Happy Ameriversary!

There's something about an anniversary that brings out Introspective Alison.

A few days ago, I was leading some of my patients through Orientation Group (a daily review of the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of their lives in brain injury rehab).  Midway through the group, I stared at the date I'd written on the whiteboard and realized: It was an anniversary!

It was August 5, my three year Ameriversary.

I can easily remember that I moved back to America on August 5 because Nostalgic Alison (aided by Procrastinating Alison) kept the receipt for my PEK - CID flight saved on my desktop for years after I'd actually returned.  I blogged about that receipt in this post, which chronicles God's faithfulness to me during my first year back in America.

On my 6-month anniversary of living in Asia, I wrote a little post called Chinaversary.  It was a list of the hard and good things the Lord gave me in my first semester as an English teacher in China, including:

• Overnight train rides that I thought would never end
• Eating animals and plants I didn't even know existed
• The blockage of almost all my favorite websites
• The 60th birthday of the PRC
• A brown Christmas
• Cooking without cheese
• Baking without butter
• Carrying on my most valued relationships by Skype and e-mail
• Teaching 190 sweet, motivated, delightful students
• Having my assumptions challenged
• Seeing God's word through fresh eyes (not mine)
• Being the fastest bicyclist on the street instead of the slowest
• Joy, purpose, and satisfaction

This week I'm reflecting on some of the hard and good things the Lord has given me in three years back in America, including:

• Cooking with cheese
• Baking with butter
• Being in the same country as my family for my sister's wedding and the birth of my brother's babies.
• Finding a job
• Re-learning how to be a speech therapist
• Finding a church
• Living in a sweet old Mansion with my friends
• Breathing clean air, and everything that clean air lets me see: Sunsets, clouds, and stars.

I am so grateful for an easier return than I ever expected, and for the many good things and good people that fill my life here in Iowa.  In reflection, I would say the hardest things about returning to the States are these two:

1)  I am forever split.  The people that I love, the places I want to be, and the person that I am are all divided between two continents.  There are parts of me that emerge only in China; for example, the part of me that gets on a stage to sing songs to a packed house because in the China-fabulous world of being a foreign teacher, part of your job is to entertain.

And there are the people.  I can't just gather up all the people I care about and keep them with me in the same country.

If I'm here, I miss there.  If I'm there, I miss here.

However, even as I have missed people on both sides of the planet, I've also realized:

2)  Life goes on.  When I flew away to China in 2009, all my relationships in America were frozen in time.  The friends I had in 2009 are the friends I thought I would return to in 2012.  But life went on.  People got married, had kids, moved away, moved on.  I moved too; my home base in 2009 was not the town I moved back to.  I was unprepared for how hard it would be to re-join the relationships I still had, and to re-build a social circle to replace the one that had inevitably changed while I was away.  Three years later, this is still hard.

Now that I'm here, my ties in Asia are likewise changing and weakening.  My former students are getting jobs, spreading across the country, getting married, moving on.  If I moved back there, I would have the same challenge as I've had here: build up the friendships that still exist, and then start fresh, building relationships with a brand new bunch.

In spite of these difficulties, the experiencing of living in another place -- really living, not just visiting -- has made both the going and the coming back completely worth it. 

What's the Scandal?

I've been thinking about why the undercover Planned Parenthood videos have caused such an outcry.  Certainly it's concerning that the officials in the videos seem to be trying to turn a profit from handing over body parts of aborted babies.  After all, if they were just charging for the expenses incurred in the donation process, why would there be any negotiation - why not just state their expenses?  Why make offhand comments about wanting luxury vehicles?  Why offer to illegally change the surgical procedures of the abortion to keep more baby organs intact?  (I am referring here to the second video, with Dr. Mary Gatter.)

So yes, these things are concerning.  But I don't think they fully explain the gut outrage many people seemed to feel when viewing these videos.  If we were just talking about the poor regulation of pricing for human tissue specimens, I don't think these videos would have caused such an uproar.  What's the real scandal here?

The scandal is this:

Abortion kills humans.  John Piper develops this idea in his article "We know they are killing children. All of us know."  Abortionists know it.  State laws know it (you can be charged with homicide for killing unborn babies in many states).  Expectant mothers know it.  You know it.

You can argue that abortion is the lesser of two evils; that it does kill a human but that the rights and health of the mother are higher priorities, but you cannot argue that abortion does not kill humans.

Descriptions and videos of abortion procedures have always been available if you want them, so the Planned Parenthood videos offer nothing new in the way of convincing us that abortion kills children.  But I think they are scandalous because they remind us that we are killing children, and they remind us in such a callous way that it's hard to ignore.  

