And the third is from Merriam-Webster: their Word-of-the-Day. They give me the word itself in the subject line, but I have to open the email to find out what it means. Every day it’s a small contest for me: Do I know this word, or must I read the email to find out? It’s a win-win.

Recent words I have already known: “abide,” “sensibility,” “delegate,” “grandiose.” Recent words I haven’t: “thimblerig,” “vanward,” “manticore,” “yegg,” and “hachure.”

Thursday’s word was “veld,” and I knew it instantly, but opened the email anyway because the word made me happy.

And then I saw I was wrong. I do know the word “veld,” but I had confused it with something else.

***

All of this is done from my phone, usually standing at the kitchen counter where I have left it overnight. These three emails, as I have said, are always in my inbox on weekdays, but invariably there are others, and more accumulate over the course of the day.

I typically read these three and the most pressing others immediately, but the rest have the tendency to languish, as I hate dealing with email on my phone.

Instead, I use it for other things, like texting and browsing Instagram, looking up recipes, listening to sermons and podcasts, getting directions, looking at Facebook, and, occasionally, talking with people.

I am busy with my phone a lot.

***

My error with “veld” was the vowel. I read it and thought it was “vald,” which is German for forest–and that should have made me realize my error immediately, because Merriam-Webster’s words of the day are English words, and the English word for “forest” is, well, “forest.”

But it’s indicative of my problem with words that I immediately thought it was “vald,” because words are such delightful and heady things for me. I think my brain stands ready on the instant to be taken with a word, and this is what happened on Thursday morning as I (this time) sat in the sunshine on our front steps eating my granola and checking my email. I think, subconsciously, I wanted the word to be “vald.”

***

Recently a friend told me about an article she’d read about phone addiction. Apparently, people go to therapy for phone addiction. They go to rehab.

I found this unsettling. And then understandable. After all, we have been warned. I am sure you’ve noticed it yourself, and then there are articles galore (this recent one on rehab among them) about our walking, heads bent to our phones; our waiting, heads bent to our phones; our eating in restaurants with–you know–heads bent to our phones.

There is much of excellent value on the phone, right? Recipes and news updates are only some of the many worthwhile resources at our fingertips. And in many ways, social media are among the best of these. When seeing a friend at the gym, I love being able to ask about her recent trip to the beach–something I enjoyed tangentially through her posts to Instagram. I love my friends’ adorable dog (or cat) pictures, their children’s grins or artwork, even a shot of that amazing meal they ate last night.

But a ten-second plunge into the world of Instagram (or Twitter or Facebook) can find me surfacing twenty minutes later, completely unaware I’d been under for so long–and completely unaware, during that plunge, of the world immediately around me.

***

I think I wanted the Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day to be “vald” because I’ve known it first-hand. For three breath-taking months before we had children, Bill and I lived in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. Our village was perched on the side of some foothills: smooth, mounding land maintained by grazing cows.

Above these pastures, between our village and the snow-covered mountains in the distance, stood the “vald.” Occasionally we would go walking here, following paths through the pastureland and then into the woods.

Me and my beloved Swiss neighbor and friend Susanne, heading into the vald.

The air is different inside. Snow-covered or roofed and shot through with green, the trees stand very tall and close together. One has a sense of the forest’s vastness: any direction looks very much like another, and its ceiling– the green boughs of trees– is both vaulting and enclosed. I found it beautiful for its silence, for the impression of being hidden and secret. One can have the sense of being submerged there. One can plunge into it, if you will.

Several fairy tales take place in the vald, remember? Children get lost in it. It is beautiful and also, often, very dark.

***

I decided to put a new app on my phone to help me track how much I use it. The app, interestingly, is called “Space,” and it started with a brief questionnaire to determine what kind of phone-user I am (fighting boredom? getting side-tracked? plumbing rabbit-holes?) and then offered me a time limit.

I think it’s first suggestion was about two hours. It offered me two+ hours and 50 unlocks daily–both of which seemed too much to me. So I dialed it down. My goal is an hour max on the phone and unlocking it, over the course of the day, no more than 30 times.

Now the app will occasionally and briefly let me know how long I’ve been on it and how many times I’ve unlocked it already in a day. This is annoying when I’ve unlocked it 20 times because of an extended family-text conversation (“I had to,” I want to tell it). And it’s frustrating that minutes accumulate both during a 40-minute conversation with my parents and a ten-minute indulgence on Facebook. But it’s good to know when I’m just unlocking it to peruse Instagram–which I know I could conceivably and thoughtlessly do for a Long Time.

