Donna Miller

The first time I prayed, really prayed, I was 16 and bleeding from a self inflicted wound. I wanted to die, but I didn't want to want to die. I begged this God I'd seen move in other peoples lives, this God they spoke of with such warmth and familiarity at the soup kitchen I frequented, to do something. Stop the bleeding, just until I get to the hospital. And He did. The bleeding stopped until I reached the hospital emergency lot, where it started again. The maker of the universe had heard my prayer.

Or maybe my first prayer goes back further. As a little girl with almost no knowledge of God, confusing prayers with wishes but knowing for sure that I needed something outside of myself. My brother, homeless and addicted to drugs, was missing again. I sat at my bedroom window, in that dusty pink room with the teddy bear border, and watched for the first star of the night. "I wish I may, I wish I might, Have him home safe tonight." God answered that one too.

I was 20 when I prayed to meet my husband, although I didn't know that was what I was doing. I was huddled in the alcove of a closed shop, homeless and trying to stay dry from the rain, lamenting that I couldn't believe that God could love me, that anyone could love me. "Lord," I asked "Send me someone to help me believe that I am lovable."  I met my husband a week later. Married him 6 months after that.

But at some point my prayers became safe and sanitized. I learned more about what faith was supposed to look like and I became afraid to pray from a place of any real need. I asked God to bless this and that, to help me, to show me his will. But I stopped falling on my knees and crying out in desperate need to the God that knew my heart.

This past year when the bible felt dry and empty, the psalms are where I quenched my thirst.  The psalms are full of messy, awkward, slightly heretical prayers. Prayers that question God, Prayers that are full of pain and fear. Some of them turn around by the end, into praises of God's faithfulness. Some of them don't.

Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am faint;
heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony.
 My soul is in deep anguish.
How long, Lord, how long?
Psalm 6:2,3

Why, Lord, do you stand far off?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?
Psalm 10:1

How long, Lord, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Habakkuk 1:2,3

Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
Hebrews 4:13-16

                                                                                                                                                                             
I've had  three days off due to the Mongolian national holiday called Naadam.

I know, a good cross cultural worker would be out there dressed up in a traditional costume tasting all the national foods and cheering on the three manly games (wrestling, archery and horse racing...of course...could it get any manlier than that?).

I did that once....it was fun but not fun enough to do again.


So I will disqualify myself as that kind of worker.
(now you don't have to)

This week the entire city semi shuts down and all of our staff left for the countryside to partake in this extremely wonderful event.



I basically waved everyone goodbye and then did the happy dance.

We have had numerous guests in our home on a constant basis for close to two years now.
I love our guests.
But this week they too headed off to celebrate in various forms.

And, get this, our house was completely empty of anyone but our family for almost an entire week.

So, I celebrated as anyone of you would.....come on admit it...

I went wildly dormant.

I mean completely, heinously lazy kind of do nothing dormant.

I slept until 11am....proof that this is possible after forty!

I stayed in my pajamas and ate cereal for lunch and dinner.

I watched ten episodes of parenthood I'm a late bloomer on season 3 so don't give anything away.
Don't judge, I've been out of the USA for 8 years...it's a wonder I've even heard about the show. 

Slight feelings of guilt would come up when I walked by my husband Troy's  office (our bedroom with a real desk...lucky guy) and I would see him feverishly typing away on his pile of work.
But I skillfully slapped the guilt aside with an hour or two of answering emails, a tiny bit of camp planning and then made sure the bedroom door was closed tight so I would not have to see that again.
AND....I loved every single minute of it.  

It's over now, and the team is back at work....(uhmmmm....except me who slept in again today...oops) But this time it was only until 8am and I am semi working from home. (I gotta ease back into it ok!)

It's that team who is back to work that I want to write about. I had some time to think about them this week, and the thoughts made me happy.

The team I work with is as eclectic as you could get.
We've got a mixed bag.
The personality blend alone could make us look a bit schizophrenic as a whole....
And then you toss nationality in there and....

WHOOOOOA Nelly......

Did that really just happen?

But we work together to do these remarkable feats of wonder.
I'm not exaggerating.
Once my teammates decided that since we could by no means bring one hundred children from the orphanage to Disney...we'd bring Disney to the orphanage.
And we did.

