Hypothetical question. Let’s say someone asked you to help an impoverished family this holiday season. Who would you help first?
Maybe this feels a little tricky.
Maybe like me, your house isn’t really all that close to people who need help.
THE AWKWARD MOM
because uncomfortable conversations are the ones worth having
Category: compassion (page 3 of 7)
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Playing with a friend in Uganda
A couple of weeks ago my trusty Subaru was packed with a bunch of sweaty kids (mine), headed home from our organization’s picnic. The mood was light, the windows down. We played two of my admittedly weird games:
- Where in life do you think your sibs and yourself will be in twelve years?
- Where around the world could you see yourself going to help people?
The first was pretty hysterical, peppered with some interjections about
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A late addition to this post: There’s another step you can take to stand with refugees. Consider signing the UN’s #withrefugees petition here!
I want to introduce you to my friend Pawad. Pawad is South Sudanese, and he’s from the Dinka tribe. Physically, this means that when Pawad gives me a hug, the top of my head aligns with his armpits. It means that when he smiles with those white-white teeth against his 80% cacao skin, it’s as if someone flipped on a couple hundred watts of electricity. He’s built like a piece of black licorice, limbs long and loose.
Pawad is fully scholarshipped to African Renewal University in Uganda, after which he hopes to become a pastor to his people, many of whom have been traumatized by 35 years of war. Coincidentally, Pawad is also a refugee.
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It’s an interesting dynamic for an Americans traveling to Asia or Africa when we first encounter the shame/honor thing in cultures. To my naked eye, it’s sometimes looked like them not telling the truth.
I’m probably going to botch this story–but I think of my sister and her husband in Asia looking for a pair of shoes. The shopkeeper says, Of course we have your size! but comes out repeatedly with pairs too small…and then actually hides. (Yes. Literally.)
But is there an element of truth to graciously covering someone’s weakness? What if they…don’t have what we want?
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In the car last week, my kids and I were discussing the American Civil War–and whether they thought it was initially about slavery or about the states’ rights. Maybe you’re like me in these discussions, or in reading books about abolitionists: Maybe you wonder whether you would have had what it takes to do what was illegal and could put your family in jeopardy in order to free slaves.
Confession: I caught myself thinking of slavery as something that happened back then.
As if abolitionists were only needed then.
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In college, I answered a youth crisis hotline one night a week. So many who called in were so…raw. Or embarrassed. Or afraid.
There was something freeing, I think, calling someone anonymously; at finally being able to share the invisible bag of stones they carried around, its weight occasionally flopping over their foreheads and making it hard to see anything else.
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Of all the vibrancy of being in another culture this week, one of my least favorite is the language barrier. It’s as if I’m constantly stopping myself from asking the questions I want to know of people–from relating.
The late neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, in his bestselling When Breath Becomes Air, writes of the two areas of speech in the brain:
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Today, I woke up in Thailand.
My sister and her husband start their day early on behalf of their community, feeding a bunch of kids breakfast so they can grow up strong. The food is cooked by an amazing local Burmese woman with a heart even bigger than her industrial-sized rice cooker.
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Recently I went to a friend’s house on a dark day. (Even now, it is hard to type this. I might be crying a little.)
I’d been hanging out with her and her two-year-old son, Henry, every couple of weeks or so as they got their feet back under them after his chemo. Which happened after his brain tumor. Which happened after a life-threatening bacterial infection. Which happened after he was born prematurely. I’d arrived from Africa a little late to the scene, when they’d gotten the happy MRI’s with a healthy brain.
Until.
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It was a handful of years ago now. Our family was hauling around the States on a trip back from Uganda. I stood at a gas station in Arkansas, an eye on the climbing digital numbers of my gas purchase. I was deliberately attempting not to look at the car parked two lanes over, whose car alarm was freaking out at what looked to be its owner.
I didn’t want to embarrass the woman. Poor thing. It didn’t help that her lapdogs were going bananas behind the glass.
I looked up at my oldest son climbing out of the car. Blonde, blue-eyed, and nearly eleven, he spoke in a low voice so that I inclined my head.
Pull up a chair for practical ideas and discussions on the parenting, relationships, and spirituality we're all army-crawling through every day.
After five and a half years in Uganda, my family and I returned to the U.S., where I write and speak professionally, and we continue to work on behalf of the poor.
My first solo book, Permanent Markers: Spiritual Life Skills to Write on Your Kids' Hearts (Harvest House), released October 2021.
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