***

Thursday’s Merriam-Webster Word-of-the-Day was “veld,” which is an English word but which comes from Afrikaans, which comes from Dutch, which is related to German (so–maybe–my confusion?). And, interestingly, it also names a type of landscape–but it is one that is, perhaps, the direct opposite of a “vald.”

The veld is open grassland with the occasional shrub or tree, and it pertains specifically to such landscapes as found in southern Africa. But it may also be used freely of similar landscapes in other parts of Africa. I have found, for example, that it can and has been used of Kenya. The veld is a grassland, a prairie.  A savannah, if you will.

***

I would like to think that using my phone connects me with others. And it does (see the aforementioned notes about friends’ photos on Instagram– and there are those occasional and delightful Facebook conversations that can include input from multiple circles of my life).

But there is a dark interior world, I find, when it comes to my phone use. One that, on the surface, looks like it’s about other people and connecting with them, but that ultimately isn’t. What is it, I wonder, about this near-interaction that gets me turned in on myself, that has me thinking about me in comparison with others, that finds me (sometimes) less genuinely loving and more critical than I otherwise might be–than I want to be?

I would like to think that my phone is a gateway to life outside myself. Often it is. And often enough, it’s the opposite.

***

Once, when our children were ten, eight, and six, we spent some time in the Kenyan veld. It was the tail-end of a trip to Nairobi. My husband had started a music festival for a non-profit in a slum near the city, and he wanted to take our children there to see what we were supporting: the excellent work of the Kenyan woman who started it and the people who worked there and were served by it.

This trip to a developing nation didn’t come at what felt like a good time to me. I had just finished an exhausting first year back to teaching, and we were at the airport at six the next morning. At that time, no one from our church had taken such young children there, and I had been warned it might be dangerous. And fatigue played its tricks on me: despite our capable and experienced leadership, I was very anxious about safety.

But it was an amazing trip. Our children played with and enjoyed the children at Beacon of Hope, and I was befriended and taught to weave by women who worked there. It was an eye-opening experience for all of us, a chance to know and understand how different others’ lives can be–and also how much the same.

An eight-year-old Everett with some new-found friends in Kware, Nairobi

This was two years before we had Facebook accounts. The first iPhone had only been released the year before. Instagram didn’t exist yet. And we spent the entire sixteen days with our heads up, our eyes and ears open, alive to the experiences immediately around us.

It didn’t fully register with me until we were on the Masai Mara that a safari was the planned rest and debriefing at the end of our trip–and that a safari had always been, since I was maybe sixteen, on my proverbial bucket list.

***

The easiest course, obviously, is to rid myself of the distraction. I should lose the phone.

But it isn’t the phone’s fault, and neither is it the fault of the friend on Instagram. The fault lies with me, not in what I see but in the way I see it, in what I think about and how I think about it, in what fills my mind, my imagination, my heart– regardless of the phone and long after the phone is turned off, put away, abandoned to the kitchen counter for the night.

***

The sky above the lodge was dark as we made our way up the hill. We were still waking up, pulling on extra layers and rubbing our eyes. Behind us our white tents glowed dimly among trees and low-growing plants, while ahead of us shone the lodge, surrounded with more cultivated vegetation. The whole resort was sculpted lawn, shining pool, manicured gardens. During the day and tucked in our tents at night, we felt like we were in the jungle. We lay awake fearing and a little bit hoping that we would hear the lions.

The touring trucks came for us just before daybreak, when the animals on the savannah would likely be feeding. We boarded them but didn’t sit down, holding on instead to the open framework of the trucks, already leaning into the cool Kenyan morning air.

We were there for only three nights, and this was our practice, early morning and evening, five times over the course of that stay.

How many times is enough? We never tired of it: driving away from the lodge in the near-dark, eyes wide and watching. We were looking for herds of elephants and zebra, for the mythical, long-necked giraffes. We wanted to see wildebeests in the wild and the graceful Thompson gazelles, the spotted cheetah all a blur as she chased her prey. We hoped for lions lolling along the dirt road, for a glimpse of a rhino–even if this only came from a distance.

But first we had to drive away from the lodge and the jungle of green that surrounded it. We had to go into the veld.

***

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***

***

***

The post Space appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I had a happy childhood.

That small fact is likely adequate to spoil my hopes of ever being a *good* writer, but there it is. The actual truth is that I had a very happy childhood.

That said, I did not own a pair of Nike’s until well into the sixth grade, maybe later, and certainly well after Everyone Else was wearing them. Moreover, when I did get them, they came from Sears and not from Athlete’s Foot–which was where the cool people bought them. And they cost only $20–which I’m pretty sure was the largest amount of money my mother had ever spent on a pair of shoes for me or anyone else at that point in our family history.

In fact, I got almost all of my clothes from Sears in those days. Unless, of course, my mother made them. Which she sometimes did.

