London Calling?

Here is (at least partly) how I came to be in London in the first place, and how I came to leave it again:

I grew up wanting to be a missionary. It didn't hurt--though it very well could have given another set of parents--that my parents were missionaries and church planters and pastors (sometimes at different times, sometimes all at once). I also grew up wanting to live in England. I thought the two "wants" were mutually exclusive, and then one amazing season (around my senior year of college and for some time thereafter) I discovered they weren't. I went to England on a two-year commitment, but I said early on, "I have a feeling I'll be here five years."

At the end of my first term, I really finally settled in, and, having received "indefinite leave to remain" from the British government, I decided to remain indefinitely. I was queuing up for dual citizenship. I was thinking about transferring my church membership to the church I attended and worked in, in London. Then I went back to the US for another furlough.

While I was there, I had a number of conversations with people who didn't even know each other, and who, though all Christians, have very different approaches to God. (Well, I mean, they all approach through Jesus, but their respective "styles" are different.) These conversations shook me up a little and started to make me wonder if I was supposed to leave London instead of staying there. Three days before I was to return, I was overcome with a sense of utter dread at returning to my life there, that I never really could explain. I decided to go back, take six months, and see if I could figure out what God was really telling me to do.

I guess it depends on your level of cynicism as to how you interpret things, and which things you decide are open to interpretation. It's probably also partly dependent, if you're looking for God's leading, on what kind of church you affiliate with. I've affiliated with a pretty broad range, so when I got back to London, I was bombarded with intimations in my Scripture readings, words of counsel from my friends, dreams of my own and dreams of my friends and colleagues, strong senses of direction. Eventually I decided that, though things were tremendously better for me than they had been immediately before I had left London, I was being called to move away. It was okay that I was leaving when things were good again; I always think that it's better to leave on an up-note than in shame or high dudgeon. On the other hand, it was hard to leave, too--all those friendships that had been forged, all those prayers that had been prayed, all that learning and growing. Not to mention the urban environment and the cosmopolitan nature of the place. I knew I'd never find another place like it. I haven't.

But the sense to leave seemed unequivocal. I even believed I had been directed as to a specific date of departure, which was appropriate, because the date of my arrival had also been significant. And so it was that in May 2002, I moved back to the USA. I had lived in London for five and a half years.

To be continued . . .

Hannah

I have a niece! I am an auntie!

Hannah Louise was born to my brother and sister-in-law last night. Isn't she cute? Congratulations guys!

Number 7

The day I moved to London, Lisa took me to have tea with Megan, so that I could stay awake and get over jetlag more quickly. Megan lived at number 7, Cotswold Gardens, a house with a Winnie-the-Pooh-yellow door. (You could maybe also call it goldenrod, but Laura Lee, a much later addition to the team, cited Winnie the Pooh.)

I'm not the biggest fan of "goldenrod," except on goldenrod, but I absolutely loved this door. It was such a happy shock of insane brightness in such a usually grim and grey city. I also loved the house on the other side of that door. I thought to myself, "I love this house. I'm going to live in it one day." The house was owned by the churches I worked for, and it was often changing hands, though I didn't know that when I first "met" it.

About two years later, I really did move in. That first night, as I lay down to sleep, I thought to myself with a sense of confirmation, "Yes. This is your house."

It was my house for three years, and when I left, they painted it and Laura Lee picked the colour. She wanted to paint the door something sensible, but I made kind of a stink about and spoke up for the yellow door. So they did repaint it, but it was still that crazy yellow.

Last year Jayne told me in an email that the church was trying to offload some of their extraneous properties, and that was one of them, and they were putting it on the market. I wanted to buy it. It was my house, after all. But they don't pay you enough at Starbucks to put a downpayment on a home in London. I never heard anything else about it, until I got to Jayne's house for dinner on my first day in London last week.

"Number 7 finally sold last week," she said.

I shouldn't have been surprised. And it's good for the church and everything. But was I ever disappointed. I stayed the week in the house next door, with some friends, and so I got to see my house every day. But the house had been painted off-white, and the door had been painted blue, and the last three days I was there, the new owners spent gutting the place. The front garden was full of the bricks that didn't fit in the skip (dumpster) hired and sitting in the middle of the street.

I think I might have been sadder, except with the door now blue instead of yellow, it wasn't my house anymore. It does kind of feel like the end of an era, though.