Complete with a space mountain roller coaster that cost us a total of fifty dollars to re-create.
Well, fifty dollars and Troy's two arms that stayed sore for a month solid because he and a dear friend were literally the mechanics behind the roller coaster....the guys who shook the swing for 100 children (again and again and ONE MORE TIME PLEASE!!)

That's the kind of brilliant stuff that shoots out of our team when we all put our heads together.

But there is something else about the team, something that goes far less noticed.
The unheralded behind the scene details that makes working with these people such a high honor privilege to me.
The every day living of their lives that I find extraordinary to observe.

Here are just a few of those unsung stories  I'd like to share with my small world of readers.
I hope the stories  inspire you, as they have me....to just be a stinking awesome human on this planet.

Be encouraged by the woman on my team and a young man who lives with us who drove across town to the home of another cross cultural worker to pick lice eggs out of her hair.  This woman with the awful lice was not a part of our team, but she was desperately seeking lice picking assistance. As you can imagine this is not a job that ANYONE wants to have to ask for help with or that anyone wants to  run towards.

I know...I've been her! 

Any excuse at all is a good excuse to not help someone pick out lice eggs from their scalp.
My teammate answered the phone, and I watched her face contort into all sorts of yuckiness....and then she said, "Yes...I'm coming" 
When she hung up she stood in our living room looking lost.
I grabbed all my kits, combs and short tips on how to rid yourself of this hellish bug (not that I'm an expert or anything...wink wink)
And then placing all of it into her arms I said, "I'll pray for you." (yep I'm not as awesome as my teammate). However, a young man who lives with us saw my teammates apprehensiveness and jumped up laughing, "I'll help"...he said.

Those two spent an entire afternoon picking eggs when no one else would and showing up for someone that in her most vulnerable state...really needed a TRUE FRIEND.

They came home at 9pm that night....with a smile on their faces. "It was sort of fun" my teammate laughed as she got out of her car.
I tossed them a bag to put all their clothes in and told them they were a maniac awesome human beings  (from the doorway). "Talk to you after you shower....." I shouted. 

And this act alone....stayed with me for much longer than any of our tremendous works on the mission field.
Because this was an unseen act....the kind of thing that no one wants to do. It wasn't for a Mongolian so it won't make it into her newsletter. But it made it into my heart, and my spirit and I think it changed me.
I'm a better woman because I saw their genuine goodness.
Saw it with my own eyes. 

Be inspired by the choice of another teammate who earns five-hundred dollars a month in a society where the cost of living is equivalent to the USA.

Be challenged, as I am, by her choice to recognize her own wealth. 

She is my Mongolian teammate. 
And when she reads the Bible verses commanding the rich to take care of the poor, she does not read about some TRUMP type.  
She sees herself. 
She realizes that most of the world is living off of less than $2 a day.
To her, SHE is the rich.

And so when she came face to face with a suffering human in the South Sudan who was hungry, exhausted and overwhelmed by war she decided to do something about it.

My "rich" teammate is paying tuition fees for a young woman she met last year so that this young woman in war torn nation can go to university and perhaps just maybe, better her life.
She never talks about this sacrifice. But I know about it because I'm married to her boss (who tells  me almost everything.) 
This act that was done in near secret has reawakened my generosity.
It has helped me to no longer see myself as  "poor".
I will not wait until I am "rich" to give.
Or rather, I have been reminded of my own wealth.
I saw this through her gift to the suffering.
Saw it with my own eyes.

If you're doing something good that just doesn't seem to be paying back the glory you expected, be lifted by the story from my teammate who wanted to feed a hungry child on the street.
She took that child and the child's father to a local cafe to eat because she could not stand to walk by one more beggar and do nothing.

It was a disaster.
The child did not like the food.
The father and child argued about it.
She did not speak the language so the awkwardness just swarmed around her like a buzzing mass of flies.
In the end no one said thank you.
She was left in the restaurant with half eaten food and the stares of the nationals pelting her back.

But...she'd do it again she said.
"I did it because I felt I must." 
And then she added something to the likes of,  It's not about me anyway...who cares how I feel.

Through my teammates willingness to act,  I cannot tell myself the lie ever again that an awkward moment equals failure.