My father had a good job. We lived in a plain but nice neighborhood. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford store-bought clothes–things from The Gap, The Limited, from Limited Express.  It was that we didn’t buy things there because it was less expensive at Sears, and cheaper still if you made it yourself.

We also went to church three times a week. Sunday morning: Sunday school and the worship service. Sunday night: evening service. And Wednesday evening for prayer meeting, choir practice, youth group, whathaveyou. We were there every time the doors were open.

From time to time, we would complain, my sisters and I: Why do we have to go to church All The Time? And why can’t we just buy everything at The Gap? And don’t you understand that I need the collared shirt to be an Izod?

But my parents were deaf to these concerns. They loved us. They provided and cared for us. But they were motivated by things other than the meager reputation one might manufacture based on clothing or the right pair of shoes.

They were motivated by love and miracle, by committed belief in the resurrection of Jesus. By the idea that their lives had–in a very real way–been purchased by blood, and that of God’s Son. Very simply, they did not believe that their lives were their own: for entirely their own satisfaction, their own pleasure, and a concomitant accumulation of stuff.

***

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.  Luke 6: 28-34

***

And so it was no surprise that–after we had all left the house–my parents did not quietly retire. No. They joined Mercy Ships and soon enough were off to West Africa for months at a time: Benin, Togo, Liberia, the Gambia, Sierra Leone. From May of ’99 to January of ’09, it seemed my parents were perpetually gearing up to join the ship or just returning from an outreach, or looking ahead to where the ship would be the next year and determining where (and when) they could join her.

My father, the electrical engineer, quickly became the head electronics technician on board, doing everything from replacing light bulbs and installing air conditioning to repairing medical equipment, the ship’s sound system, even her gyrocompass.

And my mother, a nurse by education and training, went from being the crew nurse to patient admission and then to caring for eye patients and those on the ward, before and after surgery. She spent weekends teaching health care practice in the Displaced Persons Camps, holding babies, comforting mothers, laughing with children.

Neither my parents nor any of the crew was paid for this, of course. Commonly in the developing world today, there is no health care system for the least of these– for people living out in some lonesome wild of West Africa, where unenlightened belief systems credit evil spirits for cataracts, fistulas, benign and grotesque tumors.

All of the ship’s crew–from the captain to surgeons, from the engineers to the kitchen’s cook–pay their own way to be there.

***

Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.  Matthew 6: 19-21

***

Every year, Mercy Ships plans a destination and then, months and weeks ahead of the ship’s arrival, sends a small team into the countryside, looking to spread the word: a hospital ship is coming, and perhaps the doctors can help you.

By the time the ship arrives in port, the pier is lined with hopefuls: people who have walked for weeks in the name of possibility. They are young men escorting blind fathers, parents cradling infants starved by cleft palates, the unnumbered rejected from nameless villages who have tumors occluding their sight, blocking their breathing, slowly but certainly taking their lives.

The screening lasts for days as expert doctors and nurses talk to, examine, evaluate patients. There are some whom they must turn away: the ship is not equipped to do the long-term care required for cancer. But benign tumors and cataracts, these can come out. This jaw can be reconstructed, that palate made whole. This life restored.

Sometimes my father’s favorite task was to visit those waiting for evaluation. They stood or sat in the hot African sun, and he brought them cups of cold water.

Remarkable what work like that can do, how readily it can galvanize the beliefs one clung to while in the comforts of an American suburb: that there is far more to life than what we see here, more than our car, our career, the number of bedrooms or baths in the house.

***

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours:
We give our hearts away, a sordid boon!

William Wordsworth

***

I was a literature major. I’ve read Wordsworth’s Preludes and I know what that poem means. The poet wasn’t decrying materialism for the sake of Jesus and the world he died for– but his opening lines are appropriate, aren’t they?

Getting and spending, we give our hearts away.

I do, anyway. Despite the way I was raised, despite the example set by my parents, I am enamored of the Pottery Barn catalogue, the J.Crew catalogue, the possibility represented by a paint chip. I am as materialistic as the next person–no. I am the most materialistic person I know, because I know what I’m like, and what I want, and what I’m lured by.

And what I’m lured by numbs me, lies to me, makes me believe that if I can just get That Thing, or get these things to look That Way, then I will finally be happy. I give my heart away–a heart bled for and died for, a life paid for–so that (somehow, temporarily, in this instant after which all of it will readily be forgotten) I can look (and feel?) good.

***

Is not life more important than food (or my house, or my car, or my blog/facebook/instagram projections) and the body more important than clothes? Matthew 6:25b

Yet these matter (sometimes) too much to me. And here, O Reader, I will make– in this very blog that has never been a journal or open book on my life–a very real confession:  God has been merciful to me in my materialism. I do not mean that He has turned a blind eye to my selfishness or has overlooked my tendency to judge people by their exteriors, although even in these things He has been merciful.