London Revisited

After Ireland, I spent this last week in London and saw a whole bunch of people I love and missed a whole lot of other ones because of time constraints, and saw the first copies of my book. I just got back and now I have a headache, but it was worth it.

London still holds a strong and significant place in my life, even though I haven't lived there in six years and I actually got lost trying to walk from Oxford Circus to Covent Garden yesterday. (This was demoralising. And I didn't have an A-Z to help me out.) London is the place, I tend to say, where I became an adult. Not necessarily a mature one (maturity might be an attribute my possession of which is still debatable. But it's okay. I've got the convoluted grammar down). I've changed in some ways since then, and there are plenty more ways I dare say I should change. But I still feel like that was the beginning of it.

So going back is kind of bittersweet. The first time I went back after moving to the States, I felt like everything was all wrong, and London was my home, and why was I not permitted to live there anymore? The next time I went back, I felt like I was in a place I had never been before--but where I knew exactly what to expect. This time I feel like I could move back. Or not. (Most likely, according to the Home Office at this point, not.) It's both hard and easy to imagine moving back and slotting into the same neighbourhood and churches that I worked in and with before. And it's equally hard and easy to imagine moving back and living and working somewhere else.

And meanwhile, I still haven't found a new job.

I have a lot of posts built up in my head since probably January. They're going somewhere, I think (kind of like me), but I'm not quite sure where (also kind of like me). Bear with me while I keep trying to figure it out.

The Edge of a Precipice

You would think I would be all "Ireland this," and "Ireland that," and I dare say I'll get to that point . . . sometime back on the other side of the Atlantic. But for now, we're going to talk about other stuff.

Someday, when I'm ancient and long-ago menopaused, so that no one about whom I could possibly be alluding even remembers me, let alone thinks I'm talking about him, I'm going to write a book about the role of sexuality in evangelism. Of course, it might not make much of a book. I can tell you the conclusion right here: it doesn't help anything. At least until recently, any overt or covert heterosexual attraction between me and any guy I've ever tried to talk to about Jesus has not led either to dating or to conversion. I do wonder sometimes, though, if God allows that dynamic so that people who might never get prayed for otherwise, get someone praying for them for a while. (When I'm feeling less positive about this, I think cynically that God's purpose for my life is "bait.") At the very least, it paves the way for unexpected conversations.

Like, one time I was returning to London after a visit to the States, and there was this striking man on my flight. We caught each other's eye, and then, during a stop in Frankfurt (yes . . . I had to fly through Frankfurt to get to London), ended up conversing a little bit. He was Turkish, and a doctor. (Well, he might not have been a doctor, I suppose, but he said he was.) My relationship with Jesus is usually the first thing I tell attractive men about me. In this case, I think that information might have come right after telling him I had learnt to make kisir and borek a few weeks before. Turkish Doctor, trying to be tolerant, no doubt, did not try to argue with me about my Jesus-fanaticism, but he did hint something along the lines of people being like trees--how they grow and change and don't look the same when they're finished as they did when they've started.

I had just recently gone through the tolerance-challenging, grace-building upheaval of my life, and so I could agree with this, except that I would have said that that had only drawn me closer to Jesus instead of making me branch out farther. And after Turkish Doctor and I had got on our respective and divergent planes, it occurred to me that what I really could have said was that he was right about the tree, except that the thing is, it's still always a tree.

I was thinking about this a couple of weeks ago on a walk when I passed this tree. I pass it every time I walk in that direction, but I had never looked up at it before. This time I did, and it struck me just how astounding it was. It's enormous and beautiful and serene. I thought about how a tree's root system is supposed to be as extensive underground as its branch system is above-ground. I know something about this tree's root system already (see fifth photo down in this link). It has kind of "eaten" the rocks in the stone wall above which it grows, and I could imagine the rest of its roots extending back into the yard behind it. It is kind of awe-inspiring. Who knows what it's gripping, under the grass, under the rocks, under the road. It would need that, because like I said, it's a massive tree, and it's growing right on the edge of a mini-precipice. I don't know how big or how old it was when they dug out the land to make the road this tree is on, but it's still growing straight and strong and rooted.

