Like jellybeans...

I have been in airports and needed nothing less than the strength of my Holy Heavenly Father to lift my feet towards the security check and on toward my gate. The constant motion of life is making me seasick.

I have been in classes where the professor said, in a statement of quite basic reality, most of life is saying goodbye. It made me lose my breath and grit my teeth. I'm over goodbyes.

I have been a foreigner in many lands under a sky that is far too beautiful for this earth and wondered why it should be content to hang there above us while we go about in dirt and business ignoring it. All this wandering is making me homesick.

I am finding that America is a land where time passes quickly because no one honors it. We speed through our days the way we gobble down food and make quick work of our checking accounts. Nightmares come true when my peace is shattered on the alter of things to do and jealousy for time, unnumbered and uninterrupted, alone with my Father stalks like an angry giant around in my soul. We weren't made for this American dream.

Lhasa weighs like the stillness of many mountains on my heart. It is a slumbering beast; I can feel it's heavy breathing. But I can't wake it, not yet.

And I move step by shaky, curious step along a pathway of grace that my Father has laid out for me. Friends seem to appear just at the moment I feel that I'm falling, conversations and laughter and phone calls and meals and emails and benches in front of fountains appear like a magic walkway over an abyss I dare not contemplate long.

...and I know I can trust that Lion of the tribe of Judah for another day more... even if it's only with a heart that feels like a jar of jellybeans that someone has thrown so carelessly to the floor and shattered. Sticky jellybeans lying amidst shards of glass and dust.

May He be honored by so broken and confused an offering.

The ends...

In English we talk about frayed ends and loose ends. We talk about them as if they were broken, or we need to tie them up, or they ought not to be that way. But the truth is, that's the way that all ends are... and there's nothing we can do about it.

*** *** ***

It had been raining. Rain made the sky low and the earth seem fresh. I walked through a mist up to meet my friend at the nearest monastery. The uneven street up to the gate was slick with moisture and my friend stood in his deep red robes waiting for me in front of a tea house. We got cups which were filled by a grinning man with a dented kettle. As we sat chatting, the rain played a song that only it can sing on the roof and ground around us. The mountains were velvety green in the misty dampness and the monk reasoned Lhasa wants you to remember it beautiful so that you will come back quickly. Another monk friend joined us and we moved to a bench under a tree to eat lunch. Rain drops splashed in my cup and reminded me of all the tears I couldn't cry. My first tea in the rain and my last tea with monks.

The nunnery had been recently painted and I breathed deep in the cool air and stopped often to admire the purple flowers like jewels scattered on the ground amidst yellow flowers like flames licking up from the rocks as I walked up the mountain towards it. I made a phone call and my friend came out wearing a towel over her closely shaved head. The city looked like a sleepy child waking up in the cool morning and I sat in a room occupied only by statues of idols as my friends came and went and held my hand and laughed with me and handed me small gifts. Leaving them to the busy work of cooking for the rest of the nuns was a little bit like walking away from a bustling and familiar home scene. My first time sharing a nun's tsampa bowl and my last entirely Tibetan conversation.

I and two Chinese students sat around a too small table in a too new Chinese tea shop trying to suck our too chunky tea up wide straws and laughing about the way that the chairs were too small and made us feel fat. The shop was really just a counter with a table and chairs available mostly for decoration as sitting at it nearly forced us out the door and onto the sidewalk outside for lack of room. I stared past my students out into the blue Lhasa sky onto the dirty, periodically, crowded Lhasa street. Suddenly, a small Chinese boy appeared in the door with a little baseball cape cockled on his head. He stared at me and with hand raised he moved as if drawn to our table and left his hand suspended in the air until I instinctively shook it. Then he grinned and disappeared. When we got back to the school my students asked me if I would give them each a hug. My first small child handshake, but my last Chinese milk tea.

Recovery from a night and a day of vomiting horrors was slow and time was exactly what I didn't have. I delayed a dinner with a quirky neighbor for a day and then we went out with a group, greeting my mostly empty stomach with a tray of chicken buried amidst kilos of spice. The rain poured down around the outdoor eating area where we spat chicken bones on the floor and decided to accompany my neighbor to his room for tea later. As the hour drew late and I emptied my tiny glass cup for the last time making it quite certain that I wouldn't sleep well later, my neighbor picked up his electronic dictionary up and handed it to me. I want to tell you this he said. Yi luo ping an was the entry: have a good journey. My first dinner at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the Potala and my last interaction with an odd man transformed into a trusted friend.