But His greatest mercy in my materialism has been expressed by withholding:  by simply not enabling me to indulge my greed. Yes, I live in a charming but simple neighborhood, in a charming but simple house. I enjoy, like most Americans, living in the top one percent of the world’s population–a fact I have always been keenly aware of due to my husband and my parents, who think about these things.

But in comparison with that of most of my peers, the population among whom I live out the dailiness of my life, my ability to be a middle class consumer has been radically curtailed. My husband, due to the vicissitudes of our economy in the last decade or so, has twice lost his job. And while he has always worked hard and has never once spent a day on the couch, we have spent some years living on an income below the poverty level.

It is a miracle that we still live in our house. It has been grace to put gas in the car and groceries in the refrigerator (and that we own a refrigerator). Needless to say, our home is in want of repairs. Some of our furniture is Old. We simply do not order things from J. Crew. Or Pottery Barn.

And all of this is mercy.

***

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.

You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.  Matthew 5: 13-16

***

I imagine that God, whose own Son bled and died for me, understands the way I am made–and that, were I able to get my hands on all the beautiful stuff (and it is so beautiful) this world has to offer, I would lose that saltiness in the interest of my own self. I would pull the bowl of my possessions right over my head and gaze at it all in the small light of my small life, and so, eventually, the light of my life would be extinguished.

Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?

I don’t think Jesus is saying that we shouldn’t care about food and drink, that we should completely disregard clothes. I think he delights in my husband’s skill in the kitchen, and he is pleased by the ingenuity of design and the creativity of fashion.

But it’s amazing, isn’t it?, how readily we are distracted by these things, how utterly consuming they–and things like them–can be. Well, I’m amazed by that impulse in me, anyway. I can’t honestly speak for anyone else.

Anyway, I think Jesus said all of that about *not* worrying over our food, drink, and clothing so that we could let go of that stuff and instead find out His provision for us, so that we would be free to serve Him and thus find out His life and His joy. I believe and, to some extent, have known, that there are treasures–vast, exquisite, shining–that cannot be listed on the pages of a clothing catalogue, and there are spaces–holy, pure, beautiful–that will never be photographed for a magazine.

There is much more life, sometimes, in a cup of cold water.

Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.  I Peter 1:8-9

***

In June 2007, Bill and I took our children to visit Beacon of Hope in Nairobi, Kenya. This indigenous organization supports, educates, and helps women and their families who are infected with or impacted by HIV/AIDS. From 2005-2009, my husband produced a music festival here in North Carolina to support Beacon, and he wanted our children to see first-hand what all the fuss was about–why he spent hours putting the festival together, why it was so important.

To some extent, I think, we were not surprised by what we experienced there. The team leading our group was compassionate and expert, seasoned in what we would see. And of course there were the many experiences related by my parents, trips to the opposite side of the continent, but very much exposing them to similar need.

We are so glad we went.

I won’t say that that trip hasn’t come up again, when–confronted by our children with requests for this or that, things enjoyed by their well-heeled peers at the school where I taught–we remind them of what it really means to be in want.

But we do live in America, after all. My husband has started a business that (God be praised!) is thriving. And while our trip to Kenya still feels fairly recent to Bill and to me, for our children it is a distant speck in the rear-view. We want them to remember what they were exposed to in the Kware slum. When pulled by the noisy allure of material things, we want them to know that there is so much more to life than what we own, and that what we own can readily and absolutely and almost always get in the way.

***

Will graduated from high school in May. He turned eighteen last month, and I am grateful that, in a few weeks, he’ll join the Africa Mercy, part of the Mercy Ships fleet, in Madagascar. He is to be with the ship for six months, serving as a cook and otherwise being part of the community that is a floating hospital. Through my parents’ experience on the Anastasis, I can guess at what he’ll see. From my own experience in Christian community, I can guess what he’ll discover.

But it’s my deepest prayer that, in this year of forestalling college, he’ll be even more infected than his mother by the vibrant hope that Christ offers. It’s my hope that these six months color the rest of his life–all of the decisions he makes, whether it’s buying a house or a car, or deciding where to invest his valuable time.

I won’t say that this is easy for me, this sending my first-born to what feels like the other side of the world. And it’s not just until Thanksgiving, or until Christmas, which is what, I imagine, most mothers of first-year college students have to wait for. It’s until April.

