On Not Saying Goodbye

August 10, 2014August 10, 2014 / Erin Kirk / 1 Comment

There’s this thing on the ship that people talk about all the time. Or maybe they don’t talk about it enough. It’s a nasty little gut check, a surprise I got this week as posts from DFW, Heathrow and Tenerife filled my newsfeed.

Every day, Mercy Shippers make you fall in love with them and then they leave.

They leave Texas for the ship. They leave the ship to go home, or they leave the ship forever to write the next chapter in their lives. After returning from field service in Haiti, and saying goodbye (or not) to a group of 30 (not 31) people who forced me to come up higher, listen harder, pray deeper and trust God more than I ever have, my heart broke in new and unusual ways.

My gosh, I’ve only known them for eight weeks. Please. But I’ve been skulking around their lives the whole time, asking questions I can’t even believe I ask. Questions that maybe we should ask more often in church, but don’t because we’re too busy, polite or afraid.

“Tell me about your Dad.”

“What’s the Lord saying about that?”

“What’s happening on the boyfriend front?”

I don’t know who gave me permission, maybe I just gave it to myself, but when you ask hard questions, people bristle, they fight, they cry or they breathe a sigh of relief and say, “My God, do you see me in here?”

Jesus sees you in there. It’s his light we’re shining. His is the only one I’ve found that reliably chases out the darkness. There are people sitting next to you right now, whose story would break you in half, if you knew it, but we avoid it because people are messy and loving them is costly.

Especially when they leave.

I’ve decided this is the Lord’s way of teaching me empathy for the crew of the Africa Mercy – people who live, work, eat, cry, pray and laugh together until the day they walk down the gangway in tears or stand atop it in tears, waving. Painful goodbyes are such a regular event on the ship, people say they’re not sure leasing real estate in their hearts is worth it. They know exactly how bereft that land will be when their sweet little squatters are gone.

That’s plainer to me now after a year of Gateways, and in particular this field service in Haiti, where I camped on a bunch of new real estate and let people camp on mine.

One day, when I nearly hurled a garden hoe across a huge weedy field and later sat on a 100-degree rooftop and cried, two different somebodies showed up to remind me that God is working in me too, and if all I can muster is to walk humbly as I grope my way through, well then, they’d happily stand by, praying.

I’d love to say I have a salve for the painful goodbye, but I don’t and frankly I doubt I’m meant to. Maybe a little longing, a little pain is part of the fullness Jesus had in mind when he explained what he was doing here. Remember Jesus didn’t promise us happy, he promised us full, and there is a difference. So if full means missing these faces until I climb the gangway again, I’ll take it.

Ship videographer Josh Callow put it like this in a blog post he called The Pieces of My Scattered Heart, which I beg you to read because it’s his heart laid bare on this topic, in a fearless and magnificent display.

The thing that is so great about Mercy Ships is the ferocity with which we love. These people that travel across the world to work for no pay to serve the poorest of the poor are some of the most selfless folks you’ll ever meet. They dive in head first and love at full speed…

So June 2014 On Boarding – Go dive in and love at full speed. Then pair up in threes as soon as you can.

xoErin

*As ever, the thoughts are my own, not those of Mercy Ships, but I’m pretty sure you know that.

Thoughts From the Ranch.

August 6, 2014August 7, 2014 / Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

There’s a place on the ranch I’ve photographed more times than I can ever count. This is it.

I lived here for six years and watched the seasons change that field like the Lord expects us to change – from glory to glory in ever increasing measure. But even now, every time I try to capture it, to own it by putting it in words or photographs, it slips through my hands and breaks my heart with yearning.

When it comes to me and the ranch, the only thing I can have is the moment we inhabit together and that, I think, is exactly how it is with God.

There is only now.

But as ever, Ike is down the road on his backhoe and the neighbors are sipping cocktails. The bald eagles fish from the snag, and the sun outside Dodo’s warms the pines just like it has for the last hundred summers.

