How Much Is Enough?

The first time I read the checked baggage allowance, I could carry two checked bags, up to 50 pounds each, one carry-on and one personal bag. I packed accordingly. Two bags. 45-50 pounds apiece. My carry-on and backpack were stuffed because I'd packed a considerable amount of things I expected to use while I was here.

The evening before I left, I read the airline's checked baggage allowance policy again and found that I could now have one checked bag, up to 60 pounds, and one carry-on weighing no more than 15 pounds, as well as a "computer bag."

As you might imagine, panic flooded through me. I found different luggage and took everything out of the original suitcases. From the huge pile of "stuff," I extracted the items I had agreed to deliver. Those definitely had to go. I divided everything else into stacks according to item category and began to sort through. Pants, tops, underwear, socks, toiletries, books, snacks. 

I decided to carry eight tops, three pairs of pants plus the pair I wore on the flight over, and a week's worth of underwear and socks. I kept a denim jacket and left behind the heavier jacket I'd planned to bring. I kept one ziplock bag of individual peanut butter and fruit & nut bars. I didn't need them, but I wanted them. 

When all the supposed essentials were packed, I filled the empty spaces with things I thought I might need. Extra scarves. Another pair of shoes. Leggings.

I left two full weeks of snacks behind, and the box of tea I prefer. Curling iron, flat iron (hair straightener), and hair products didn't seem as essential as I'd first thought, nor did flip flops. The books and notebooks weren't essential, either.

In the end, the one thing that mattered most went in my backpack first: my study Bible. I knew I couldn't do without it, so I packed it where I could be sure it was safe. I needed my computer because this is a writing trip, so that went in the backpack next, then toothbrush and toothpaste. 

The longer I've been here, the more I've realized those three items were the only essentials I brought. A complete change of clothes, or maybe two, would've been plenty, even though I'm staying more than three weeks. 

I "needed" a lot less than I thought. 

The extra tops have been convenient, but I could've made do with fewer. Next time I travel, I plan to do just that. I'm choosing, in advance, to be content with less. 

I wish I'd done this a long time ago, and not just in my travel bags. I wish I'd been content with less in my home, my life. 

I had already started cleaning out the excess before I left, but I expect that will continue in a more serious way when I get home. How much is enough? I don't know yet, but I intend to find out how much leaner I can go.

The more I live lean, the more I wonder why I wanted to live with a bunch of stuff in the first place. What's the point?

I'm pretty sure this accumulation of stuff is not an exclusively-Leanna issue. Today, let's ask ourselves if we have more stuff than we need. Could we live leaner? Give more away? 

Is there someone else to whom our excess would be a blessing? Let's pass it on. Is there a way to make do with less? Let's give it a try. 

Why does lean living matter? It was the way Jesus lived. No extra. No burdens. No debt. It was also the way He taught His disciples to live. Lean. Ready. Available. Isn't that the way we should live, too? 

". . . I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity, in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of bring filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need." Philippians 4:11-12 nasb

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I love you, my sweet, encouraging digital family, and I miss you more than you might imagine. I'll be home soon and I hope you'll to invite me to your Sunday school classes, small groups, and church families to share the stories of what God has done the last few weeks. It's bigger than I can share in a blog, harder and sweeter than I can communicate in emails or text messages. 

The best parts can only be shared in person. 

_________________

In case you missed the most recent post, here's the link: When the Fast Pace is Gone and We Find a New Life

If you feel led to partner with this ministry, here's the link to give your tax-deductible donations: Global Outreach Acct 4841 

You can also mail your check or money order to: Global Outreach/ PO Box 1, Tupelo MS 38802. Be sure to put Account 4841 in the "for" line.

When The Fast Pace is Gone and We Find a New Life

This is the first time since the blog began in 2013 that I haven't written every day. There are many reasons for that, most of which I'll share with you in person when I return home. One of the reasons for the slow-down of writing, however, is that life here is labor-intensive. It takes a lot of time to get through the routines of life.

A few days ago, one of my friends worked well past dark to do what we in the medical field call "activities of daily living." "No one would believe this back home," I said, and he agreed. 

We've left our fast-paced society behind. Life is real here. Today, I hope to give you a taste of our new reality. 

Grocery shopping is no small feat. You can tell from the photo above that the souk, or open-air market, is packed with a mass of people. If we go really early in the morning, we can have a more leisurely stroll from one vendor to the next. 

Most days, though, we wind our way through the other shoppers to buy tomatoes from one vendor, onions and bell peppers from a different stall, and fresh ginger from yet another. 

After our produce is in hand, there's a "grocery store" to buy things like garbage bags and milk. Yet another stop is required to buy bread or baked goods, and one more for hand-mixed zatar (a spice blend). It's an hours-long process.

The only grocery carts are at the Sama store (the grocery) and about half the size of the ones at home. As we shop in the souk, we pack as many bags into our backpacks or purses as we can, then hang the rest on our arms. 

There's a limit to how much we can tote at a time. 

