The Wood Between the Worlds

In C. S. Lewis' book "The Magician's Nephew" he describes how Narnia first came to be, and who the first people from our world were to see it.  But before the main characters Diggory and Polly get there, they travel to an in-between place, which Lewis called 'The Wood Between the Worlds.'  In that place, both children find themselves drowsy and forgetful.  They lose all sense of who they are, where they came from, and what they were doing.  They can't even recall where they were going, and have trouble figuring out how to get there.

I can relate.  How about you?

One of the things I love so much about those books is how little scenes like the one I described help me make sense of my own life.  Recently, my women's small group has been looking at The Chronicles of Narnia and finding how they tie into and reflect stories and truths found in scripture.*  Naturally, I've been enjoying it.

It's always been surprisingly easy for me to find a story to illustrate and explain things in my own life, though I don't always make use of it.  Tonight, however, I was realizing how I've been stuck in the WBW.

I don't know what it is, but I find myself falling into old habits that get me nowhere, when I have things to do that will get me to Ireland.  I can't exactly blame my job, because it's a small part of my day.  I can't even blame TV or my cycle of staying up too late and sleeping in, because those are symptoms, not the cause.  I feel like I'm in a drowsy, lazy fog like the one Diggory and Polly encountered.  And it's been keeping me from remembering my urgent task of preparing to go to Ireland.

To be fair, I do want to balance out working toward the future with living in the moment, but that's not really what I've been doing.  I've been stalling.  Dragging my feet.  And I'm not even entirely sure why.  Maybe I'm a little scared and daunted by the tasks ahead, like the large amount of support I need to raise.  Maybe it seems too far away (it's not).  Maybe I've just let myself get distracted.

But now that I've remembered who I am, where I'm going, and what I need to be doing, maybe I'll find my way out of the WBW quickly.  I could really use prayer to help me work faithfully at the tasks I've been given....One of the other Narnian tidbits that's given me a visual image came from our study: In "The Horse and His Boy," Shasta meets Aslan at the end and discovers that He was the same lion who had been chasing/helping him and his companions throughout their journey.  Being chased by a lion gave the four friends quite a fright, but it also motivated them to RUN and get to their destination just when they were growing weary.  Aslan called it "strength through fear" and I suppose I'd rather have it that way than "weakness from fear," which is more like what I've been experiencing.

So there you have it: Ireland is like my Narnia (interesting, because Lewis was born in Ireland) and I have obstacles to overcome with "Aslan's" help.  And yours!--Thanks for reading, and for your prayers.

*--By this I don't mean that I believe that everything Lewis wrote in CoN was an allegorical representation of someone or something in scripture.  The fact that the books reflect some of those truths and stories is just good story telling.  All great stories borrow their power from the One True Story.

Third Culture Kid

By now many of my few but faithful readers will likely have heard the news that I have been accepted as a missionary to Ireland with World Harvest Mission.  This was the result of not only a long application process and years of interest, but a recent trip to Philadelphia for a conference at WHM headquarters called "A&O" week.

A&O stands for "Assessment and Orientation."  The first half of the week. we were interviewed, and after we were accepted, the rest of the week was spent in orientation.  The whole process was really good in many ways; I feel like I've found a really good organization.  There is a lot that i could talk about (and probably will eventually), but there was one session in particular that struck me.

Though we went through five interviews, including one which covered the results of our psych and personality profile tests, most of what I talked about in those times were things I already knew about myself.  In one interview, however, after recounting all the places I'd lived in chronological order, someone remarked, "You're really kind of a Third Culture Kid, aren't you?" I had no idea what he meant; I'd never heard the term before that I could recall.

So when we had a session on Third Culture Kids (or TCKs) our last day, I was totally caught off guard.  Though the term TCK has come to replace MKs in many circles, and generally refers to kids who have grown up in another country, it's really about cultures.  Psychology Wiki lists the definition as follows: Third Culture Kids (abbreviated TCKs or 3CKs or Global Nomad) "refers to someone who [as a child] has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture."

Okay, you're saying to yourself, interesting, but what does that even mean?

Since I grew up in the many different cultures that make up the US, moving every few years and never really settling down, there are a lot of ways in which I myself am an adult TCK (ATCK).  I just didn't know it until now.  I knew that moving around all that time had shaped me in a lot of ways, but I didn't know there was this whole group of people out there who feel into the same category and had the same struggles.  When our facilitator listed the strengths and weaknesses that many TCKs have, I felt a little like I'd just discovered I had a medical syndrome I didn't know existed.

One site I went to looking for links and info today suggested that I'm actually either a "Domestic" TCK or a Cross Cultural Kid (CCK).  Either way, the point is, my many uprooting and cultural experiences had an effect on me.  It shaped me into who I am today: a woman who cares about many cultures and places, but can't decide where to say she is "from." Here are some other characteristics:

• Make great culture bridges. They have multiple frames of reference.
  
  
• Excellent observers of other people. They can be very observant and sensitive.
  
  
• Establish relationships quickly. They cut through many of the initial levels of diffidence when forming relationships.
  
  
• Open-minded and less prejudiced.
  
  
• Adapt quickly to unfamiliar countries and people, culturally astute, cross-culturally enriched.
  
  
• More welcoming of newcomers into a community.
  
  
• Educational achievers - a high percentage will attend university and obtain advanced degrees.
  