I went to her room because I had been to her room nearly once a week for years. It was exactly the same as it always was and she perched on the nearly shredded stool exactly the same girl she always had been. We made sha momos that were exquisitely delicious in their simplicity and familiarity and words spilled from her slightly quivering lips. It was as if she felt compelled to tell me all of the story of her life thus far lived in order to impress upon me the weight of my entrance into it. Your hair is different, and your eyes and skin, but my heart thinks you are the same to me, as my sister she confessed. Something caught in my throat and I could only hope that my eyes could speak everything that my mouth failed to in that moment. My first compliment of such tender depth and sincerity and my last sha momos.

Immediately upon meeting her on a busy street corner she grabbed my hand and led me around the slanted and bustling allies of Lhasa running errands in a last minute rush that demanded our tea be slow and untroubled. We arrived in a tea house and ordered a thermos as though there was nothing different or final about this day. The owner sat down on a bench next to us and suddenly the entire room wanted to know everything about me. When they learned that indeed my hours left in Lhasa were numbered the owner said Don't leave with enough force that perhaps the words would generate reality from the very act of speaking them. They only managed to make my friend and I blink back tears which appeared quite suddenly to both of us. She rubbed my finger as we waited at the bus stop and watched my face slide away from hers as the bus jerked away. My first time seeing tears in her eyes and my last Tibetan tea.

I had begged for sleep. Instead I got dreams. Upon waking to my last morning on my mat which had been my bed for three years to a sky that has become like a confidant and friend to me the only thing that was sure was the clarity of the voice in my dreams which had commanded me to read in the Psalms. I sat up and opened my Book to the first section of Psalms I randomly came to. Psalm 65. Praise is rightfully yours. My first easy breath in days and the last scripture I read underneath that sky.

I sat alone in an empty apartment and felt only slightly sick to my stomach from travel anxiety. A knock at the door. Then an entire class, which I had first thought troubled beyond reaching turned dear, filed into the apartment. We sat and stood around in silence, then one student took my hand. Really we thank you teacher and we love you. My head bowed and silent hot tears filled my lap, filled the room, and the only sound was thirty two sets of damp eyes and heaving chests. My first time seeing all of the students of that class together that semester and my last.

Another knock on the same door and a different small group of students filed into my apartment empty of all except a growing pile of kadas. They wept with me, they sang to me, they laughed with me, they sat with me waiting for the car. In Tibetan we say that tears hold all the words that our hearts can't speak said one. I nodded and tears made rivers down my face. One girl stood up, thank you teacher she said as she slipped a ring off of her own finger and onto my trembling one, she usually wears this one, the other girls affirmed. Into the room walked two Tibetan teachers, one who had been like a father to me this whole time bearing kadas and gifts that only made the tears hotter and deeper. Think of seeing your mother and father said the teacher as he held my damp face and please be happy. My first gift from one finger to another and my last time weeping on the shoulder of this father figure.

Outside students were milling about in teary groups and teachers stood solemnly next to each other and we waited for the car and wept quietly. When it came roaring around the corner, the tears came harder and mouths opened to speak and instead only moaned. My students rushed toward me, one who was particularly close to me who had remained relatively composed until this moment rushed throwing her arms around my waist and laying her head on my shoulder to sob convulsively and I became sure that dying couldn't feel worse. Handshakes from teachers I could see only through a waterfall of tears and hugs and kadas and tears and I was gasping for a breath that wasn't damp from inside the car. My first time holding broken students and my last time offering any kind of consolation whatsoever.

The car made a quick stop at the gate and the sweet old gate grandfather who had forced me to sip his home brewed barley beer at new years, a request I had submitted to only because he is my friend, ran out calling my name. He flung the car door open and I leaned forward tears lashing my lap and hands as he reached in to present me with a kada. My first gift from him and my last time to look deep into his discolored, aging eyes.