But, as Owen Meany once said, “Faith takes practice.” In letting Will go off on this adventure, I am practicing in the keenest of ways what it is I’ve been trying to learn: where to put my treasures. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

My children are most decidedly treasures to me, and always, when confronting that verse, I have counted on “storing them up in heaven.” They belong to God, not to me. If He is their Absolute Treasure, as He is mine, then physical separation–especially in the name of Christ–really shouldn’t be such a big deal. Right?

Durham to Madagascar: 8,946 miles. 7 hours worth of time zones. And through God’s mercy, Will and I will be working side-by-side, despite the distance, to build the Kingdom of Heaven.

We have all of eternity–invisible and more real than anything I’ve known–to look forward to. Six months, in light of that, is nothing.

For more on Mercy Ships, watch this.
If you are interested in supporting our son Will financially as he embarks on this adventure, we are sincerely grateful. Go here to do so. And thank you.

The post Materialism, Mercy and Madagascar appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I like thoughts that come slowly, in a singular way, like rain drops falling one at a time from the end of a branch.

I make my start in this deluge, daily, meeting the needs of the early morning in a flood of thinking: breakfast, ironing, waking children, navigating our departure from the house. And over it all and in it all and through it all, the waterfall of thinkings about work and my plans for the day, about needs of the household, about Other Things, true or not, and trying in all the wet splashing to grab on to the true ones.

It’s a good thing the way to school is familiar enough. I can make that jaunt without thinking; it’s a road I know by rote.

Last week we were driving to school as usual, I in the driver’s seat simultaneously awash. But we were all a little more clear-headed than usual: this was the last week of school; the days dwindled. It was almost over.

And then I saw her, there by the side of the road. A black woman in colorful clothes, kneeling, her back to me, bent over a bed of flowers. What was she doing? Weeding, perhaps, maybe pulling some blossoms from their stems.

We passed her in a matter of seconds. My sight of her was momentary, at best. But for the rest of the way to school, the water of my mind was composed of Africa, of a Kenyan June morning where the air is cool and damp. Vendors unpack their wares at the lip of the roadside. The smell of burning trash fills the air. A green field is split by a red dirt road. And flowers everywhere are in bloom.

The post Morning appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

As I said, they are thank you letters– a small effort toward gratitude to the many people who prayed for us and made our journey affordable. It’s just a letter and some photographs offering glimpses into what we saw and did, and the people who changed us while we were there.

It feels like a long time ago sometimes, and sometimes it feels like no time at all.

Coincidences are strange things. I just finished assembling the letters and addressing the envelopes on Sunday, and today in my e-mail is a message that the documentary film– of which our trip is one part– is completed. We’ll have the chance to see it as soon as next week and so, in a way, we’ll be experiencing it again. I’m looking forward to that.

What do I remember from Kenya? The smell of the air, I think, and its clarity. No humidity in Kenya like we have here in Durham. Sitting in the sun in the weaving room. Eunice’s laugh. The thick green of the Tanzanian woods. Beans and rice and beans. The bunk beds in Amani Children’s Home. The sunrise over the Masai Mara.

Some time ago now I read this passage in Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. It was so aptly put, I had to fold the corner down. Like Dinesen, we went out on safari a few early mornings ourselves, getting up before dark and dressing in the cold, then driving out onto the plain in the earliest light. Here, if you are wondering, is what it is like:

The early morning air of the African highlands is of such a tangible coldness and freshness that time after time the same fancy there comes back to you: you are not on earth but in dark deep waters, going ahead along the bottom of the sea. It is not even certain that you are moving at all, the flows of chilliness against your face may be the deep-sea currents, and your car, like some sluggish electric fish, may be sitting steadily upon the bottom of the Sea, staring in front of her with the glaring eyes of her lamps, and letting the submarine life pass by her. The stars are so large because they are no real stars but reflections, shimmering upon the surface of the water. The light gets clearer, and, about sunrise, the sea-bottom lifts itself towards the surface, a new created island. Whirls of smells drift quickly past you, fresh rank smells of the olive-bushes, the brine scent of burnt grass, the sudden quelling smell of decay.

And then you see the swollen sun, and the darkness where the grass has been all along is suddenly individual leaves. A heard of Thompson gazelles is grazing not at all far from the van’s path or maybe, in the distance, a solitary rhino. Over the rise we find a family of elephants; coming through the trees is first one and then several giraffes.

Like the undersea world, this is one you’ve only ever seen on television, or books. And now, when the van’s diesel engine stops its rattle, you can hear the tear of the grass as the elephant pulls it with its trunk, and you can see the wrinkles on its knees. The world before you this morning is a new created island, a mythic world newborn.

The post Kenya Revisited appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We got to know Nate last spring when he and a film crew descended on our home for a Saturday. They were doing preliminary filming for a documentary film they were making on cross-cultural trips: they filmed our journey to Kenya as part of a two-part project, the second part being, of course, a team of Kenyans coming to America. You can see a trailer of that film here.