  
• Live more in the present and for the moment. (Pollock, 1999)

And here are some challenges:

1. Belonging everywhere and nowhere. The elusive concept of "Where is home?"
   
   
2. Difficulty with commitment to people, places, schools, or school systems as these constantly change.
   
   
3. Uncertain cultural identity.
   
   
4. Problems with decision-making.
   
   
5. Loss of relationships, community, school is a loss of their world.
   
   
6. Feeling different from others, difficult in forming peer relationships; occurs more often at university level or when returning to "passport" country, where they are misunderstood by their peers.
   
   
7. Rootlessness and restlessness. The frequent need to change countries and homes.
   
   
8. Feeling "Out of Control" and Powerless. A feeling that they have no control over events and that these are often taken out of their hands anyway by the inevitability of the move.
   
   
9. A crisis of identity - "Who am I?"

So, there are upsides and downsides to this kind of life, but in the end, I guess it's just one more thing that helped shape me into the kind of person who pursues overseas missions!  I may not be able to say where I'm from, or be any good a long range planning to know where I'll end up, but I know where I'll be by the end of next year: Ireland.

And that's enough for me right now.

...And it Vexes Me So....

Okay.  So.  I realize I touched on this topic on my blog a few weeks back (and I've written on it before), but I think I need to revisit the subject.  I hate to beat a dead horse, but sometimes I get going on a topic and I just can't quit.  Apparently, according to an inventory I took tonight, it's partly because of my secondary spiritual gift of exhortation.


So, here is what I would like to exhort tonight: Singleness.

I have nothing against marriage.  I believe it's a sacred institution, created and blessed by God.  I am a total hopeless romantic.  I'm a sap.  I believe we were all created to live in relationship and community with each other, and marriage is a vital part of that.
HOWEVER.

However, I am getting frustrated with certain attitudes in the church about marriage.  Maybe it's because I'm a bit more of a cynic than I was in my teens and twenties.  Or maybe I'm just more realistic.  Whatever the case, I'm a little fed up with pastors and authors trying to push the idea of marriage on me as though I'm somehow lacking and deficient without it.  

Did you know, for example, that there are whole books that have been written on the subject of how to land a guy, within the context of the church?  Since when did we start taking our cues from Cosmo and Glamour, anyway?  Call me old-fashioned, but while I'm not exactly sitting around waiting for Prince Charming to ride up on his horse, I'm not really interested in going out and trying to lasso him, either. 

I don't think there's anything wrong with affriming the blessings of marriage and acknowledging that most of us (especially women?) want it.  But there's also nothing unbiblical about realizing practically, that all of us may not get it (at least, not as soon as we would like to), and learning how to cope with that.  Even rejoice in it!  There's this weird notion that's been floating around the last half-decade or so that to be single indicates a lack of spiritual development, that it's somehow laziness on our parts.  While certainly examples could be made, I don't think it's fair to say that's the standard.

And quite frankly, I think there's enough pressure on women outside the church--all the negative messages surrounding beauty and self-worth...why must we in the church add to it, when we all know (at least in theory) that we are supposed to find our fulfillment and worth in God?  All the emphasis seems to be unbalanced and a trifle unbiblical, too, since we are given examples of both singles and couples equally being vital to the Kingdom!

I know I touched on this issue recently when I talked about my biological clock.  Let me be clear and honest: Yes, I'd like to be married someday.  No, I'm not sitting around feeling sorry for myself in the meantime.  Please don't feel sorry for me or give me advice on how to wait.  I know how to wait.  I'm learning to live with the reality that I might never be married.  If I do, it will certainly be much later in life than I ever expected--but that's part of the problem, isn't it?  We sort of expect these things to just happen, and when they don't, we wonder what we did wrong. 

I'm not going to apologize for being single, or outspoken, or female.  I come from a generation of women who grew up with Princess Leia and Wonder Woman as their icons & role models.  My idea about femininity may have been shaped in part by such cultural icons, but it was also informed by the church.  And recently, I've begun to rethink some of my earlier-held assumptions about Godly Femininity.  That's a topic for another post another time, but the issues are related.  I'm not a man-hater or anything like that.  I'm just tired of feeling guilty for (and limited by) being a single woman. 

I made the choice a long time ago to trust God with my future, whatever it entailed.  Sometimes I feel a little adrift and have no idea where my life is headed.  Actually, that happens a lot.  But guess what?  Despite our cultural standards suggesting otherwise, that's pretty typical for a life of faith.  I'm not perfect, and I have to work at being okay with not knowing what's coming next.  I have to work at patience and trust and contentment.  So I get pretty pissed when I read stuff that undermines my hard work and makes me doubt myself and my path.

If you have a single friend or relative, do them a favor and be kind.  Don't give them advice on how to find a spouse or point out their flaws as an explanation of why they're single.  Instead, encourage them to seek God first, and His kingdom.  Because single or married, all the other stuff that comes along with life can really get in the way of that. 

PS: There are other books that actually offer good advice & encouragement in this area.  One is "Now and Not Yet" by Jennifer Marshall.  I did see a couple others on Amazon that sounded promising, but I haven't read so I can't vouch for them.  As Brianne pointed out, there's always Lauren Winner's "Real Sex," too.  Know of any other good resources?  Feel free to share!