“Skateboard shoes, skateboard shoes, skateboard shoes…” I don’t why this childhood memory, of all things, sticks out to me so consistently now as an adult. I was probably 10 or 11 years old, wanted a new pair of skateboard shoes, so my Dad put me (and my siblings) to work to lay a new spread of grass in our yard. The payoff for my labor would be skateboard shoes. With every drag of the rake breaking up dirt to plant the grass he told me to just repeat it in my head to remind me why I was working, “Skateboard shoes, skateboard shoes, skateboard shoes.”
I’m really thankful for being raised this way. Learning to work for what you get makes enjoying it even better. But honestly, learning to work in a different culture and in a FAR different work environment has been a real adjustment these first 8 months overseas. I come from a culture of 9-5, 5 days a week, fast weekends, and brutal Mondays. I kind of miss it, because it was easier to know where to be and when to be there in that culture. In this place, and this kind of work, it has been a lot more fluid, and there’s often the struggle of separating work from personal life, because in this field it’s almost impossible. I mean, our job here is to ‘do life’ with people who don’t know our Shepherd. To serve them, love them, and build relationships with them. Those things often happen outside my 9-5 preference, and they often happen on top of a plethora of daily routines, like language learning and teaching.
So what is work here? At first I beat myself because sometimes I felt so out of place not being able to confine my work to a concise period of daylight, but then I took a step back and really looked at it. I realized I work a lot, like when…
-I wake up in the morning to spend some time in silence, to talk to the Lord and get spiritually geared for what’s coming that day. Jesus said, if we abide in Him we’ll bear fruit.
-Spend hours in my mornings/afternoons in a classroom feeling my brain slowly liquefy under the pressure of language learning
-leave the classroom just to find another desk to do more independent language learning.
-return to a classroom, this time to teach a different language.
-make an hour long bus ride across the city to visit a brother from the majority background who is lonely and depressed and needs encouragement, only to return at 1am.
-I visit a refugee I met last month who wants help renewing a passport because everything is in English, and what follows is two hours of cultural head butting as I try to figure out fancy bureaucratic Arabic words I don’t know.
-I play soccer with two new friends’ majority friends at 11:00pm after praying that the Lord would lead me to new friends.
-do coffee, meals, visits, and all the other things that stretch us past the imaginary barriers we build in the hopes that somehow the Father uses these things to open doors to make Him known.
It’s not a 9-5. It’s a 9-12, 2-4, 10-1, and all sort of awkward combinations of schedule I sometimes can’t pin down. I’m learning to find and fix structure when I can, but embrace the fluidity and God working through it when I can’t. That is work.