Memory Monday: When one adventure leads to a BIGGER one!

Exactly 20 years ago this week, I was working my first post-college job.  What was it?  Well, my degree is Political Science with an International Emphasis, so naturally I was an administrative assistant….in a broadcasting office.

What?

It was at the WORLD CUP OF 1994!!  People, I would have done any job to have gotten to work at the World Cup.  I was lucky to have an inside, well-paying job and still get to be around all the action.  (The photo above is the jacket I was given by my employer, EBU Sports.)  Of course, twenty years ago the only people I knew interested in the World Cup were international friends at Texas Christian University with a couple other Americans thrown in for variety.)  It was one of those friends who referred me to the office where I got the job.

The work was all day long, seven days a week.  I actually had to ask special permission to get off for the two games to which I had already bought tickets. (I saw South Korea vs Germany in group stage and then Brazil vs. The Netherlands in the quarterfinals.) No big deal.

I mean: BIG AMAZING DEAL!  INCREDIBLE!

I have not even gotten to the biggest part of this story, though.  As part of an office to which international broadcasters came by every day, I really got to know some of them well.  I would always talk to this couple from Colombia who told me all about their country and family.  We became friends and they asked if I would visit them.  I said I would love to. (Americans tend to deal with these invitations a bit casually compared with our foreign counterparts.)  A couple weeks more of this chatter and one day the wife shows up with a packing list.  For my visit. To Colombia.

I was a 22 year old young lady. I had just graduated from college. I did not mean for them to take my invitation acceptance so seriously, so…now.  What could I do?

I went to Colombia for 6 months and it changed my life.

Someday Saturday: LONDON!

 

Photo credit

No, that is not a typo.  I have never been to London.

What? How does someone manage to make it to 5 continents and consider herself a world-traveler without having been to London? I’m not sure and I realize that needs to be remedied as soon as possible.

Ok, technically…I have been to London.  Several times, in fact.  Those occasions are layovers through Heathrow on the way to much more exotic locations, but none of my layovers have been long enough to leave the airport, so I just cannot count them. I still have not seen the city I love.

City I love, you ask?  How could I so love a city I haven’t properly visited?  Let me tell you: I am a long-time Anglophile!

I was a little girl in the era of Princess Diana marrying Prince Charles.  I had her pictures all over my room when I was younger.  Then came Fergie and I was sure I was the missing part of a very fun Princess trio. So what did I do?  I wrote Prince Edward a letter asking him to marry.  I made my case as seriously as a 14 year old could.  I never did hear from him. Strange.

I woke up my young daughter at 4 a.m. so we could watch the royal wedding of her generation. I love the pomp and circumstance!

If you ask me my favorite book?  Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. (By the way, you can download the kindle version free from that link!)  I am sure I have read everything written by Agatha Christie at least 3 times.  What great English mysteries they are!  One of my favorites is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  Read it and thank me later.

I adore Jane Austen and Agatha Christie so much that Agatha Jane was (I’m not kidding about this) on my list of potential names for Petunia.  Mark would not go for it, so she does have a much prettier name. (Hint: It’s English.)

Afternoon tea?  English history? The Tower jewels? Changing of the Guard?  Oh, for crying out loud. I need to go to London.

Your turn!  If you’ve been or plan to go, what’s on your MUST SEE list.  Since my trip is still theoretical, I can include whatever I want.

 

Wanting to Help Others Well

So many people I know want to genuinely help others who, in some way, may be less privileged than themselves. Wanting to help others is a good thing!  Unfortunately, many people think it should be as simple as giving things or money to others, but it’s actually complicated to help well.

The desire to love and help others should come easily. The actions taken should be done carefully.

I have begun to read some articles from others who are taking on this subject and encouraging others to help thoughtfully, while others reply “It’s the thought that counts.” or “At least we’re doing something.”  Tragically, giving without thoughtful consideration of the following points can be very damaging, not merely unhelpful.

