I started writing this post waaaay back in autumn. Once I got started on the subject, it got somewhat out of hand and ended up too long. But I've chopped it up a bit, and this is about how far I got with the theme. My emotional status (and the weather!) has improved since, but this is a snapshot of where my thoughts had reached.
It has been dreary and raining almost non-stop for weeks now… welcome to England. Also, I was sick for close to 3 weeks, first with a bladder infection and then with a cold that turned into bronchitis. I don't recall being sick this often or this long for many years. Plus, our somewhat archaic heating system decided to give up the ghost in the middle of last week and just got repaired yesterday-- the house, being old and damp anyway, still has a chill to it.
One of the results of all this has been that I have been cooped up inside our small, rather dim "bijou cottage" (as a visitor put it-- meaning "dinky") rather a lot. Often cold. And physically miserable. Cooking and baking, which are my default cheer-Holly-up strategies, were not an appealing option because, being ill, I couldn't taste much anyway. I have nothing meaningful demanding my attention; at the moment, there is no way in which my life makes a significant difference (to anyone but A). I ran out of piddling household projects and library books to read, I don't yet have the emotional stamina to plunge back into deep and meaningful books, solitaire and Bookworm grew stale, and I realized something else:
I am bored.
I lived 30 years in a country to which I went at 25 with fire in my bones and a purpose in my heart. There was always a sense of responsibility, of calling, about living there. Though much of my time was spent doing the normal business of living --raising two children, running the household, shopping, cooking and cleaning-- that was not my primary purpose for being there. Indeed all those things would have been more conveniently, and cheaply, done in my country of origin. I stayed because I had made a commitment to make a difference in Austria, no matter how small a difference it might be. Only time and posterity will tell if that did, in fact, occur. Later, that fire inside spread to include several other nations. But here?
I am (or at least I feel) purposeless.
I'm aware, too, that though an ambivert, I'm normally a relatively sociable creature. Though I need my solitude, relationships are a large part of what feed me and bring me life, and the fact is I've only been here (at the time I began writing this) a bit over three months. In Austria (besides my family) there were many people I had known for 20 years or longer, so there were always social options; but here, there simply hasn't been a lot of opportunity to build relationship with anybody yet. While Elliott, the cat we acquired recently, was company for me the first weeks, as soon as we started letting him go outside, now he disappears for many hours at a stretch. This means my only local real friend is A, who has a job to do. Result:
I am lonely.
Now, I have been through major cultural change a few times now, and I do know the ropes; in fact, I have even taught on them in missions schools. I understand the dynamics of culture shock and adjustment, the emotions that one experiences, the tools one can make use of to minimize its effects. I know it's not helpful to wallow in one's feelings, though they may be uppermost in one's mind. But it's not wallowing in them to take them out and identify them; in fact, I find it helpful to do this periodically because otherwise, unnamed emotion can clog up the brain and muddy perspective. So, pushing what I know aside, what does this stage of my journey feel like?
It feels dead. It feels as if my life is over. And in some ways, it is. That life is past.
I've had a major watershed similar to this before. By 1990, P and I had been full-time missionaries for 7 years, married for 12. We had seen good fruit but also some very dry times. By spring of that year, I was in what I now recognize as at least a mild form of clinical depression, though I had no words for it then. Oh, I was functional: as mother of 2 small children, wife to P, active in the Austrian church we had helped plant in 1983. But inside, I was dead, or at least dying. Nothing I had been taught was helping me do more than cope and maintain, and so much of what I'd been taught simply wasn't enough to deal well with real-life situations in our budding church, or even the unpleasant surprises that had surfaced in my own marriage. As "missionaries on the foreign field", we were at the top of the status rat heap as far as our own church circles went; but personally, I was finding it singularly unsatisfactory.
I'd discovered John Wimber's books the previous autumn and longed for the Kingdom I'd read of. After all, I had fallen in love with Jesus during the Jesus People movement, which had a lot more life in it than I now had. And one spring day it came to a head out in the garden, when I told God: "If this is as good as it gets, if this is all I can expect, if I can't live what these people in this book get to live, then I don't want to do this any more." And I realized, as I said "do this", that I didn't just mean ministry, being a missionary. I meant I didn't want to be here on earth, didn't want to live. There didn't really seem any point to it…
Now, I wasn't planning to actually DO anything about it myself, but I did ask God if it wouldn't be too much trouble to arrange a brief and painless accident. I knew he would take care of my kids and husband, whom I did love, but uppermost in my heart was that I simply couldn't do this any more, maybe even for years and years and years. And I saw no way out.
