I’m the “she” Haley talks about in this post. Haley and I dream about a lot of things, but for all our dreaming, this girl is one of the most grounded friends I’ve ever had. She challenges me, pushes me, corrects me, laughs at me, and doesn’t let me ever, ever, ever hope in anything less than the gospel, straight up. She loves the word of God, delights in it like a small child, studies it with the fervor of a scholar, and rests in it with the confidence of a disciple. She writes here.

We talk of many things. Serious things. Funny things. Sad things. Joyful things. Empty things. Hope-filled things.

Some times when we talk we talk about house things. Not appliances or DIY projects for the living room or yard, but whole houses.

Sometimes it is the old house in New England with the wrap around porch, a porch swing in the front and two hammocks in the back. There are chickens and a vegetable garden and dogs. We live in this house, the two of us, no longer as young as we were when we first met. Her hair is still as crazy as it was, but there are streaks of silver mixed in with the auburn and chestnut, and mine is still as stick straight as ever, but amidst the gold there is now white. In the absence of families birthed of our own bodies we have chosen to create family together here. We wile away evenings warming hands with mugs of tea, and begin mornings with coffee on the back porch with the dogs at our feet. We sit sipping tea on an evening in May, and our eyes and smiles meet, because somehow this day has become real.

Sometimes it is the old house in New England with the wrap around porch, a swing in the font and a tree house in the back. There are chickens and a vegetable garden and dogs. The screen door flies open as her brood of curly haired children come spilling out and run down the wide front steps and collide with the toe headed brood just escaped from the station wagon parked in front of the house. She pushes open that same screen door with one hand, while her other holds his. She smiles at something he’s said as they come to a stop on the top porch step as the kids merge into one big mob halfway between car and porch. I wait, my hand in his on the other side of this little sea of life we’ve created, smiling over the tops of curly mops and toe heads. Our eyes and smiles meet, hers and mine, because somehow this day has become real.

We talk of these house shaped things and in them I see hope. The houses are not the hope, but each image speaks of hope. And if I’m honest each house contains false hope.

Because houses crumble, no matter how solid the foundation, when the foundation is anything less than the Gospel.

So we talk of many things. We talk of the fullness of life and the emptiness of life.

We talk about our house shaped hopes and the ways they both remind us of a God who knows us intimately and of how easy it is for the created things to become our hope instead of hoping in the One who created all.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
Psalm 20:7

This hope to live full and love big burns deep. Sometimes it seems uncontainable, and other times I wish it were something I could ignore or even stop. Because hope in the ache of the emptiness hurts.

And to see emptiness here, now is to misunderstand both that for which I hope and that which is here and now.

It is true that I hope for those house shaped things and all the porches, chickens, dogs, swings, and maybe even children and husbands that go with them.

But they are not what I hope in. They are not who I hope in. They are not who we hope in, nor are they the sustainer or fulfiller of that hope.

Hope takes the shape of the One who knows my heart and my head more intimately than I could ever hope to. Hope takes the shape of the God-Man whom death could not defeat. Hope takes the shape of the Comforter who is with me and whispers, “Hope, beloved, hope.”

The first thing I knew about Seth was that he was a poet and a father, a husband who loved his wife, who spoke like an elder in the gates about her. A man like that is trustworthy enough on those merits alone. Then he asked me to join his team of church folk over at Deeper Church where he is editor. It is rare to have a good editor, one who pastors and who picks not at grammar and structure and prose, but who sees each piece as a mere stone in the cathedral, a beam in the sanctuary, part of a whole. Seth is that kind of editor and that kind of friend.

Our driver’s name was not Kabede, but for the sake of giving you the sense of things, it will be his given name in the following. The English translation of Kabede is “getting heavy,” so it seems appropriate, and I must admit, when I discuss my time in Ethiopia, it tends to come across this way.