I can not tell myself the lie that every right and good deed will make you feel good, or that it should. I'm no longer afraid to do the awkward thing...If I feel I must.
I'm no longer waiting for a gold star moment at the end of my good deed doing.
I just do it for the sake of doing it.
I have a real life example of what it looks like when you step out on a limb and the branch breaks....but you survive.
I saw her do it.
I saw it with my own eyes. 

If you're wondering when is a good time to obey God, be moved to action by the story of my teammates who showed up at the airport with four children and two brown boxes each.

That's ALL they brought to Mongolia.

Two brown boxes each because they did not have enough cash to buy luggage for the whole family.

We moved them into their home in the slums of Mongolia where they believed they were being sent to know and love the suffering poor. I was concerned because they did not have a refrigerator, they did not have beds, a couch or any of the American "necessities" to make a home.

When I asked them if they were ready to shop for those things, my teammate answered, "We don't have funding just yet for that stuff and we're thinking maybe God wants us to truly know what it's like to live a simple life...so we're just waiting until He provides...just like our neighbors have to wait."

(did your jaw just drop...because mine did)

Through my teammates obedience in less than perfect circumstances I have learned the valuable lesson that the right time to obey God is when he tells you to do something NOT when you are good and ready and comfortable to do it.

I learned more about the hard walk of faith as I watched these teammates.
I've gained courage to walk on in my faith because I saw it.
Saw it with my own eyes.

And that brings me back to my husband Troy behind the closed door pounding the keys.
If anyone is a behind the scene, don't let the left hand know what the right hand is doing,  life giving kind of guy....it's him.
I used to get angry when he gave in silence...whatever it was...because I wanted people to know the kind of man they were dealing with.

I've never seen another soul silently spend themselves on others the way he does.
Troy rarely gets the pat on the back.
I get it a lot because my actions are quite open. (I'm the Facebook, newsletter writing, blogger)
I'm the open to the world people person. 
To the naked eye it could look like he is just along for the ride on my holy roller coaster.

What has Troy taught me?
Because of him, I will never again judge a person by their exterior.
(unless they have a mullet .... I mean come on...)  *
But I digress..
Over the years it's become sad to me how a "friendly" "charismatic" kind of personality can be dubbed a better overall human being.
If you're the kind of cross cultural worker  that throws in a lot of "HALLELUJAHS" then it's assumed you are FULL OF JESUS!
However, if you're not that great at working a crowd and you think more than you talk......you might just need a little more friendly Jesus...(because yeah...Jesus was the friendliest guy of all...?)

But the steadiest rock solid believer I know is also one of the worst social performers on the planet.

Almost everything he does is behind the scenes.
I sure could learn from that.
And I'm better because I saw it.
Saw it with my own eyes.


                                                                       * The mullet is still very much alive here in Mongolia....so it's a real battle. :p

She fought bitterness valiantly and spent her days weeding out the roots of hatred as if it was the key to all that really needed to take place long after she was gone.

That's what I'm aiming for.

When it is all said and done....may the arrow hit there.
May it stick.

To me, JOY is the absence of bitterness in the midst of great sorrow.



Because there will be great sorrow for all of us from time to time.
And for some of us, there will be great sorrow almost always.

I was not acquainted with great sorrow until my journey brought me near it, to the borders and then well within it. For most of my life great sorrow was something I saw on the news, or read in a story. I was keenly aware that it was distant, like a poisonous fog that lay over other lands but not my own.

It was upon meeting great sorrow that my faith first took a shaking.
I'm not talking about a little tremor here, but a full blown axis altering quake.
It's a story I have not yet shared with many but I remember sharing it with my mom while she too was in the midst of great sorrow.

It was a July afternoon and the two of us were sitting outside on her front porch.
I had flown home in May because of her diagnosis with stage four breast cancer that had metastasized to her bones, lung and liver.  Her spine had collapsed on itself due to the radiation she was undergoing. She was sitting in a contraption meant to pull her spine straight. She had lost the ability to take care of herself, my once strong and independent mama who found her joy in caring for others, had been rendered completely helpless. To get her out on that porch took a lot of patient work and coaxing her that she could actually walk with her walker.

"One small step at a time mom."

By the time we made it to the porch she was shaking.
Beads of sweat on her forehead from the effort it took.
Getting back into the chair caused her excruciating pain.
She was not happy when she finally made it.
It wasn't the glorious  mother daughter moment I had first imagined it would be.