Undercover abortion videos taken from the perspective of the mother seeking an abortion usually feature the clinic staff reassuring the mother, providing some basic education about what will happen, and helping her fill out the paperwork.  Clinic staff in those videos use terms like "terminate the pregnancy" - I remember seeing one where the staff awkwardly tried to say that if the "whole pregnancy wasn't removed," then they would have to go in and clean it out.  In our public discourse, we dance around words to help us forget we are killing babies.

But in the recent videos, we see powerful people frankly describing "less crunchy" methods of ending the lives of the tiny babies in the womb.  We see them remark about a "baby boy," not a "male fetus."  We hear their discussion of the head and the lungs and the liver, and suddenly we are reminded: these are humans, and they have value.  All of us know it.

The scandal is this:

Abortion hardens the heart.  Any sin does.  The greed and callousness that can go along with this industry were horrifyingly highlighted in the Kermit Gosnell case of 2013.  Remember him?  According to the grand jury report of his murder trial,

"This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women. What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy - and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors," it states. "The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels - and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths." (from the Atlantic article "Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell's Trial Should be a Front Page Story")

How do people get to this point?  Did the Planned Parenthood officials grow up dreaming that one day they could sit at a table and dispassionately discuss the monetary value of an unborn child's head?  Did little Kermit Gosnell plan that one day he would help to usher new lives into the world, only to end them with a scissors to the spinal cord?

Abortion is like any sin.  If you get your first abortion, or perform your first abortion, your conscience might cry out.  But if you do it often enough, your heart will become hard.  Maybe one day you reach the point where all you see are dollar signs and a comfortable retirement.  I don't know.

The scandal is this:

Everyone involved in the abortion industry has blood on their hands.  Everyone.  Providers, consumers, supporters, legislators -- they have blood on their hands.  We know we are killing children. Maybe some people's hearts have hardened, but somewhere along the way, I think we all knew it.

The scandal is this:

I have blood on my hands too.

Want to know one of the most scandalous things Jesus said?

Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day." (John 6:53-54)

People were very put off by this gruesome statement; Jesus was a lot more appealing before He started talking about drinking blood. Many of His followers left Him then and there.

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, 'This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?' ... From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. (John 6:60, 66)

My sins were paid by the blood of Christ. This is a hard teaching! Who can accept it?

How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! (Hebrews 9:14)

My conscience was cleansed from acts that lead to death. How? With the blood of Christ.

1 Corinthians 6:20 reminds me that I was "bought with a price."  My sins, no more and no less than even the most prolific abortionist, came with a cost.  The cost was the flesh and blood of my sinless Savior.  I have blood on my hands too.

The scandal is this:

I will worship next to former abortionists in heaven.  I will worship next to providers, consumers, supporters, and legislators who once had blood on their hands, but who have been washed as "white as snow" (Isaiah 1:18).  Even now, in church, I worship next to women who have had abortions and who have been cleansed by the blood of Christ.

Killing babies and bartering for their flesh?  Scandalous sin.  

The death of Jesus for my sins and yours?  Scandalous grace.

Up, Up, and Away!

I went to the National Balloon Classic in Indianola last Wednesday for Glow Night with my wonderful family.  I had never been!  It was lovely!  The balloons all came meandering up through the sunset in the west and then tried to drop their beanbags on a target in front of a crowd.  Then they all re-inflated in the field at dusk and let us walk among them as they glowed.

I was hooked.  On Saturday morning, some friends and I woke up early and arrived at the balloon field at 5:15 a.m. for "Dawn Patrol."  As you can imagine, it's not safe for balloons to fly at night because they can't see the ground to land.  But they can launch in the dark and land after the sun rises.  We watched these four balloons for about a half hour.  Every so often, one of them would light up for a few seconds.  It was, again, lovely.

The sun rose and my friends and I enjoyed free coffee while we watched the rest of the morning events.  Three large tourism balloons inflated and took off with people who had bought flights.  Then the competition flights began, with the balloons flying from behind us toward the target on the field. 

 

Beautiful!

Free Relationship Advice for YOU!

When I was beginning my first relationship with a man, I learned pretty quickly how clueless I was about relationships.  So I took to polling my friends for their best piece of relationship advice.  After my relationship ended, I thought, "What am I doing to do with all this great advice?  Recycle it?  Give it to Goodwill?  Store it in the basement?"

It's still in pretty good condition, so I didn't want to throw it away.  I decided the best option was to do an online giveaway:  Free advice for YOU, given by my friends and family, and paraphrased by me.

On fighting:

• "Try to have at least one big fight before you get engaged."
• "My tendency when we fight is to draw away, even stand at the other side of the room while I make my point.  So I try to hold my husband's hand when we're fighting.  It's hard to be too angry while you're holding hands."
• "When we have a disagreement, it's easy for me to get angry or defensive.  Instead, I try to look at what insecurity or hurt might be driving my husband's behavior.  Then I try to encourage him in that."