As a caveat, I mostly prefer to confine my discussions of Ethiopia to the internet real estate of others. I do this for two distinct reasons. First, I enjoy stirring the pot, although this enjoyment is typically confined to the pots sitting on my neighbors’ stoves. Secondly, writing in another forum allows me some notion (perhaps a feigned one) of plausible deniability, whereafter I can pretend as if I never penned these words, as if I never opened this can of nightcrawlers. I can either hide or not, depending upon how the weather hits me at the particular moment, and currently, I feel it’s cloudy with a chance of rainy season.

Plausible deniability is, of course, the playing field of the cowardly. But lest you think I am finished with the caveats of cowards, allow me another. The following account is fictitious. Not really. It is, actually, less of a fiction and more of piling up of various nonfictions. It is a synthetic work comprising the stories of various taxi drivers, in various blue cars, pointing out the various Chinesings of the Ethiopian landscape. This is the way it has to be on Lore’s real estate, because the discrete works would take days and days, and her real estate is no more mine than the Ethiopian real estate is the Chinese. And this synthesis of peoples, stories, and taxis must, by its very nature, be Kabede.

Things are getting heavy, see.

The roads leaving Addis Ababa were slick black, fresh tarred like those of some new suburban enclave in Fort Worth, except without all King Ranch trucks. Kabebe rolled his window down because the air on the road to Adama, the wind coming up from the Great Rift Valley, was dry and clean. Arm hanging out the window, he pointed down to the blacktop and yelled, “Chinese.”

“What?” I asked over the rip of the road wind.

“Chinese,” he responded, and then added, “they paved these roads!”

“Come again?” I responded.

Kabebe rolled up his window and reached down to his iPod. He pressed play and Johnny Cash sang “it burned, burned, burned, the ring of fire.” Kabede turned the volume knob to a mere background level and said in singsong tenor “the Chinese, they’ve built all these roads. See that?” He pointed across my chest and out the window. “That is a warehouse. Chinese built that, too. They do not allow Ethiopians in, so we are not sure what’s behind the walls.”

Kabede shrugged his shoulders as I examined the warehouse. There were two empty guard shacks and a high iron fence topped with barbed wire which surrounded the complex. The yard was pristine with no signs of life, though the facility itself was larger than the ones in my hometown that produce the various and sundry Whirlpool and Rheem appliances. We sat, each internally stoking various conspiracy theories. I considered whether the yard was the staging ground for some coming Armageddon, or whether, instead, it was merely a low rent widget plant. Perhaps it made Whirlpool and Rheem knockoffs.

“I hate the Chinese,” Kabede offered. Of course, this was an offensive notion to me inasmuch as I am an American and have always been taught that racism of any sort unacceptable. “Racism,” my sixth grade math teacher once said, “is the province of unenlightened redneckery.” The application of my grade-school lessons to Kabede, however, seemed dismissive and equally unenlightened, so I turned to him and asked, “Why, Kabede, do you hate the Chinese?”

“They have come here to fix Ethiopia,” he said, which was no explanation at all. I have found this is one of the crowning qualities of the people of Ethiopia. They lead you to the water, yes, but they never make you drink.

Kabede reached for a handful of roasted barley.

“Is it so wrong to come to fix Ethiopia?” I asked. “What do the Chinese ask in return?”

“Ahh,” he sighed. “They have come here to fix Ethiopia, and in return, we give them natural resources. We give them our minerals, our energy. We give them the stuff of our ground. They come here to fix Ethiopia. They give us roads that may last twenty years. We give them resources that make them rich. And the people of Adama? The people of the Awash river? They are still poor.”

Kabede chuckled.

“They come to fix Ethiopia, and they go to our tourist traps; they dance to our music and throw us coins. They bring their karaoke.” Now he was laughing full-bore. “I hate karaoke,” he said. “And I hate them. That is okay, right?”