But the reason I’m writing about Nate now is on another errand entirely. Because in addition to being a great filmmaker, Nate is also a really fun guy. In illustration, I offer you the bet he had with William and Everett. Nate is a Wisconsin guy, and when Duke played Wisconsin, the boys called him and proposed a wager: if Duke beat Wisconsin, then Nate had a make a film about the boys; if Wisconsin beat Duke, then the boys had to wash his car.

The potentials of the outcome were decidedly against us, I thought. After all, Nate lives In Wisconsin. There were (possibly) two plane tickets in our future. Moreover, it’s the middle of the winter In Wisconsin. Washing a car up there at this time of year would be, at the very least, a messy ordeal.

For Nate, on the other hand, the wager simply meant some editing of footage he already had on hand. And while I’ll readily admit that I don’t know much about filmaking and editing, I’m sure it’s a Very Simple Process.

Right.

Anyway, the good news is that Duke won. And the better news is that Nate kept his end of the bargain (which is better than we might have been able to say had the reverse been the case). And the best news is that you can see this short film now, by clicking here. Be sure to watch it full-screen. Be sure to remember Robert Redford’s film of the same title. And be sure to discover some clear insight into the various natures of the members of the Stevenson family.

Enjoy! And thanks, Nate.

The post The Natural appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

We did root for the Patriots when they were in the Super Bowl six years ago, but that was when they were the underdog. We like rooting for the underdog. It’s the American way.

Yes, Go Underdog! Unless Duke is in the game. Duke isn’t ever the underdog, and that reality is the means by which I can come to understand the venomous hatred with which some people consider the Blue Devils men’s basketball team. That, and Pure Envy. But maybe that, too, has something to do with the underdog. Maybe the underdog, despite everyone’s being “for” him, is always envious of the guy who isn’t the underdog.

Anyway, we were pleased when the Giants beat the Patriots on Sunday night. We enjoyed the game, despite the fact that two of us were already experiencing the extraordinary discomfort of the respiratory flu, and another of us was on the brink of it. The Super Bowl is a great event, so very All-American, you know. And Tom Petty was the half-time act. It doesn’t get much better than that.

As we settled in to watch it, one of the children asked if everyone in America would be watching the game, and Bill said that about half of all Americans watch it. That’s A Lot Of People.

Funny, isn’t it?, the American stance on the underdog. Very much for the underdog, though we, ourselves, at an international level at the very least, haven’t been the underdog in a Very Long Time.

And who would be– on an international level– the underdog, one wonders? Any number of geographies might come to mind.

But I would have to say that Africa might be the continental underdog. Sub-Saharan Africa, anyway, has a Very Hard Time of it. And now, of course, Kenya is a part of that– a wretched truth that I have a very hard time believing, the news of which always comes as a dreadful shock. About a week ago, I heard a reporter on NPR say that Kenya is, slowly but almost certainly, “lurching her way toward anarchy.”

My friend Steven wrote this on some of the problems in Africa. He and his wife Amy live in South Africa, and it is through him, for the most part, that I know what’s going on over there. I suppose you could say that it was their passion to help the underdog that made him and Amy move to Africa in the first place. So very American of them, don’t you think?

Although I will say that I don’t think it was an American impulse that sent them to Africa, so much as it was their love for Jesus.

Now there is Someone who always goes for the underdog.

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We truly had glorious weather, and surely that is a Sign From God, is it not? We can plan until the cows come home; we can arrange an amazing line-up of talented musicians; we can get corporate sponsorships to support it, and provide free air-line tickets, and even set up a giant tent on the lawn; we can set up a Beacon of Hope tent on the lawn. But ultimately, God is the one in control of the weather, and He gave us a beautiful day. Surely that means Something.

Yes, it was a beautiful day, and we had a great time.

But that is for another post.

This post is for our friends Nate and Jeff and John. They flew in from Wisconsin to film the event, capturing the last footage they’ll need for Nate to complete the documentary film he’s making about our trip to Nairobi. It was great to see them.

We first met Nate back in the early spring, when he came to our Kenya meeting and talked about the possibility of the possibility of Christianity Today wanting him to make a documentary about our trip. Then, in April, Nate and Jeff showed up and spent two evenings with us, interviewing Bill and me and the children, following us to Will’s baseball game, even coming to Trinity School to get footage of me teaching.

And then Nate and John were with us in Nairobi. And in Tanzania. They became part of our team, in fact, and we became accustomed to their presence and that of their cameras and microphones. When it was all over, they didn’t feel like an appendage to our team. They were just part of our team.