Oddly enough, that prayer acted as a sort of catalyst. Nothing at all had changed in my outward situation, but something started changing within me: a sense of hope, of expectation (for what, I had no clue) began to grow. It grew throughout the following summer, along with my personal hunger to experience firsthand more of what God was doing on the earth.
That November, P and I had a major and unexpected encounter with Holy Spirit and the power of the risen Christ which resulted in our physical healing (my spinal curvature and P's severe food allergies) and in a new level of interaction and experience of Holy Spirit in our daily lives. Within half a year, this experience (and our refusal to deny or renounce it) had resulted in our losing everything we had built up to that time: our reputation, our ministry, our mission sending board's commendation, the church we had helped plant, almost all our friends, and last but not least, our livelihood.
Well, being the great spiritual giant I am, I complained. I bitched and moaned about how unfair it all was, and how we were just being true to what God, after all, had given us, and why should we suffer like this for it, and what about our kids, what would we live on now… And mid-moan, Dad interrupted me:
"Remember that life you said you didn't want any more? The one you gave to me and asked me to take?"
Nod yes.
"Well, look at your life now. You don't have that old life any more, do you? I took it, just like you asked me to."
Oh.
"...So what are you complaining about?"
His voice was kindly and a bit amused, not at all condemning. But it shifted my perspective completely. (I often find God takes our prayers much more seriously than we do!) Dad was so right; the life I didn't want to live had been taken from me, and I had up to that point mostly focused on the many losses as a result. But now, all sorts of possibilities as well were open to me. None had, it's true, yet materialized at that point; but I was no longer trapped in the closed circle of my previous context, and never needed to be so again.
In a way, I'm at a similar point now. Even since the recent life changes, many words of life have been spoken over me and I/we have received many confirmations that God has something good in store for me, and for A & me as a couple. That is, something not only good for me/us personally (as our marriage and our release from the CAWKI mentality are), but something that will actually benefit the world around me/us. That's what I wanted in 1990, and it's what I want now: his Kingdom to come, his will to be done here on earth as it is in heaven, and I want to be involved in that. I just don't yet have a clue as to how, here, now, at this point in my journey, that will be lived out.
So, being aware of all this, I asked God to help me identify the season I am in; and I received the word "fallow". This at first didn't seem very encouraging. But then I started remembering (and then did a little researching) what that word actually means.
FALLOW -noun: (of farmland) ploughed and harrowed but left for a period without being sown, in order to restore its fertility or to avoid surplus production
(of a period of time) characterized by inaction; unproductive: long fallow periods when nothing seems to happen
(transitive verb) to plow, harrow, and break up (land) without seeding to destroy weeds and conserve soil moisture
Cultivated fields are, of course, regularly turned over and harrowed in order to prepare them for planting the next season's crop. An intentionally fallow field is left unsown, though, for several reasons:
1. in order to restore its fertility;
2. to avoid surplus production;
3. to destroy weeds;
4. to conserve soil moisture.
Well! I could certainly identify with the ploughed and harrowed bit. Starting in 2005, when my father shot himself, varying life circumstances had grown increasingly harrowing. I felt I never had time to recover from one blow before the next one fell. Eventually these circumstances resulted in the loss of my marriage, my own church, my wider ministry, my livelihood and what was left of my inheritance. It did feel rather a lot, at times, like being rolled over by a heavy tractor and gouged deeply enough that all the ugly worms and rocks under the surface were turned up for all the world to see.
This current period of time feels precisely like the second sentence: characterized by inaction, unproductive, nothing seems to happen.
As for the verb meaning, A has long referred to this season as our time for "de-sucking" before God can healthily inflict us upon the world again. He coined this word as we both realized how much our attitudes, in many ways, really suck; so what we need, obviously, is to be de-sucked! In words that fit my concept, we need the weeds destroyed, and new stuff planted in our hearts.
And I feel quite dry inside. Not dead; more numb, or in hibernation. Perhaps I can take the "wettest winter on record" the year we moved here as a sign that this will not remain the case..?
Many more thoughts boomeranged off of this, which I may get around to developing in another post. But right now, even though things are not as bleak as they were last autumn, I am still, for the most part, lying fallow. My challenge in this season is to trust the Farmer that he knows precisely when to re-plant me, and with which crops. It's his harvest, after all; he gets to decide.
I get to rest.
Happy Springtime, everybody.
