of God’s words over our lives opens far more doors than criticism and perfectionism ever could.

On Responsibility

It’s been two years now since that night in Brazil when my whole life changed, when I felt the earth shift under my feet. Over the past year, I have been especially thankful for God’s clarity in those first days. He knew there couldn’t be any doubt about the journey we were beginning because we were walking headlong into a storm with absolutely no idea what was coming.

When Saulo and I confessed our feelings to each other for the first time, I thought about all the times I said that I would not want to marry someone from another country, forever split between cultures and families, dealing with cultural differences, navigating the immigration system. Only if the love were earth-shattering and absolutely certain would I ever take it on. As it turned out, this love was. I wasn’t going to find this just anywhere, and God’s voice threaded the needle from years and prayers past, making me absolutely certain of what was happening.

“It’s going to be a lot of hard work, and it’s going to be painful,” I said to Saulo that night, “but I’m ready to do this if you are.”

I had no idea.

As so often happens when you’re following God’s lead on anything, the beginning of the new season usually looks the opposite of what you expect. (Think about the Israelites and Jericho–here’s the Promised Land! Oh, wait, here’s the biggest wall I’ve ever seen.) Saulo was my first real boyfriend, and in the two years after we met, I spent more time alone than any other season of my life. Not at the office. Not at school. Not at rehearsal. This is life, at the moment, for everyone, right? In many ways, I feel blessed. I was able to meet Saulo in London and spend a month in my favorite city with my favorite person. After a year of separation, this was a time of healing for us.

When I came home, that’s when the battle truly began. If you have never found yourself caught in an immigration process during a pandemic, I can tell you that there has never been a time when I have felt so powerless or so unable to make a good decision. I was barely hanging on by a thread when we started the K-1 visa process, anxious about every little thing that could go wrong and missing Saulo like crazy in the middle of it. One thing I was so thankful for was my job. I was making more money than I ever made before (which still wasn’t much), and I finally had good benefits as well.

I saw my job as an anchor, something that would give us what we needed for the next season. Prior to the beginning of the pandemic, I was working 12 hours a day most days, teaching piano and doing accompanying on the side to try to save as much as possible for a wedding, our first apartment. etc. Money was all I thought about, and I was feeling the pressure. In the first months of his time here, Saulo won’t be allowed to get a job, and I am his sponsor. I have to make enough for the both of us.

In many ways, I have been so blessed financially. I’ve been worried about money since I was seventeen years old, when I realized that my dream of going to college could easily be cut off simply based on dollars. After graduating from grad school, being able to get through six years of school without debt (miraculously, and thanks to my parents), I didn’t feel the freedom I expected to. I was struggling to find a decent-paying job that I actually enjoyed. I felt out of my element and frustrated by my job prospects. Like many in their mid- to late twenties, I started feeling hopeless almost immediately, especially when I checked out the rent prices in the Twin Cities.

If this all just sounds like real life hitting for the first time, that’s exactly what it is. And that’s why suddenly the question became this: “What are the most important things?” At my job, despite the pay and the benefits, I was miserable. I think I had been miserable the whole time but just too busy to notice. All in the name of being more “responsible,” I stayed in the job and planned to do so for as long as possible. I was excited for those larger paychecks, and I scheduled a doctor’s appointment for the first time in a decade. However, on a personal level, everything was deteriorating quickly, and I eventually made the choice to leave that job in February.

I started thinking about what it means to be responsible and how we relate to our own ideas of responsibility in a situation where the options are so limited. I got a new job, one that pays less but makes me significantly less miserable. The amount of money I was making in my other job already wasn’t enough to appropriately afford an apartment (i.e. I would be spending significantly more than the 30% or so that you’re supposed to spend on rent every month). So when it comes down to it, what exactly was I hanging onto but the appearance of a “responsible” life without any true joy or new opportunity coming from it?

At what point does being responsible for oneself and one’s own family become about something more than a paycheck? Money is a necessary evil, and very few people that I know personally have ever been paid fairly for the work they do. We are all so affected by the culture we live in, the one designed to turn us into good tax-paying employees. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against work. But I am against a system that holds wages that are too low and benefits that are too expensive over my head in order to keep me busy and convince me to consume more and more of what it offers me. But that’s a topic for another day.

Suffice it to say that I have many other “responsibilities” in my life. To myself. To Saulo. And most importantly, to the calling God has placed on my life. I have had a lot of time to evaluate the things in my life that make me feel alive. Doing these things may involve choices that I or others would not consider “responsible.” But how do we define that anyway? Isn’t it the most “responsible” thing in the world to do what you were born to do? I’m still learning what that looks like, but knowing what comes first and what doesn’t is certainly a good first step.