• Our instinct is to give material possessions. Here are a few problems with that:
  • The underprivileged actually describe their lack in non-material terms. They want a chance to improve themselves, a say in their future, and a sense of hope.
  • Sometimes there are material needs, but have we asked what they are before we give things?  There may be a real need. Let’s ask first.
  • Unfortunately, giving can endanger a recipient.  In cases where there is desperate poverty, people are willing to hurt others over a possession that many of us would consider a trifle.  I am sorry to say I know this personally from some of our overseas partners.
• We cast ourselves in the role of giver.
  • When we go as the deliverer of goods, we are automatically setting up a transactional relationship, in which someone is the giver (us) and the materially under-resourced is the receiver.  That one way relationship can be damaging to the self-worth of both sides.  Instead, let’s approach others with a desire to get to know them and learn from them.
  • I have learned deep life lessons on joy, perseverance, forgiveness and faith from people who have much less stuff than I.  This attitude creates a transformational relationship, in which both sides can learn, grow and benefit from the other.  And, yes, that may include giving materially at some point.  It is easier to do that well once you’ve gotten to know someone.
• What do we do when we want to help, but we aren’t in a place to build relationships?
  • You may be saying, “This sounds great, but I am not going to …. where I can get to know someone personally.”  That’s ok! Many people will not. I suggest you give to an organization that is about building healthy, two-way, transformational relationships with those they seek to serve.  For many of you, this could be your church.  Are they building relationships with those they are reaching in your community and around the world? Support those efforts.
  • Do you have a particular cause that makes your heart beat or keeps you up at night in anger over injustice?  Find a non-profit that deals in that area, then find out how they treat those they aim to serve. Once you’ve found a ministry or NGO that is dignity-giving to the people with whom they work, support them.  There are so many good organizations, but I’m going to share one because you can see from their stories how this attitude I write about is put into practice.  Meet Blood:Water Mission. I have followed their story and been a supporter for many years and am so proud of what they do.

Many of these concepts are based on invaluable lessons I learned from the book When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.  I highly recommend that anyone involved in compassion, who cares about the poor, who is involved in ministry, and especially anyone who travels for a short-term ministry trip, read this book.

I plan to keep writing–and keep learning–about this subject.  Please feel free to share thoughts and/or questions in the comments.  Loving others well is one of my favorite topics!

 

Memory Monday: Courageous

Sometimes it’s not about how far we’ve traveled, but what we had to overcome to get where we are.

When I think of courage, I think of Petunia.  While this is posted, she is wrapping up her first week ever in Africa and I’m sure has been both delighted and heartbroken in ways like she never has before. We realize in making this journey as a family, there is no going back. She has seen what she has seen and now knows what she knows.  May her tender heart, sharp mind and courageous spirit, all gifts from a God who created her perfectly, help guide her along with her loving and proud Mama and Daddy in whatever lies ahead.

Be a hummingbird!

photo credit

Headlines (and social media stories) can be so hard to read that it seems easier to look away from the reality they present.  Teen suicides. Drug abuse. Homeless families living in storage sheds. Babies with terminal illness. Kids being abused or neglected.  If you pick up the rock and look at the horribly creepy crawly things under it, it is normal just to want to slam the rock back down and walk away.

I know as much as anyone that the amount of need faced in our communities can be overwhelming. In our own part of town, a fairly well-to-do area compared to the national average, our compassion staff personally knows homeless families, hungry kids, teens aging out of foster care with nowhere to go and no one to show them the way, under-resourced people falling through the cracks of society, and people who have lost hope.

It can be overwhelming to know where to start.

There are some resources from our church and some others in the area. Some services are provided by government and non-profit organizations. But the need cannot be met without ordinary people getting involved.

Average families, who have to deal with their own mortgages, jobs, children, carpools, sports lessons, friendships and dreams, are the ones deciding they also have the capacity to carry just a bit of the burden of someone else who has too much to bear.  They inspire me! As we continue here together, I hope you will get to meet some of them…at least virtually.

To make a difference, you don’t have to change everything. Just do what you can.  As told by Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai, here is

The Story of the Hummingbird:

One day a terrible fire broke out in a forest – a huge woodlands was suddenly engulfed by a raging
wild fire. Frightened, all the animals fled their homes and ran out of the forest. As they came to the
edge of a stream they stopped to watch the fire and they were feeling very discouraged and
powerless. They were all bemoaning the destruction of their homes. Every one of them thought
there was nothing they could do about the fire, except for one little hummingbird.

This particular hummingbird decided it would do something. It swooped into the stream and picked
up a few drops of water and went into the forest and put them on the fire. Then it went back to the
stream and did it again, and it kept going back, again and again and again. All the other animals
watched in disbelief; some tried to discourage the hummingbird with comments like, “Don’t bother,
it is too much, you are too little, your wings will burn, your beak is too tiny, it’s only a drop, you
can’t put out this fire.”