On compatibility:

• "You want to be going in approximately the same direction at approximately the same rate."

On discernment:

• Almost everyone encouraged me to pray and seek counsel about my relationship and its future.  One person said, "We know from Solomon that if we ask for wisdom, God won't hold back!"

On expectations:

• "In order to be valid, expectations have to be reasonable, verbalized, and agreed-upon."
• "Once I realized that my happiness in my marriage was largely dependent on my commitment to seek happiness in my marriage, it took some of the pressure off whether I was making the right decision.  Although I still very much believe that my husband is the man God had for me, when I'm discontent I know it may be because of my own attitude and actions rather than because I married the wrong person."

On communication:

• The majority (OK, all) of my advice-givers agreed that communication is a good thing. 

I'm probably missing a couple pieces of advice, because already I can't remember all of the wonderful things people told me (which is one reason I'm writing them down now).   I find myself thinking about some of these principles in other aspects of life; for example, the advice about expectations needing to be agreed upon was new to me, and so helpful!

I hope you find something here you like.  If not, just put it out at your next garage sale and send me the profits. :)

What's your best piece of relationship advice?

[From the Archives] First Kill

Watch out:  In this post I confess murder.

Today I spent a lovely afternoon at the pool with a friend, and she was chatting about the rabbits that have invaded her yard and her attempts to avoid committing bunny-cide with her lawn mower.  It reminded me of this:

Years ago I took a creative non-fiction writing class.  One of our assignments was to write on the topic "First Kill."  

Here was mine.

First Kill

            When I was little, there was a tree in my neighbor’s back yard.  Right by the trunk, there was a nest of bunnies.  The four mouse-size bodies were cozily nestled together in the cool darkness of their underground home.

            I can’t remember how I discovered this buried treasure, but once I did, I was in love.  Have you ever cupped a tiny, wild rabbit in your hands?  The soft baby nails of his feet scratch your palm.  His heart beats fast against your hand.  His shaking subsides as his fear dies.  Run a finger along his fur – it’s so soft you wouldn’t know you were touching anything if you couldn’t feel the ridges of his little ribs as he breathes inoutinout in out in out in   out   in     out… and finally he’s calm and content.

            I would traipse over several times a day to open the gate of the neighbor’s fence and peer into the nest under their tree.  The mother rabbit never seemed to be around.  Our neighbor had trapped a young rabbit that week and set it free in the countryside.  He assured me that it was too young to be the mother, but I was unconvinced.  (I still am.)  In any case, Mama Rabbit’s absence gave me free rein to befriend her children, and I had no qualms about touching them and holding them and generally ignoring all the good advice that children are given about not messing with wild animals and keeping your hands off their babies.

            That day, I took strips of paper towel and Kleenex and shredded them finely.  I put them in a coffee can, carefully lining the bottom with inches of fluff.   I tested the bed with my finger.  It was as soft as a cloud of cotton candy.

            Off I went, through the gate and to the tree.  I peeked inside the nest to see the four brown-gray bunnies cuddled inside their small home.  I reached in and took one.  Carefully I cupped him as I walked back to my garage where his new bunny-bed awaited him.  Gingerly I laid him in the can.  Breathlessly I watched over him until I saw that he was quiet, maybe even asleep.

            Later, I decided it was time to get him back to his brothers and sisters.  He struggled as I grasped his body to take him out of the coffee can.  His baby nails scratched at the air and his tiny back arched and he wriggled around and somehow… he fell.

            NO.  His body seemed even smaller lying on the concrete driveway.  I panicked and scooped him up, running him back to his nest in a desperate hope that he was still alive.  Certainly he wasn’t moving, but I convinced myself he was still breathing.  I barely even looked as I placed him back with his family and ran away.

            The next day, I gathered up my courage to visit the nest one more time.  I looked in.  He was still there, his brown-gray body nestled against the three other bunnies in the hole.  His black, bead-like eyes were open.  A fly landed on his eye and stalked across his face. 

[From the Archives] Martha at the Coffee Shop

This article has been collecting dust on my hard-drive since fall 2011, when I undertook to write out a few short stories from my days in China.  I had just moved to a new city and was out for a meal with an American co-worker and one of her American friends, a businessman's wife who lived across town.  (Names have been changed.)

I had forgotten about this lunch, but when I found the story last week I was reminded of a quote that's been on my mind lately:  

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts." -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There's no use thinking in terms of "good people" and "bad people."  The Bible teaches, quite truly, that we are all sinful but yet all made in God's image.  And we can all be redeemed through Christ. 