We sat there in silence.

I tried to start conversation, but she did not respond.

The silence went on for hours.

She was lost in her heart. Her eyes were closed but she wasn't sleeping.
I wondered what her thoughts were.
I imagined she was fighting....fighting hard.
I didn't know what her battle looked like or exactly who the enemy was but I envisioned it was something that could have drawn in a great crowd had any of us been able to see it.

Maybe I told  her because she was quiet and so aloof that it was as if I were speaking to no one at all.
Maybe I told her because I suspected what she was fighting was similar to my own enemy  and I, still a selfish child at heart, wanted my mom to teach me how to do it too.

"I may have lost my faith mom." I broke the stillness with words that I believed would have brought her out of her own deep quiet.

It didn't.

She remained far away.

I told her then about the great sorrow that I had been exposed to for a few years living near the suffering, and that because of this I was unsure of all that I believed.

I spilled out all the details, all the questions, all the fears that I was holding now for too long.

Only after I had shared my darkest thoughts, and cried out all the years in Mongolia did mom break her silence.
She broke it with a whisper.

"Don't get bitter" she whispered. "Fight it."
and after a little while lingered between those words she added,
"I'm fighting too."

It was then that I recognized for certain,  my fight was with bitterness.
Something in the way she whispered it caught my hearts attention.
I knew I had to take this serious.
I needed to take out the roots of hatred and begin to offensively battle with great intention the enemy that was sure to steal all joy.

Because JOY was what was needed to survive the onslaught of great sorrow...and JOY was what was really being stolen from me.


I began to learn from mom.
I watched her fight that beast of bitterness and she did it well.
She fought it and kept her JOY.
The rest of her days were a testimony of this. 
Although death found her at last...bitterness lost. 
It never took her JOY.

And after mom left, I needed to watch others fight bitterness.
It had become my way of fighting it myself. To watch others find JOY in the midst of great sorrow had become one of my greatest weapons.

I began to look for the fighters and I discovered them everywhere.

It's one of the worlds best kept secrets...the TRUTH that there are more people actively fighting and winning over bitterness than we realize.
The media, the world around us ,will focus us in on those who have quit the fight.
We are often unaware of  how convinced we truly are that JOY is nowhere and that bitterness has won.

And there is only one solution.
To turn your eyes onto those who are fighting bitterness and living JOY.
Look for it as intently as you look for the opposing side.
Look for it at work, at school, in those around you.
Seek out the stories of JOY.

This week for me, it was at our camp for the orphanage.
Here there is great sorrow.

This is where our team spends most of July. Out in the countryside organizing a giant camp for 
nearly one hundred children.

Children without parents who can care for them or wish to care for them.

Children who have stories of pain and rejection so deep they pierce your soul when the ear hears them. Pierce it sharp and deep. If you are not trained to know when bitterness has afflicted you, these stories alone could take you down.

I know this, I've learned it from experience. 

And here, in the midst of great sorrow there is JOY.
The children are so full of JOY that it leaks out all over the place.

I'm not saying there is no pain.
I'm not saying there is no struggle.
I'm NOT saying there are no problems here.
All of that abounds along with fighting, anger, bullying and harsh words.
It's all here.

And so is JOY.

Before my mom died, before I learned to fight bitterness I could not see what I see now.
The intensity of the sorrow overtook my ability to notice anything else.
Bitterness had me in a choke hold with it's right hand and squeezing the life out of my joy with it's left hand.
Had I not learned how to fight, this would have been the game changer.
I could not have continued on with the work we do.
But I learned to fight. 

And here now, I see it everywhere.
JOY.

Here it is heard through songs sung by the children so loudly and so freely that you would have to have a heart of stone to not want to sing along. The song pierces the night sky, pierces harder than the bitterness and helps us all overcome the sorrow. Joy wins, this starry night.

Here it is seen through a teenage boy,  the coolest guy in the camp, standing proud when a fake gold metal is placed around his neck. He won the gold for best leader of his team. His face bursts open in smile and he means it. He fought bitterness for years, and he won. He will leave this orphanage one day soon with his joy still intact. 