And as the animals stood around disparaging the little bird’s efforts, the bird noticed how hopeless
and forlorn they looked. Then one of the animals shouted out and challenged the hummingbird in a
mocking voice, “What do you think you are doing?” And the hummingbird, without wasting time or
losing a beat, looked back and said, “I am doing what I can.”

If you decide you would like to be a hummingbird and carry your drop of water to a burning fire, there are many places you can start.  Let me briefly introduce two national organizations that we have begun to partner with which bring long-lasting transformations.

The first one is called Safe Families for Children.  Here is how they explain a bit about their service: “When crisis strikes, many of us rely on relatives and our church family for support. But for some parents, there isn’t a safety net. Often problems such as drug addiction, domestic abuse, incarceration, or illness can be debilitating, making it impossible for parents to care for their children…Since 2005, Safe Families for Children has offered sanctuary to thousands of children, minimizing the risk for abuse or neglect and giving parents the time and tools they need to help their families thrive. The ultimate goal is to strengthen and support parents so they can become Safe Families for their own children.”  You can help out with Safe Families by being a host family temporarily to children or by serving as a Family Friend who supports hosts.  If you have any interest at all, go check out their website!

The Open Table is the name of the other wonderful organization.  Their vision is “A movement of servants restoring people in poverty to our communities through relationship and the investment of our own vocational and life experiences and personal networks.”  Basically, it’s this: if you know how to function in life and society because you had anyone care for you along your journey and show you the way, now you can be a member of a Table and pay it forward through sharing of your advice, your network and, most importantly, your friendship.  Their tagline is: The Triumph of Relationship Over Poverty.  I love that!

Go fill your beaks, hummingbirds!  Whether you work with Safe Families for Children, The Open Table, or any local place, the important thing is to do what you can.

 

 

Memory Monday: Girlfriends in Africa

If everything has gone as planned, I will be hanging out on these same steps soon.  They are the front steps of a place that works God’s miracles here on earth: Serving His Children.  Here, Renee Bach, along with a medical and house staff, help treat malnourished children, while teaching their caregivers not only about proper nutrition, but also about a God who loves them.

I sure had fun with these compassionate, funny friends of mine while serving there together a few years ago with our church. What a memory!

“Yes, for vacation…”

That is an answer I find myself giving a lot these days when telling people that we are going to Uganda.  I don’t blame them. It’s kind of weird ’round these parts to go to East Africa for vacation.  The nurse giving Ainsley one of her shots was reading my paperwork back to me as if I’d filled it out incorrectly.

“You said here you’re going for vacation, but you mean mission trip, right?”  She is a travel nurse who gives vaccines all day long and we were strange even to her.

At the bank I requested newer, clean bills because the country we were going to, I explained, “…is very picky about bills they will exchange.” She was curious where, so I told her. She thought a minute and asked, “Are you going for {pause while she thought of a possible reason someone would go} business?”

But when you’re going with your family to have fun and visit friends, without a set agenda…that’s a vacation, right?

I will grant that there will be a ministry visit or two involved. Because that’s where our friends are.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, we will be spending most of our time with my friend Renee, the founder and international director of Serving His Children, an organization dedicated to “breaking the cycle of malnutrition one life at a time.”

Here is Renee and her adorable daughter the first time I met her. I was leading a team from our church.

Here I am on that same visit with my very good friend Brenda and a precious baby whose story is forever etched on my heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Malnutrition sometimes looks very different than we would expect in Uganda.  There are the babies that just don’t get enough food at all and have super skinny limbs and a distended belly, but there are other babies who just do not get the right types of food and it takes longer to tell that they are sick.  Recently a wonderfully talented friend of Renee’s spent a good time at Serving His Children and was able to capture this story of Blessing.  I hope it blesses you and helps you see the dear people with whom we’re going to get to spend some time.

 

 

So, yes, maybe I should acknowledge this isn’t vacation like, “Hey, kids, we’re going to Disneyworld!”  (For the record, I love Disneyworld!)  I know it will be different.  I know it will shake up Petunia’s world.  I know we will learn things as adults as we look at this new world through our daughter’s eyes.  I know our family will grow closer over shared heartbreak, adventure and gratitude.

That’s why I want to go.

I think it’s time to share!

For a year now this blog has lived in my head and even on the internet, but it’s been a little lonely.  I’ve spent hours writing and many more hours, actually, thinking of what all I would want to write, if I ever claimed a little virtual space of the universe again.