I couldn't help wondering, though, what would happen if there were a really big storm. I suspect it has already weathered really big storms, and like the house on the rock, this tree is rooted in the rock and it's still standing. But the last few weeks I feel like I've been standing on the brink of a precipice, too. Maybe a bigger one than the one than the hop between yard and street. I feel like, thanks to God, I'm pretty well-rooted. But it's still scary on the edge like this. I have to trust in the Rock to hold me and not let the big winds blow me over.

Out of Commission

Well. Not really. Just on vacation. With limited internet access. But I'll be back.

Meanwhile, Ireland is drizzly and beautiful, and I'm loving it.

Good Tolerance/Bad Tolerance

Back in January when our Teen Girl Squad started, we were talking about the charge to love God and love people, and some question came up--maybe one about how to do that, exactly. And somebody mentioned tolerance.

Tolerance is (and has been for a while) the big-word-on-campus. The "secular world" loves to exhort us to exhibit it, and, by and large, the Christian subculture like to tut about it and talk about how it's all well and good, but What About Relativism, and Humans Do Sin, You Know.

All of that is as may be, but I have a sort of tenuous relationship with the concept of tolerance myself--partly because I grew up as a self-righteous twit for some reason, and partly because my own encounters with tolerance have left me a little jaded. So I told the girls about this jading experience:

Back in the day ("the day" always being a different point in time depending on my story, in case you hadn't noticed), I had this group of about six friends. We were a mixed group both in terms of gender and in terms of culture, so this led to some interesting dynamics and also a lot of talks at McDonalds. McDonalds was the place where any two of us would meet to "have it out" if we were experiencing, shall we say, communication difficulties, and because of this we ended up avoiding it most of the rest of the time. (Well, also because, you know, it was McDonalds.)

Everybody has their own personal failings, and mine were, perhaps, a little more glaring or culturally inappropriate in this group or something, and so eventually things broke down pretty badly, and I had to meet up with one of the guys in the group--at McDonalds--to have things out for the last time. The conversation (which is a polite word for what actually went down) was summed up when the guy made this statement: "Jenn, for as long as I've known you, you've been [this particular personal failing]. I've tolerated you for four years and I can't take it anymore. I'm not speaking to you again."

We ended up speaking again (though we're not in touch now), through a long and painful and healing process, but it was in that one instant that I decided I don't have much use for tolerance. It sounds all nice and innocuous when someone says, "We should just tolerate everybody," but when someone tells you they are, or have been, tolerating you, it's like they just slapped you in the face.

I don't, I realised, want to be tolerated. Ideally, I would like to be understood, but I'll go for being challenged if understanding isn't a possibility. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that the opposite of love isn't hate but indifference (quote, anybody?), and I think that's true. Love and hate at least both dignify their object with some sort of value. Indifference is complete and utter disregard. Indifference and tolerance, in my experience, end up being just about the same thing.

My McDonalds friend was right about my personal failing. I can see how it could have become unbearable. But I wish these friends would have told me ahead of time how unbearable it was, and would have tried to help me through it, instead of tolerating it up to the point where they couldn't take it anymore and just slammed the door in my face. I realise they might not have known how to do that, or furthermore that I might not have been as willing or able to change if I had been coaxed instead of being outright rejected. Sometimes it takes a shock to make a change. But I'd still like to make the argument that love of any variety, and tolerance, don't really go together very well.

But, we asked in our girls' group, aren't there ever times when tolerance is good? The girls talked about their younger siblings, and how they would stand up for them if it came down to it because they love them and they're their siblings, even if they drive them crazy. We tried to define this and didn't really come up with anything more definite than "good tolerance" versus "bad tolerance." But upon further reflection, I have started to wonder if maybe the name that distinguishes "good tolerance" is grace.

Anybody have any thoughts on this?

Teen Girl Squad

The Teen Girl Squad (not to be confused with the virtual but original Teen Girl Squad) has a concluding party here at my house tonight. This was a group of girls (it ended up being just me, a co-leader, and two high-school girls) who got together to study the Bible on Tuesday nights. There were a lot of interruptions. It took us about three months to get through six studies. But we did it, and we have bonded. I'm going on vacation for two weeks, but then we need to talk about whether we're going to keep doing this.

I was going to talk about one of our "deep topics" of conversation that came up fairly early on in our meetings, and I think I still am. But it suddenly feels daunting, and I really do need to make some chocolate chip cookies for this party . . .

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Update:

Photos: Jenn, Tisha, Julia, Sarah. April 2008.