Here it is experienced through our volunteers who carry the stories and the sorrow of the children and yet as the camp fire burns to high heaven, the guitars come out and they encourage the children to dance the night away. They encourage them by dancing like little children themselves and letting go of all the sadness giving way to the JOY that endures despite it all. And the children follow.

Here it is felt through small whispers, "Shari I'll see you next week right?  one little girl asks me. "You're coming back aren't you?"Bitterness, determined to train her to not love or hope or allow space for  JOY, loses again when she asks me to come back. She fights to keep her heart open fights like a warrior. I see the warrior and I am inspired by her to keep fighting...keep battling...it's worth it.

Here I'm made aware of it through my ministry team.
The team who knows all the details.
All the gory bitterness heaving details that can drive stakes of rage through your very soul if you let it.
But they are fighters too. My team. Oh how I am inspired by them.
I see them laughing, living JOY and giving out more than what is ever humanly given to them.
JOY is alive here in them. 

Here the JOY outdoes the bitterness.
Here the fight is going on hard.
RIGHT HERE in the very midst of GREAT sorrow. 

Here I'm reminded again that in the midst of great sorrow it is possible to find even greater JOY.
Eyes wide open....
Eyes wide open my friends...look for it and you will see it too.

Our volunteers throwing out the JOY like candy at a parade!

Laughter,

Oh how I missed you.

Last night, we sat at our round table with our co workers, who have also become some our richest friends.

Rich in

Love,

     Endurance,

                                                                          Generosity,

                                                                                                                              and
                                                                                             
                                                                                                                      Selflessness 

among many other invaluable character strengths. 
  
And we, the war torn staff of our NGO, we are angry people in our hearts, some of the time. 
Angry about the injustice done to the weak ones of society.

Some of us have just returned from a visit to the shattered places on the globe where real war is being waged, and people are murdering, starving, and flushing out children from a land like you would flush out a rodent. 

Others of us have been here, fighting for the orphans, strengthening the child just off the streets, interviewing students who are looking to us as their only hope for a future or picking through corruption as one picks through piles of garbage, hoping to find something of value. 

Often we are in long meetings, or report writing with donors, who desire numbers, many wins and minimal loss.
Donors who don't understand that to walk with the suffering means to walk...for a very long time... in the muck and mire of not just poverty and abuse but the after affects of those events.
The twisted hearts, that do not bend back into shape over night, these are the hearts we are holding.
The hearts we are angry about....

"why don't you help more people?" some donors may say.  
"Only 24 girls in a shelter???....seems like our money could be used much more effectively..."
"How sustainable is this project?" 
 
There are occasions when we want to give up in the middle of those meetings, to run away, to throw our hands in the air and quit..... to stop trying to move mountains, but we don't. 
We could never run away, because we believe we are doing it for a much greater cause than our own temperamental egos.  

We are hurt, wounded from the fight, but not destroyed...

And last night proved it.

Siew Ling, our partner in this mission, had fallen sick for a few days, which rendered her in bed to rest. 
For the first time, in what seemed like forever, she had the time to watch television. 

And here she sat at our table last night, telling us in very serious tones, all that she had learned from the television about baby crocodiles. 

And I tried.

I tried so hard to take her seriously. 
Knowing what this dear woman has seen, knowing the battles she has taken on for others, knowing full well how she has laid down her own "life" and chosen to live no longer for herself but for those who have no voice,  now sitting across from me, seriously talking about the plight of those little crocodiles who would be eaten fresh out of their egg before they even had a chance to reach water. 

And then one of us began to chuckle. 
That one chuckle let loose the chuckle in all of us around the table.

"And sometimes their father will eat them too..." said Siew ling
"Out of 50 eggs, there are often zero survivors!"

The chuckles turned into giggles,  and contagiously took over the room. 
And soon, Siew Ling was laughing too, laughing from the deepest part of her, as the rest of us were.

And there were tears of laughter, for once, coming from this heartsick group.

The thought of the plight of the crocodile being of such great concern, in comparison to all that we have come to know as human depravity....just made us laugh.

A lot.

And it felt so good.

Crocodile tears. 

For sure, our hearts are still soft. 
We have not come out the other end of this with stone cold spirits.

Life is very beautiful still. We all believe that, fully.
No darkness, no evil, no destructive thing can take this away from us. 

Last nights laughter  reminded me that we are not crushed.
We can still feel....even for a crocodile. 




 

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