Here's the story:

Martha at the Coffee Shop

Martha talked loudly and deliberately, punctuating her conversation with laughs and frequently turning to place an emphasizing hand on Linda’s shoulder.  She talked about her cleaning help, her full-time Chinese-English interpreter, and her private driver.

She talked; we listened.  Other conversationalists were not needed; just a reasonably alert audience.  She was an unfiltered, un-inquisitive one-woman show.

Early in the conversation, Martha said three words that instantly soured my opinion of her.  Those words came in an account she gave about traveling from China to pick up some papers her husband had left behind at their California home.  Because their company wasn’t paying for the flight, she was stuck in coach (“in the back of the bus,” as she called it.)  She asserted that she was the only non-Chinese back there, and that she was nearly sickened by the surrounding belches, nose-picking, and bad breath. 

An aside:  I have made the same transpacific coach-class journey eight times.  There were Chinese people, and there were non-Chinese.  Each time I found a group of friendly and accommodating people.  I was not sickened, nor nearly sickened.

Back to Martha's story.  There she was, stuck in coach for the duration of the twelve hour flight back to America.  Worse, she was flying United Airlines.  Ah, what tragedy.  She knew we’d agree that American airlines are nothing like Asian airlines, where those “cute little Asian girls wait on you hand and foot.”  No, Western airlines are filled with ugly flight attendants.  The women are old and fat, and the men are gay.  “Fags and hags, you know!”  Hahaha!  And then it was off to another story.

We stayed at the coffee shop for another hour, eating expensively mediocre Western food, Martha’s treat.  At intervals, those carelessly spoken words, “fags and hags,” would jump to my mind, and I judged Martha.

Then I learned more about her.  She and her husband had lavishly hosted friends and colleagues for Thanksgiving and Christmas last year.  They were generous supporters of a Christian missionary friend in Romania.  At one point, Martha regaled us with tales of her daughter eating doggie biscuits as a young child.

“Makes me think twice about your parenting skills,” joked Linda. 

“Oh, I was a horrible parent!  Well, of course, my parents were horrible to me.  I had a horrible, horrible, childhood.“ (All this was said in the same joking, expansive style as the rest of our conversation.) 

Martha laughingly told us she had no idea how her daughter could be such a good mother when she herself had been such a bad mother.  “I was awful!  Well, until I got saved, and after that I was all right.”  And then it was off to another story.

Fags and hags.  Colonial snobbery.  Extravagant generosity.  A redeemed motherhood.

People are not caricatures.  Martha is not the good guy or the bad guy of the afternoon.  She’s Martha, and God loves her, and God loves the people she looks down on, and God loves me as I look down on her.  And may God save me from stuffing people into categories on the basis of three words and a lunch at an overpriced Chinese coffee shop.

[In the Style of Jason Mraz] At the Baby Shower

I wrote this poem about a baby shower I recently attended, in which only I and two other women had no babies, either in or out of our bellies.  As an aside, I should tell you that I love babies and I like baby talk.  I am in no way bothered by birthing stories.  But "I am in no way bothered by birthing stories" does not make for very funny poetry.

WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

• DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE MALE.
• DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU ARE EASILY OFFENDED.
• DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO READ SLANG ABOUT THE NETHER REGIONS.  (Sorry, Mom :) )
• DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU DO NOT PROMISE TO SING IT IN YOUR HEAD TO THE TUNE OF JASON MRAZ'S "I"M YOURS."

OK, I think we're covered here.  Let's go.


Well, I went to a shower for a baby that's a'comin;
The ladies were all snackin and the conversation hummin.
But I fell right through the cracks
Til my girls got my back!

We got no babies on our boobies and no icepacks in our privates,
No lanolin, no diapers, and no cause to get excited
At gripe water, or the sneeze
That lets out all your pees!

Oh and please, please hesitate
Some more (lots more!).
This stuff can wait.
I'm sure!

There's no need to contemplate
Your nipples' size,
Your hoohah's fate;
No more!

So I'm sittin at the table with the ladies with no babies
We're just chattin bout our travels (the good places and the shadies)
When we hear some nursing news:
Baby got engulfed in her boobs!

The moms get louder with their stories and they're sounding pretty gory
We hear things we never asked to know about their under-storeys
So we up our volume too:
"I went to Zealand, New!"

We talk louder but it's useless cuz the baby talk is flying
I mention Machu Picchu but "MY VAJAJAY WAS CRYIN!"
Splits the air (Like it was split.
Cuz the baby tore it!)

Please don't scootch a little closer, dears.
I will plug all my ears.

Oh and please, please hesitate
Some more (lots more!).
This stuff can wait.
I'm sure!



Hehehe. :)  Congrats to all my pregnant friends.