When the sun hits their ruddy, old bark, their fragrance is so subtle and fine, it’s almost hard to take, but if I stop to breathe it in, to capture it, it fades. The only way I get to smell it again is to walk slowly and appreciatively through the pine groves breathing normally and saying thank you.

The Psalmist says, in his presence is the fullness of joy. He didn’t say I could capture it like fireflies in a jar to save for later.

The word of God and the mountains have helped me understand something I never did before:

You and I are just as much part of this creation as the peaks, the meadow grass and the rainbow trout with their dusky pink sides, but we’re the deeply beloved part that He made in his image. We forget that all the time, and maybe that’s why we snap so many pictures, and write so many words. It’s like we’re trying to remember something the daisies and the dragonflies never forgot.

We are His, and each time the sunset drops a pink coverlet over the mountains, he is calling us back into the fullness of joy. His joy, right now, where he wanted all of us, all along.

Notes From Haiti

July 30, 2014September 19, 2014 / Erin Kirk / 8 Comments

It’s always the same for me, flying into the developing world.

I look at the miles of tin shacks, busted up towns, dirt roads and smoke and I get scared. The terrain rips my carefully-affixed American blinders off like Bandaids, and fear of the unknown whispers, “Welcome to ugly, welcome to depraved, you’ll probably be a victim of something heinous here and nobody will help you.”

Luckily, those thoughts are frail. As long, sweaty moments pass in immigration, the fear recedes, because staying mentally hysterical takes a lot of energy and everybody else, the Haitians I mean, are just waiting quietly.

Haiti, it turns out, is so much like West Africa it’s disorienting to recall that Florida is only 800 miles away. One hour and 20 minutes on American Airlines flight 337.

But Florida is so much farther than 800 miles away.

Kim Kardashian if you’re reading this, and I’m pretty sure you are, you ought to swing down to Haiti on your next trip to Miami. I think if you saw it – kids struggling to scratch out a fourth grade education, some of them eating only 4-5 times a week, – it might wreck you permanently.

America darling, we need a good wrecking.

Christian ministries like Nehemiah Vision feed local kids everyday, sometimes twice. They host English camps and the only community clinic for miles. They grow food, train local leaders and create jobs for about 80 Haitians. Plus, its founder is Haitian, and we, this rag-tag band of multi-national Mercy Shippers, work under his authority.

If NVM’s work sounds noble, I assure you it is, but I struggle to describe how grinding hard it is. On Monday, the heat index was 112 and it hasn’t rained since March. The streets of Port Au Prince are so choked with potholes and busses, pregnant stray dogs and noise, it’s hard to hear yourself think. Many of the children from English camp told us their life dream is just to get out.

On days where I secretly calculated the minutes until I would use my vast American privilege to get out myself, it occurred that if I learned nothing but deep compassion and respect for Haitian resilience, that would be a fine start.

Pastor Pierre, NVM’s founder, who grew up in a dirt floor tin shack, got out, but in an act of sheer obedience, he doubled back. Today, he’s responsible for a small slice of a new Haiti, a generation of readers, leaders and lights. His students are passing their exams in the nation’s top tenth percentile.

So I’ve been thinking, why is it fair to single out Kim Kardashian as the most irresponsibly gauche and indifferent American? To the Haitians who survive on $2 a day, my middle class life in the US is just as impossibly lavish as Kim’s. No sense in me sending the responsibility for poverty up the food chain to someone even better heeled than me.

I’ve bagged the white guilt though, recognizing it for the waste of time it is. What I have instead is responsibility to a generous maker to whom I’ll give an account. And when he says “Baby, I put you in a good family, in good schools, in America at its economic apex. What did you do with that?”

What will I say?

I’m rarely sure of the right answer, so at the start of each day, I sit with Jesus and ask “what do you want me to do today?”

Then, I just get busy doing that.