I buy a bag packed with sixteen rounds of pita bread for about 25 cents, then bags of cucumbers and tomatoes for less than a dollar each. A small carton of feta costs about a dollar. Turkish coffee with cardamon is around $3 for a small bag, but it doesn't take much to make a cup of coffee. It packs quite a punch. American coffee is too expensive for my budget. I haven't even considered buying meat. We can't buy pork here at all.

I can get enough food for a week in one trip because I only have to feed myself and I eat the way locals eat. Mamas with big families, however, have to carry kids along to help with their hauling. It still takes more than one trip per week for them.

A friend made french toast for breakfast today. Her husband bought several kilograms of wheat at the grain store a few days ago. She milled it in her electric grain mill to make flour, then baked marvelously crusty and delicious whole wheat bread. Today, she used thick slices of the homemade bread to make french toast.

The food she cooked this morning was only possible because of all the steps that went before. It literally took days to accomplish a single skillet-full.

You can't buy frozen French toast sticks here, and if you did, they would be insanely costly. She could've bought bread in a packaged loaf, of course, but it's expensive, too. Is it worth it to break the family budget for loaf bread? Definitely not.

We also buy popcorn in bulk. Some of it's eaten as popped corn. Most goes in the grain mill to make corn meal for corn bread. We don't buy canned vegetables here. We cook them from scratch. 

Even olives are home-canned. Several friends have been out of circulation recently. They're harvesting the olives from the trees on their property. Some of their olives will be canned for eating. Others will go to the press to make olive oil. That olive oil is stored in multi-liter-sized cans. It has to last a year because once it's gone, there's none until the next harvest. 

The reason we can't buy olive oil right now is that last year's yield has been depleted. There won't be any olive oil for two more weeks, a neighbor deep into her harvest assured me.

One of my neighbors has an electric washing machine for their family of eight, but no clothes dryer. Instead, the mom uses a wire clothes rack to dry the freshly-washed laundry. As you might imagine, laundry day literally never ends.

Sometimes I spray my clothes with vinegar so I don't have to wash as often. It takes any body odor out but leaves my clothes smelling like a cross between pickles and salad dressing. The odor dissipates if you hang the garments over a chair for a while. I'm not a fan of the process, but I still use it to get an extra day or two out of pants and tops.

I have neither washer nor dryer. I could, of course, carry my clothes to one of the families I know. They'd be happy to let me wash clothes at their house. So far, it's been easier to wash a few pieces at a time in a big glass bowl with the liquid Tide I brought from home. 

I usually hang the laundry on the back of plastic chairs to dry. That takes a while. One day, I hung my socks on the metal stair railing outside for a couple of hours. Most of the socks dried quickly in the sun, but I had a hard time getting past the image of clothes hung on the front porch of ramshackle country houses back home. I finally brought the socks inside and hung them over a plastic laundry basket I perched haphazardly in the bathtub. It worked.

Pause to imagine what your day would be like without big box stores. Consider cooking without anything processed, canned, or pre-prepped. What about walking from vendor to vendor to vendor to get your food? How much more time would cooking require? 

What about drying all your laundry on a clothes rack on the roof? How many days would it take to get a week's worth of washing done? How many times might you wear each garment before washing it? 

Is this life hard? Not really, but it takes a lot of time we might've spent doing something else to accomplish each day. I can't imagine what, right now, though.

The food is much better tasting when it's literally farm-to-table fresh. If you eat a mostly grain-and-produce-based diet, it's not expensive, either. I've become what we call a cultural vegetarian. I eat meat only when someone else cooks it. 

Despite all the time spent doing the routines of life, we've gained more time with family and friends. We don't watch TV or go to movies. We rarely eat out here. Instead, we walk over to friends' homes and sit down for tea or coffee and a "sweet." Sometimes the sweet is homemade and sometimes it's a boxed cookie. The important part of our visit is not what we eat, but with whom we eat it. 

A lot of savoring happens here, too. Food that took days to bring to the table is much more precious than something bought from a drive-through. The aroma of clean sheets dried by the wind whipping through the Jordan valley can't be reproduced by anything. Sinking into the bed at night is pure heaven. Long walks up and down the mountain to visit friends beats a trip to the gym every time. 

It's a good life and I enjoy it. It's the lifestyle I tried to create in Mississippi but had to travel nearly 7,000 miles to find. In another week, I'm bringing the good parts home with me. I know how to do it now.

There's much to celebrate about our lives in America, but there are some ways of living we need to reconsider. If our bodies are temples of God, why do we stock them with processed food? With fast food? 

If relationships are of prime importance, why do we do most of our communicating by email, text, and FB messenger? 

If being the church matters, why do we choose virtual church with digital sermons instead of celebrating our faith with fellow believers?

If bearing one another's burdens is what we're supposed to do, why do we send touching digital notes instead of lifting those burdens with our flesh-and-blood presence?