I sat in the car heading dizzingly quick towards the airport with three Tibetan teachers who had become like sisters to me. We held hands and laughed about memories and watched the Lhasa river float lazily by the window. I believe we will meet again I believe it, I feel and I believe it was the chorus of our trip until my eyes became painful with dry redness and puffy from emptiness. At the airport we dragged one hundred pounds of luggage over to the check in and found out that I would be charged for half of it. Nothing could be done, no excuses were good enough, no amount of begging compelling enough. We walked over to the cashier counter who calculated the bill. As I threw bills onto the counter the cashier looked hard at the ticket. Nevermind she said this plane is big enough to handle the extra bag, you don't need to pay. My first free luggage and my last moments with dear friends.

The flight out was perfectly on time and boarding had never been less stressful. I leaned my throbbing head and heaving heart against the plane window and winced as it left the tarmac. The mountains just underneath the plane were painted in a thousand beautiful patterns and colors, green and brown and purple and orange and white and I gasped at the beauty of this place that seemed to be somehow more vibrant, more brilliant in this, my last vision, of it. My first time to see the mountains with such a clarity of their awesomeness and my last glimpses of a place that had wounded and taught me repeatedly for three years.

These are my ends. They are loose and frayed. There is no fixing them and no tying them up. That's the way all ends are.

Good-bye Lhasa, until another time... if hopes and tears add up to anything substantial at all.

Did you get the message?

My last text messages from Lhasa...

Ok, don't be sad, I know, we will can meet, you need take care of your body! Jigme and me never forget you!

Surely I will contact you! yeah, I am sorry not to see you off at the airport. It is a pity! and it is lucky not to go for I am afraid I can not control myself. I am moved by the students. We will miss you. No one talk to me in the office. No one will enjoy tea in Mr. Liu's.

Where are you?

Ok, hope everything goes well~best wishes, my forever friend~

I already miss you.

Teacher: Good luck. Have a good and successful future. I will miss you. God bless you.

Dear Kelly, I know you will leave for America. But I can't meet you. I thank you for you are my teacher. I'm glad. You will go back. I must miss you. I will send message for you usually in the future.

Do you remember we are first meet at beside our school door and conversations I will don't forget forever. I hope you will keep touch in me and take care of yourself.

Dear Teacher (Kelly) what a pity you are leaved our. I don't know you are leaved our today, I feel very sad because I love you very much and I will miss you! good luck to you!

I hope make laugh with you forever! Goodbye my best teacher!

Ms. Kelly I am so sorry. because you are about to walk tomorrow. I shall miss you. Wish you a pleasant journey.

Ms. Kelly. I will go on writing poems. I believe we can meet again. although you will go back. a friendship between you and us.

Ok, I wait for seeing you in Tibet again someday.

Damp things...

It's raining again and the ground will be mushy tomorrow but that's not what I mean.

I sat on a broken chair at the front of the classroom on my last day inside it and asked the Father of grace to surround my students and bring them safely to His side while they poured over their books and notes searching for answers for their open book exam. I blinked hard and the knowledge that this might be the last time I see them all together became a damp thought threatening to spill over my face. I turned to the painful brightness of the sky outside and breathed slowly letting the dampness sink into my stomach.

Sometimes they, my colleagues in the office and around campus, look at me too hard and I can't look back lest I be overcome with thoughts too damp to hold inside.

I had lunch with a student and tea and sadness sloshed around in my stomach and stayed right there because when she asked about one more time together I knew it would be so. Only when our eyes met did they glisten with some damp thing.

There was no chair for me in the last classroom in Lhasa I will ever be in, so I stood. I stood behind the desk I've stood behind nearly every week for three years and looked out on a roomful of students that taught me how difficult love is. I asked the Father of mercy to continue in His patience with them until they are brought safely to His side. I told Him that the next room I wanted to see them in all together again was His throne room. Dampness made my face heavy and weighed on my chest.

As each student finished their exam I took it and handed them a good-bye letter and a photo. One student, in the front sitting alone put her head on her desk and let the dampness run down her face and cause her eyes to redden. I squeezed my fingers, hoping that my damp thoughts would pool up there instead.

After class, a roomful of students made slow and silent with so many damp things walked out to the football field. They handed me a gift of handmade, beautiful Tibetan shoes that I have often seen on the feet of nomads and envied, which only fit when I'm not wearing socks. They took turns and heaped forty kadas around my neck. By the time they had finished whispering their wishes and gratitude to me it was my cold hands that had to stuff all my dampness back into my eyes.