I had not the heart to tell him that karaoke might actually be a Japanese term, mostly because I was afraid that the Japanese had likewise offended him and I could not stomach this much talk of other people groups. Instead, I said nothing and we drove closer toward Adama as Johnny sang about a boy named Sue.

“This is my favorite,” Kabede said. “An American gave me this cd. It is my favorite of all American music.”

I inquired as to the American, but Kabede said he did not want to talk about it. I pushed further, and he said only that the American came for an adoption. “They came to take their baby home to America,” he said. “He was a cute baby.”

“How do you feel about that?” I asked Kabede.

He smiled and said, “they took their child home. That is all I have to say about that. Actually, I suppose I have more to say. They took their child home, and they left me this cd.”

Kabede paused.

“What is it that you call Johnny Cash?” he asked.

“The man in black,” I said.

“Ah yes,” he said. “That is right, sir.”

And with that, we drove into the outskirts of Adama.

Today’s guest post is from Andrea Levendusky, one of my oldest and dearest friends. I told her yesterday I would never stop loving her and there are few people I think I can really, really say that to and mean it. This girl is a journey-walker with me and I love her for it. She blogs here. 

I’m obsessed with the trail of sugar ants that are streaming into my living room from under the baseboard. And by obsessed, I mean, neurotic. I mean: I close my eyes and I feel ants crawling on my eye lids, under my knees and down my back.

One little half-eaten lollipop forgotten and left under a chair has led us into this mayhem and epic battle of man vs. creature. Because I can even step on them and they don’t die. I mean, what kind of creature can withstand the power of a frightened, human foot?

CREATURES WITH THORAXES. (Gross.)

I fall asleep thinking about them. I wake up thinking about them. I started my plan of attack by researching organic methods to calmly rid my home of them. And a few aggravating days later, I find myself frantically grabbing RAID and the most chemically-damaging, possibly cancer-causing repellents and traps I can find. My living room is surrounded with small black traps and gooey Borax solution, luring the tiny creatures in.

Killing a colony of ants is no small feat. I can kill a few but the truth lies in the dark of what I can’t see. The source of their home. The queen who waits to be fed and nourished and the reinforcements are sent out hourly, and I pace the four corners of my living room to see if we’re seeing any progress.

If only I had just seen that half-eaten lollipop, I tell myself.

Last night, I laid awake in bed with my heart pounding in my chest. I felt it in my throat, in my temples, and down to my finger tips. Sometimes I forget how to breathe when anxiety sets in, so I closed my eyes and tried to settle my heart in silence.

We are in a season of change, my daughter and I. Moving, school changes, career changes, relationship changes, traveling, planning, events, church, community… and at night, when my heart is pounding, I try to find the root. I try to find the source. I want to name the one thing that has left me spinning and then problem solve to cure it.

Because somewhere in my mind, instead of taking everything to my Father in prayer, I tossed fear and worry under rugs and left half-eaten hopes and dreams to rot. And then the ants came. The army started in single file, then swarming, to feast on the unattended doors and cracked floorboards in my heart.

And swarm they do.

And crawl over my ever moment, they do.

Let me see your face,
let me hear your voice,
for your voice is sweet,
and your face is lovely.
Catch the foxes for us,
the little foxes
that spoil the vineyards,
for our vineyards are in blossom.
Song of Solomon 2:14-15

I lay awake and think of the foxes.

And the ants.

And all the things I let swarm and spoil the beauty of Gospel rest and trust within me.

The things that dig at the soil where I’ve laid my work and striving to rest.

The creatures that creep and crawl and steal and choke, and leave my heart pounding at midnight. It’s then, when I’m seeing shadows dance with streetlights, that I realize I’ve bought into the lie that diligence to preach the Gospel to myself doesn’t matter.

That I can make it a week, a day, an hour, a minute, without falling on my knees and begging for daily bread. Bread that doesn’t spoil with things that seek to destroy.

“If I covet any place on earth but the dust at the foot of the cross, than I know nothing of Calvary Love.” — Amy Carmichael