I've seen the body of Christ in action over the last few months as I've cared for Sam. Our family of faith has done exactly what we're created to do. They've help lift our burdens with their presence and made sure no need was left undone. It's the way we're supposed to live, and we should do more of it. I should do more of it.

If I seem different when I get home, it's because I am. I hope it's a change for the better. 

Today, let's be serious for a long moment and take a hard look at our own lives. Are our lifestyles the ones God would choose for us? If not, what needs to change? Are we willing to make the changes He desires or not? What consequences will we reap by our refusal?

"...Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory did not clothe himself like one of these. But if God so arrays the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more do so for you, O men of little faith?" Matthew 6:28-30 nasb

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I love you, my sweet, encouraging digital family, and I miss you more than you might imagine. I'll be home soon and I hope you'll to invite me to your Sunday school classes, small groups, and church families to share the stories of what God has done the last few weeks. It's bigger than I can share in a blog, harder and sweeter than I can communicate in emails or text messages. 

The best parts can only be shared in person. 

_________________

In case you missed the most recent post, here's the link: When Memories and Reality Don't Quite Match Up but the Service Remains

If you feel led to partner with this ministry, here's the link to give your tax-deductible donations: Global Outreach Acct 4841 

You can also mail your check or money order to: Global Outreach/ PO Box 1, Tupelo MS 38802. Be sure to put Account 4841 in the "for" line.

When Memory and Reality Don't Quite Match Up But the Service Remains

I almost always say yes. That leads to lots of open doors, and is one of the reasons I have such a fun and exciting life. Every once in a while, though, I wish I'd taken a little longer to consider my yeses.

I've agreed to write the story of the work of Baptists in Gilead. It's an enormous task that will be a full-length book if it's ever finished. When it's finished. Sorry. I had a moment of doubt, but I'll press on until it's done, because I've given my word. 

The stories of the service in this area over a forty-year period are simply amazing. To gather those stories, I've interviewed tons of people about the doctors and nurses who worked here, the amazing sacrifices they made, and the lives that were changed.

When I began to assimilate the stories, I found an unusual thing. The actual timeline doesn't always match the perceived timeline of memories. On occasion, the people given credit for an action weren't present in the country at the time. Sometimes, a person who did something remarkable, according to the "facts", is never mentioned by the people I interview.

It's been confusing. Frustrating. Difficult to sort out. I finally have official records for the timeline and am making progress in sorting memory from reality.

What I've realized, though, is that, even when memories are a little skewed, there's still some important truth hidden within. One of my favorite stories was of one of the doctors and his wife. It was winter and the pipes had frozen at the hospital. As you can well imagine, the soiled laundry at the hospital quickly piled up. 

One of the doctors (I'm still not sure about which one did this) realized there was a shortage of clean linen. He loaded up the dirty linen in a huge bundle and toted it to his house. He and his wife washed and dried all the laundry. This was before the days of electric dryers, so they probably had to hang them over doors and furniture.

When it was done, he toted it back again. 

The laundry was done during the time he wasn't seeing patients. He used his "off-time" to wash soiled hospital sheets. 

Do you know the kind of filth that's on hospital laundry? This is not something you want to handle in your home, or by yourself. 

The doctor didn't complain or argue or whine or ask someone else to do it. He didn't claim his important medical work as a reason for someone else to do the dirty work. He simply did what needed to be done.

Every time I remember that story, I think about the great cloud of witnesses in heaven as they leaned over and watched the doctor and his wife wash sheets late into the night. I suspect there was great rejoicing over the humility and servanthood of those two sweet people.

Theirs is an example I want to follow. No job too big or small. No pride to stop my service.

The memories aren't clear yet on who did this work, but what's most remarkable of all is that there are several physicians who lived such lives of service and sacrifice that any of them might have done this good work. 

Let's imagine for a moment what the body of Christ would look like to a dark and perishing world if we served the way those doctors served. 

Imagine no task left undone because it was too hard or too dirty. 

Imagine finding the difficult work done and saying, "There are so many people I know who might have done this without complaining that I don't know which one did it." 

You know what people outside the church would say? The same thing they said here: "Those doctors loved perfectly. They served Christ and gave their lives for the people here." 

If we lived and loved in such sacrificial ways, another thing would happen. People wouldn't just take note. They'd want what we have, and our world would change, one heart at a time.

Today, let's look for unexpected ways we can serve, then step up and do what needs to be done. 

"Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interest of others. Have this attitude in yourselves, which was also in Christ Jesus, who. . .humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Philippians 2:3-8 nasb

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There are many stories I'd like to share with you about this amazing journey, but they can only be shared in person. I'll do another brunch (like last time) to allow an opportunity for story-sharing, but I'm also happy to share with groups of any size. Message me to schedule a time.
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In case you missed the most recent post, here's the link: When Your Prayers Need a Little Help From a Friend

If you feel led to partner with this ministry, here's the link to give your tax-deductible donations: Global Outreach Acct 4841 

You can also mail your check or money order to: Global Outreach/ PO Box 1, Tupelo MS 38802. Be sure to put Account 4841 in the "for" line.