After living here for nearly three years my tastes have pretty much mutated into an authentic Sichuan girl's and I have come to love with reckless abandon any variety of their pao cai (pickled vegetables). Last night two students from the freshman class came to my house and we made some. It was the first time to attempt such a feat for all three of us. I learned that some pretty strong Chinese liquor is required for success. I thanked the students as they left, wondering what I would do with all the left over liquor, and they giggled saying: don't thank us until you taste it after three of four days. Three or four days of watching our concoction swim around in my little pot... nice.
That's not the story I really want to tell you.
Once upon a time in a land half a world away from her home a girl entered a battle she knew nothing about. She learned how to fight from the fight and she ended up with more scars and bruises than she had skin. She spoke simple words of eternal truth that pierced the darkness and made idols shake, she loved the forgotten youth and punched injustice in the face by always supplying beggars with meals, she clasped the hands of the dying and begged the Spirit for their release loosening their lifelong chains. This fight was not hers and though she bore wounds from it, she had actually not done any of the fighting. Her body was a clay pot, a pitiful trojan horse, for the power of life and truth that resided within her.
One day she made pao cai with some students having no idea what role that little incident might have played in the battle, and they left and she rested. Night fell. The girl washed clothes in her rattley machine. There was a tap tap at the door. The tap tap quickly became an incessant kicking that shook the few pictures on the wall and set the girl's teeth on edge. The kicking continued though it was no time at night for a six year old neighbor to be coming to ask for m&m's and play games. Knowing the kicking would never stop the girl ran to the door as her brain twisted into a headache from the kicking and pushed it open. Right into the little girl, who stopped kicking only because she ended up with a door in her face.
There were two headaches peering at each other in the darkness and the washing machine rattled away. A fight lost, a punch misplaced, a wound inflicted rather than healed and defeat multiplied.
Failure. I should have had more grace for this lost lonley little girl. M&M's do not heal frustration.
This morning I woke up, failure fresh on my pillow, and watched the sunrise and made some tea. The sunrise spoke through the clouds, the haze of dust, the din of continuous construction, it told me of a better story, a life made free from condemnation. The tea spoke too, it told of a life of endless opportunity, a life lived because it isn't my own.
And I found that this failure was really a blessing because it reminded me that I can't do it on my own, have never been able to, and never will. Reminded me that this isn't my battle, that my trust and obey shoes weren't crafted by me, that my love is not something I could have knit together. And I found that this failure had become my freedom to find strength and joy and trust in my Father without any hidrance from myself.
This is a story of how such a failure became embraceable, breaking my own chains, ending my own injustice, piercing my own darkness...
...a story of how failure became freedom.