2020 Book List

One of my goals for this year was to read more. Unlike most of my other goals for this year, I achieved this one and went above and beyond. My goal was to read 20 books this year. It has been a long time since I have read this much, and this book list seems to reflect my own personal journey in many ways.

Remembrance of Earth’s Past series: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End by Liu Cixin*
Oklahoma! by Richard Rodgers
Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat by Stephen Sondheim
Espirito Santo: Uma Introdução by John Bevere**
Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline
When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor… and Yourself by Steve Corbett
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her by Melanie Rehak
The Masterpiece by Francine Rivers
Welcome to Adulting: Navigating Faith, Friendship, Finances, and the Future by Jonathan Pokluda
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins
What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson***
Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.***
When God Becomes Real by Brian Johnson
Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly
The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby****
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson****
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates***
Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement by Justin Giboney****
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander*****
Quantum Glory by Phil Mason

*I cannot recommend this series highly enough, especially for readers interested in science fiction. When asked to describe what these books are about, I say that they tell the story of humanity making first contact with life elsewhere in the universe. But this description is not enough. These books have everything: love, philosophy, politics, science, poetry. I have not been this engrossed by a series of books in a long time, maybe ever.

**The first book I have ever read in its entirety in Portuguese!

***You may notice a theme in my book selections this year. Each of these books adds valuable context to the discussion. Stony the Road, in particular, disturbed me in important ways.

****These books are especially important for Christians to read. Please read and recommend these to church groups.

*****This one gets its own special category. I read it mostly in its entirety during election week. I didn’t realize how naive I was about police power and the prison industrial complex before I read this. In combination with Just Mercy, absolutely essential reading.

Now I’m working on my reading list for 2021. What were your favorite reads of 2020? Send me your recommendations!

Clutter

The most cluttered area of my living space is (usually) my closet. I’ve been living with my parents since I graduated about a year and a half ago, and I will be living with them for a few more months before I rent an apartment. My mom is the tidiest person I have ever met. Even down to the water spots in the sink. We always tease her about that.

I reorganized and cleaned out my closet this past weekend. It’s a task I only do every once in a while, when I realize that I have been hanging on to some old article of clothing that I was wearing in high school. In fact, this time around I threw away two pairs of extremely stretched-out gym shorts that I have owned since the 5th grade. I just turned twenty-six. My mom and I joke about those shorts, paint-splattered from a missions trip to Guatemala in eighth grade. They have traveled with me from Minnesota to college in Illinois to various trips around the world and back to Minnesota for grad school and beyond. This summer I tried to wear them again, and they were so stretched out that they would no longer stay on my hips. It was time to say goodbye.

Despite how I drag my feet leading up to one of these clutter-purging sessions, I really enjoy the feeling of getting everything organized and straightened out. It feels a little like that’s what the past year and a half of my life has been in a more emotional and spiritual sense. And perhaps I should take a more positive look at it, in spite of how difficult and tumultuous it has been at times.

I think of the de-cluttering process in three steps (in both the literal and the figurative senses):

1) Throw out

2) Move around

3) Bring in the new

Throwing out seems like it should mean throwing out people or situations, right? If I just get rid of this person, this job, this church, etc., everything will be fine. But I’ve found that this is not a successful strategy for me. Even if I find a way to remove [fill in the blank] from my life (which is necessary at times), there are residuals, memories, beliefs.

What I can do as I continue this journey is take stock of these bad beliefs and throw them out as often as I am able to find their hiding spots. Long-term, it’s beliefs that are so sticky and stubborn. No use hanging on to the ones keeping me from moving forward.

Moving around is prioritizing what really matters. I’m learning a lot about priorities in this full season of my life, always running from one place to the next. Where can I create space? How am I filling my space? What matters to me? A lot of things have been shaking and moving around since I graduated high school. My priorities have shifted and shifted again. On the verge of some major life changes, I’m spending my time figuring out where everything belongs.

And last, bringing in the new. Change is difficult for me sometimes. Taking a step forward into something I haven’t done before. It’s not that I dislike change or even fiercely resist it. It just takes time for me to realize that the time for a change has arrived, that the necessity for a change has overtaken everything else.

It’s an exciting time. A year ago, I balked at the idea of creating a new identity for myself, of making my own choices and forging a path forward, even though it would certainly involve learning something new. As I began to let go of my own shame, my own negative self-thinking and self-talk, I started to see the endless possibilities of a season like this one.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.