I went to dinner with two girls who had been my students until this semester and who are consistently brave enough to overcome their entire culture's worth of shyness to speak to me. We went to the teahouse we always go to because we know the owner and he's funny. We ordered the same thermos of tea and three bowls of noodles we always order because it's delicious and the predictability is comfortable. We sat down at a dented ma jong table in the quiet tiny room, just the size for three, upstairs. The tea came and they pulled out their gifts: incense, jewelry for my family, a jar filled with paper stars, a purse...


Oh these are very perfect, I gushed, I'm so happy to have them, I assured, I will take them back to America and remember, I cracked.

The world became watery. Dampness can blur even the hardest of crumbly teahouse walls.

A teacher and two students sat at a dented ma jong table and didn't look at each other because the table was slowly becoming stained with splotches of dampness, damp drops splashed in our tea, tissues were turned into fortresses which melted in the damp. When the student sitting across from me put her head on the table and sobbed openly, in a way that is uniquely not at all Tibetan, all my hot damp thoughts from the day ran down my face like streams. Our meal was eaten through sniffles and seen through eyes of glass.

This is my last week in Lhasa. All my things are damp.

Boundless trustworthiness

If you had been standing under my window this morning and heard on the breeze a girl's voice demanding that a new song be sung by all the earth it would have been because the Spirit told me that today, my tenth day left in Lhasa, would be a psalm 96 day.

Some days I wake up and read something and I don't know why but I have to read it again... and then once again...

And in my mind these words stick and I know my Father's trustworthiness is uniquely boundless, and then I have confirmation days that go like this...

I delivered a plant to a bare little office inhabited by an awkward Chinese man before class and the timing was perfect because we got to have a long chat despite the minor interruption of being given a gift from the Language department chairman who considers himself my father. 

I had exactly seven minutes before my last class of the year to go down the hall to another office to pick up my exam copies from some friends who had nearly made me lose it in tears at the banquet the night before. 

I was shocked to see more than thirty students in a class that had been averaging around twenty and was blessed that they all seemed to want to be a part of a class picture outside on the football field not an hour later. 

I went to lunch with four students who I needed to have one last lunch with to give them a small graduation gift and I know the lunch was meant to be because until the food arrived none of us could look at each other because we were all trying not to cry. 

I got a phone call and described the situation to the students I was with who gladly finished quickly and helped me give a book bag of goodies to my beggar children, which was certainly an ordained moment because His goodness and plenty were given witness. 

I climbed the crumbly stairs to my apartment and thought about calling my endearingly odd neighbor about when this weekend we could have a last dinner and right as I did that my phone rang and it was him. Come to my house he said. 

I went to his room and we found a good time for our dinner and he revealed that this dinner wasn't actually his invitation but another friend's who wanted to have dinner with me. Then why didn't you invite me? I inquired, because I want to have a lunch with you another day he laughed of course all the same people will be there. 

I rested for a moment in this soon no longer mine apartment and praised my Father who makes all things good and thanked His Spirit which had so obviously guided every single minute of the day thus far. 

I marched into a nearly completely full afternoon class and knew that the students were far more concerned with taking a class picture than reviewing for their exam and so we went outside and took care of that. Moments were sweet as students asked me to come visit their family once more, stand here for a picture, and can all our classroom boys take one together with you? 

I took one last picture with our gate grandfather to his delight and walked arm and arm with a student who I wish for all the world I could just take with me. 

I waited in my apartment for a former student to arrive and take my last plant home with him. He came, flopped down on the couch, and bemoaned the empty room shaking his head I can't believe you are leaving. He drank a cup of water and said I have a gift for you, but I wouldn't bring it because I didn't want this to be our last  time to meet. 

I walked with him back out to the school gate to wait for some teachers that needed to take me out to dinner. As we sat in the taxi one who has become a dear friend of mine leaned into me and whispered, I think all of the English teachers will see you to the airport, I am going to arrange for the school to send a bus.

I ate dinner with them and ran into a random friend and we walked around an island arm in arm as the wind cooled our overheated, overfull bodies and I couldn't help but comment again and again at how green all the mountains were this year.

