Li Hai

I was just backing into a parking space.  I do it all the time.  Leslie said, "Wow, you're...Li Hai!" We'd been doing it all weekend- after six and a half years living in our respective countries, we've forgotten how to speak real English.  I'd make sentences with Indonesian words in them, and she'd accidentally mix the languages from her country.  Li hai means, 'a force to be reckoned with.'  It kind of made my day.  From that moment this post has been rolling around in my mind, trying to find its way out.

We spent three days talking.  We met seven years ago and spent six weeks at training together.  Haven't seen each other since! So we had a lot to catch up on.  We did some fun stuff together, but my favorite was just talking about life and listening to her stories and thoughts on her life in Asia.  After I dropped her off at her conference I thought of a hundred other questions that I wish I'd have asked.  I loved that she asked about real things, hard things, stuff that no one else asks about. Here's what I loved most-  I felt completely accepted when we were talking.  This is rare for me, because I'm an insecure freak and I'm SURE everyone in the whole world is judging me and I'm always coming up short.  Just sure of it! But not this weekend. Even though my hair was frizzier than usual, and I had two zits, and I got lost everywhere we went, and my youngest kids were acting just barely better than wild monkeys. 

As we talked I realized we've both been through so much.  Things you don't share on Facebook or your blog because you just don't flippantly write those kinds of things. Things you don't even tell your family because they'll worry that you're miserable or unsafe or on the verge of a mental breakdown.  And good things that you can't share because of security concerns for new believers.   As I reflected on my personal experiences and Leslie's stories about hers, it occurred to me, "Dang, we're li hai! We do hard things and we've lived to tell about it!"

But not in our own strength.  In my own strength I'd be finished.  Flown the coop. I'd be out like a fat kid in dodgeball.  Once, in a four month period where I was pretty much crazy, I even prayed for a disease that would let us leave the field without being branded with the "quitter" label. A curable but completely-untreatable-in Asia-disease.  Sounded like a great plan. Praise the Lord he didn't take that advice!

If there's anything I've learned in the last six and a half years, it's dependence on God. I'm still learning it. I CAN do hard things, but never alone.  In Him, I'm li hai. I'm a dang force to be reckoned with! WE are a force to be reckoned with!

God has been so faithful to us, in big and small ways.  In times when we thought we were caught in a storm we were never meant to be in, He'd steered us into it, because we needed it.  We needed to learn that He would get us through it.  In moments of complete panic, He was there with an audible reminder to trust him.  When I ugly-face cried in the grocery store the first week here because I didn't know how to cook ANY of the food they were selling, He had planned ahead and given me a family that likes to eat cereal for dinner. In the midst of these and many other challenges, He's been there, even though a lot of times I doubted it. 

So thanks, Leslie, for coming and asking hard questions and encouraging me to think deeply about how far we've come.  Thanks for the vocabulary lesson and the reminder that I'm in a covenant relationship with God who meets my needs and has my back.  And thanks for the show in the outlet store! Ha!