I do like to keep a record for myself, but I knew if I started this blog, I hoped there would be some value to others, too.  I figured the only way I could do that was to write about what I know, which were the very topics I wanted to ponder anyway.  Isn’t that lucky?

So here you’ll find all sorts of posts, but the topics will center around family, travel and compassion.  Wherever any of those intersect is my especially happy place!

For travel, there will be some trip reports from vacations far and near with tips that may be helpful to others, inspirational pictures and locations that may go on our wishlists, general travel topics and value tactics from time to time and a feature I call Memory Monday, which is just a snapshot of one particular moment or a picture that inspires me.

 

 

For compassion, I will strive to share what I have learned these last several years, which has been so much about what it means to love well. My teachers have been both others wiser than me and that grandest-teacher-of-all — the making of and learning from mistakes. Here’s a big hint that I hope won’t spoil you on all future reading: Relationship is the key to everything.

For family, well…those posts are about my heart.  I love doing life with my family and want to encourage others to combine travel, family and compassion wherever possible.  If there is anything about one of these topics you’d like to learn more about, please let me know. I am looking forward to community here at Have Heart Will Travel!

Setting out to Sea

In a few days, we’ll be leaving on a jet plane.  I will get to return to the beautiful pearl of Africa for an unbelievable (to me) seventh time and Mark will be going for his third.  However, this time we’re taking along someone who will be going for her first visit. (Of how many, I wonder?)  You guessed it… Petunia is going to Uganda with us!

She’s always been an explorer and adventurer at heart.

She has wanted to go for a long time, enduring many departures and homecomings of her parents while waiting her turn.  I have known for a long time I’ve wanted to take her, but we were waiting for her to reach a certain age before we brought her along.

For one thing, we know we are going to be around some difficult things on this trip and we wanted her to be old enough to begin to understand the complexity of, for example, spending time visiting a clinic that serves severely malnourished babies where death is, unfortunately, a possibility.  Gratefully, most of the mamas or caregivers who do come to Serving His Children, leave with much fatter, much healthier babies and more knowledge about how to care for them.  It has blessed my life to cross paths with that organization and I am thrilled that I will have days to spend being with them, attempting to help if I can, but mostly learn from and encourage my friend Renee who founded it.

Another reason we waited is the several vaccines that Petunia had to take in order to go safely on the trip.  She has been blessed with pretty amazing health and we hated the thought of filling her small, young body with lots of medicines at once.  Just as we suspected, despite taking the shots and pills like a champ, she did suffer some fever and ill-feeling.

Of course, there are other concerns, too. Will she drink the water and get sick? Will we be able to keep her safe? How will she endure the 16 hour flight?

These concerns are valid and we could have decided to let them keep us at home.

But this is where our family philosophy meets the fork in the road and makes a definite, intentional choice.  What we want for Petunia are the same things we want for ourselves: to be brave, to make friends all over the world, to constantly challenge herself to learn new things and to have the confidence to march to the beat of her own drum, which we pray will always be kept in tune to the Spirit’s leading.

If those are the aspirations we really hold for all of us, and they’re not merely words that look good doodled in a dream book, then our decisions are going to sometimes be difficult, costly, and scary to us and dramatic, odd and maybe even dumb to others.

If you are wrestling with such a decision and wondering if it’s safe enough or smart enough to make, try this little trick that I sometimes use: imagine yourself in your real life sometime in the future…the bigger the decision, the farther in the future I go. Fairly significant?  Try 5 years from now. Picture you and your family at that stage. Are you there? Ok. Looking back, what decision will the future you wished the current you would have made?

Sometimes there’s a reason to play it safe, but remember…

“A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.”

–William Shedd

Memory Monday: Whale Watching in Maine

Tip: If you’re going out in the ocean, bring lots of layers. You will have to be able to be dressed for a sunny summer day and frigid ocean temps–all in the span of a couple hours!

 Whale watching in Maine is a fascinating experience!  I feel extremely blessed to say that I have gotten to partake in all sorts of neat adventures and activities in my lifetime, but whale watching is in the top few on a short list!

We rode on the Atlanticat, a state-of-the-art catamaran, according to the company who operates it.  This was a much appreciated gift of an outing, from and with Nana and Gramps Fuzz, Petunia’s grandparents, who are part-time residents in Maine. (Yes, that means more posts will be about Maine in the future! It’s a lovely place!)

 

Pretty sure he’s waving to us!