Could it be that the mountains are green and the breeze cool and the day  perfectly timed because it all heard me this morning saying again and again...

Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice; let the sea and all that fills it resound. Let the fields and everything in the exult. Then all the trees of the forest will shout for joy before Him, for He is coming.

And days like today are evidence that the heavens, the earth, the sea, the fields, the trees, and I do all that... and I can be sure that His proimse to return is found sure somewhere in the depth of His boundless trustworthiness that revealed itself to me today.

He is coming, back.

and I trust Him.

A love story.

This is a story of love.

It began with pain; a bruise on the leg of a beggar child after he was kicked by a passing student.

It was breathed into being by grubby hand prints, and hungry faces. It was nurtured by a single persistent request for money and confusion in watery child eyes when people ran away from her filthy presence. It was birthed when the children revealed their names, their family, their simply childishness, their desire for some milk more than money.

This love story grew up in poverty and grime. It dragged cardboard boxes around in the streets and didn't wear socks and one time lost all of their shoes in the stinking ditch near the school gate. It broke their skin, cracked their noses, chapped their faces, tore their fingers, and one time left open pussy wounds all over the face of the smallest one. This love story only grew stronger and went out looking for the children to clean them, washing their faces and skinny arms up to their shoulders, and nurse them back to relative health.

It grew, not in time, but rather in packages of chicken which were bought consistently every time the children appeared. The love story started to include not just the beggars but the shopkeepers, students, and even people in another hemisphere. It matured until the beggars became claimed and watched for and packages were sent on their behalf and a grand plan to celebrate this love story was hatched and they asked students and learned the name of the pale one they used to believe was called 'Hello'.

Ms. Killy, when will you go to your hometown? they asked one day in a surprising change from their normal question which was can we buy something to eat?  

And then they disappeared. For more than a week there were no children.

This story of love became a story of agony as a book bag, bought by a friend who heard the story and became part of it, filled with stuffed animals, coloring, books, and socks from America, as well as toothbrushes, snacks, tissues from here, sat getting dusty in a quickly emptying apartment. The police are collecting the beggars and sending them away this month, another friend sadly considered and the love story became frantic.

Love reaches entirely new levels when it can do nothing more than return to the source of its perfection.

************************************

A phone call: Ms. Kelly, the beggars are here! They came back! They are at the school gate! I will tell them to wait for you!

A teacher and three students quickly finished lunch, dashed to the school gate, scooped up the two smallest beggars as the oldest road a rusty bike that was at least ten sizes too large for him behind them.

A book bag bulging with things was ushered down from an apartment to a quiet place in the shade behind the building, right into the arms of the slightly confused, though happy, children.

A threesome of students unzipped the bag which the children didn't know what to do with and started to unload its contents on the grass for the wide-eyed, silent, dusty children to observe.

A tear, then two, then many ran down the faces of the students as they saw all that had been given. The children tilted their heads in disbelief until a stuffed monkey was drawn from the bag and the smallest one started giggling.

A love story was celebrated by three little ones, the very picture of every poor little one that the Son of perfect Love loves, shuffled down a broken, dirty sidewalk balancing a too large bike between them carrying a book bag filled with more than they had ever owned.


Ms. Kelly, today I am very moved. I know you really love those beggars. I... I want to be like you... I think you are like god declared one, rather choked up, student.


Now I will tell you which god I'm like...

And a new love story flinched with its first signs of life.

Don't go... and other things I heard today.

"You are thinking too much, this is bad for your heart."

"Without you I don't want to think, I will be so bored and miss you always."

"Teacher, we never forget you."

"We will all miss you."

"I... I can't say."

"This isn't beer, it's tears... I have many words to say but only remember this: take care of yourself."

"Tell your father thank you thank you."

"Kelly, oh Kelly it will be okay, only be happy now."

"Teacher, what size shoe do you wear?"

"She has been our teacher for three years what does the price matter?"

"You should go back to America, get married, have a baby, and then my heart is so happy."

"When Kelly came to the school my English got so much better, she is my friend."

"What I admire most about you is that, in three years, you never complained. You give me a good impression of foreigners."

"If you ever have opportunity to return you must take it."

"Oh I will miss you SO much."

*********************

"Don't go."