We all knew it wasn’t over when they disappeared at the Nairobi airport. We knew they’d be back. They were with us again just a few weeks ago now, here in Durham, doing follow-up interviews.

And then they were back last weekend for the HopeFest, and it wasn’t at all surprising to see them at dinner on Saturday night, or in church on Sunday morning, or all that afternoon and evening, for that matter.

But it did catch me by surprise– the realization on Saturday evening that this would be it. This would be all the footage they’d need. There would be no reason, after this, for them to make their way to Durham– Carolina barbeque notwithstanding.

I said this to Nate, even as the surprise of this revelation was still settling on me, and before the sadness could set in. “This is the last time we’ll see you,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Nate, in his matter-of-fact way, which is the way he says most things: matter-of-factly. “But it won’t be the last time I’ll see you guys,” he said. “I’ll be spending the next three months with you,” he said. And I knew what he meant: he’d spend the next months reliving this weekend, and the weeks in Kenya, and the interviews before and after that. He’d be going through and through and through the footage Somewhere North in his editing room for a Long Time To Come.

And I didn’t know which was a lonelier thought: our having no reason to see him, or him toiling on alone, shaping images and soundbytes into a film that could make our experience meaningful for thousands who had never experienced it….

Sometimes art is just lonely like that.

Sometimes life is, too.

The post The Last Time appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I’ve failed to mention it here, though these photos were originally going to be part of a blog post way back in April…. But I ran out of time.

Yes, Fourth Line Films accompanied us to do a story on our trip. Nate and John became part of the team, really, though it took some getting used to at the beginning to have cameras always rolling and large microphones hovering in the room. They filmed us as a means of creating a series of films about what it looks like for Americans to go on a mission trip in Kenya; interestingly, our story has a partner series: what it looks like for Kenyans to go on a mission trip in the U.S.

Every documentary usually has focal points, and Nate chose our family as one of those points. The crew came to Trinity School to film me teaching one day; later they followed our family to William’s ball game; and finally, one Saturday evening, they interviewed Bill, me and our entire family at our house.

That’s what you’re seeing here: the living room transformed to serve as film studio. The lights they used were Really Something. The dust in my living room was Impressive, and I realized in a Whole New Way how much we were in need of new carpet.

Last Sunday, our Kenya/Tanzania team gave a little presentation after church to let our many sponsors know what we did and, perhaps, to interest others in making a similar trip someday. Nate and Jeff of Fourth Line Films came back to Chapel Hill for this event, and Nate brought a short video he produced from our trip.

We all enjoyed seeing it. Each of us said later how watching that film brought the whole trip back. It’s hard to believe that it’s over, and that we’re already home.

Here’s a link, if you’d care to see it.

Fourth Line Films. Remember that name.

The post Kenya Revisited appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I will tell you that– from the beginning– I was afraid to go to Africa.

I can’t say why, exactly. It was the “unknown” thing, I’m sure. The fear was eased, somewhat, because of my parents’ experience: they have been to Africa many times, although their travel is entirely west and South Africa– not east Africa, not Kenya. Still, it helped to know that they’d been there– and back again– many times.

And it helped, too, that many, many people thought our going and taking the children with us was a Really Excellent Idea.

“…we lose our legitimacy as Christian leaders in an affluent country like [the U.S.] if we can’t use that affluence in order to experience the situation of those on the margins. ‘God so loved the world’—how dare we say we identify with him in that love if we don’t go there, if we don’t choose the margins?”

Bill and I knew it would be good to go to Kenya, to witness how the Church is working there, to see with our own eyes what living in poverty or with AIDS means, to begin to understand what God is doing there. We wanted the children to see it, too.

But I still felt afraid.

What didn’t help were the few– the Very Few– who raised questions. No one said outright that we shouldn’t do it, but a handful– a Well-Meaning Handful– wondered aloud if we were sure that this was the thing we ought to do.

Sure? Yes. We were sure.

We thought we were sure, anyway.

Funny, isn’t it? how among twenty or thirty positive and encouraging voices, the one or two or three discouraging ones can sound So Loud?

“Who are Jesus’ brothers? The weak, the hungry, the immigrant workers, the economic outcasts.”

I had seen Hotel Rwanda, and wasn’t that enough? One can read all the political reports one can find about the social or political situation in another country. It can seem safe as safe anywhere. But who’s to say, on any given day, that Something Bad won’t happen?

About two weeks before we left, we read a report of ten beheadings just outside of Nairobi.

One Sunday I asked Keith point blank about it. He’d been on this trip two years before and taken two of his four sons with him. But his sons were older than ours at the time of their trip, and he hadn’t taken a six-year-old with him. No one from our church had ever taken a six-year-old.

“It’s safe, isn’t it, Keith?” I said, believing that I would have his reassurance. He and his boys had, after all, returned home safely.

And Keith looked at me in the dead-serious way of his, that way that means he’s hearing what you’re saying and he’s really and absolutely telling you the whole truth now, and he said, “There’s no safer place to be than exactly where God wants you.”

I found this Immensely Comforting, although I realized, of course, that there was no promise in there Anywhere for physical safety– my children’s, my husband’s, my own.

I would like to think that God will protect my children from injury and pain of every kind, but He didn’t do that for His own Son, so I’m guessing that I can’t exactly expect it for me.

“God very often is working most powerfully far from the center. Jesus is crucified outside Jerusalem—outside—with the very cynical sign over his head, “The King of the Jews.” Surprise—he is the King of the Jews. “We had hoped … ” say the disappointed disciples on the road to Emmaus, but he did not fulfill our criteria. In Acts, we read that the cross-cultural missionary thrust did not begin in Jerusalem. It began in Antioch, on the periphery, the margins.”

Of all the people I’ve ever met, Charleen and her mother Nancy were perhaps the most marginalized. Nancy’s AIDS had progressed to the point that she was extremely weak; her husband kicked her and her daughter Charleen out of the house because Nancy was “useless” to him. When we met this thirty-something woman and her daughter, they had sought refuge with Nancy’s sister. Now the household in Kware slum swelled to seven persons, all living in a ten-by-ten foot house.

“My greatest fear,” Nancy told us, “is that Charleen will become a street-child.”

As we left the house, Mary Beth pointed out to me how far advanced was Nancy’s illness: “Did you see the stains on her teeth?” she asked me. “That’s from bleeding gums.”

I had noticed, too, that Nancy’s ankles may have been, at most, two inches in diameter.

though it feels like a dam is breaking
like the second coming of the flood,
but the promise was not only justice,
but mercy and love

We tried to call on Nancy and Charleen again a few days later. We wanted to tell them that, through Beacon of Hope, we would sponsor Charleen. This would ensure her food, clothing, and education. And Charleen would not become a street child. We were disappointed to learn that Nancy and Charleen were not at home.

“I have come to the conclusion that the powerful, those at the center, must begin to realize that the future shape of things does not belong to them. The future shape of things is on the periphery. The future shape of things is not in Jerusalem, but outside. It is Nazareth. It is Antioch.”

On our last day at Beacon of Hope, I looked up and was surprised to see Nancy and Charleen standing in the hallway. Nancy told me that her sister had kicked them out of the house a few days before, and that she and her daughter had relied on the kindness of other “mommas” in Kware for safe places to sleep. They had come to Beacon in the hopes of finding help.

We didn’t go to Kenya to be heroes. We honestly went to learn. But that day we were given the opportunity to make all the difference in the world to Nancy and her daughter: we were able to pay for them to find a home so that they could both be enrolled in Beacon of Hope’s program. Before we left Africa, Nancy and Charleen had a small house of their own, and Charleen would be returning to school in September. We could safely assure Nancy that Charleen wouldn’t become a street-child.

there is nothing to be afraid of here
if we stand or if we fall,
there is no fear in love,
there is no fear in love at all

On July 5th, Nancy died of AIDS. Charleen’s extended family has rejected her, and for now she is living with a woman from Beacon of Hope, to whom Nancy signed over custody before she died.

But the question has been coming to us again and again since then: what can we do for Charleen, for this little orphan girl? She is living in a slum with a woman who must care for two other children besides. What is the extent of our responsibility? What is the best thing for Charleen?

This time the worries come of their own accord, without any well-meant words of warning from others: She’s older than two of my three children; she’s black; she’s Kenyan; she’s grieving; her English is weak; you just don’t know what you’re getting when you adopt.

But you don’t know either, do you?, what you’re getting when you birth a child. And every child has the potential to break her mother’s heart.

So now we are really and truly thinking about and talking about and praying about adopting Charleen. We are waiting to hear from people at Beacon of Hope, too, because we don’t want to be practicing any kind of heroics. We don’t think we can save Charleen’s life. We don’t have delusions of grandeur.

We just know that we have room for Charleen, and that we can love Charleen, and that we do love Charleen already. Yes, we are sure about that.

And despite all the questions in our heads, despite all the unknowns, despite the problems and potential problems this will inevitably create, we know that We Are Safe.

there is nothing to be afraid of here,
if we stand or if we fall,
there is no fear in love,
there is no fear in love at all

song lyrics “White Dove,” from the record The Morning by Andrew Osenga.
article quotes from an interview with the Rt. Rev. Dr. David Zac Niringiye in Christianity Today.

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