Purpose Asia

Saturday morning dawned dripping and misty. I tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen. Today I had to bake a breakfast treat before a going-away party for a friend. I pulled out tubs of flour and sugar and set to work measuring and kneading. Soon I stood up and brushed stray hairs from my face after closing the oven on my soon-to-be masterpiece. It was a good morning. Then the phone rang. I fumbled on the shelf above the fridge to grab it and pulled it to my ear. “Hello?” Funny, there was a strange tickling feeling on my arm. The person on the other end of the line started talking but another tickling feeling on my neck and arm distracted me. I shook my head thinking I was just being paranoid. “Uh huh.” I agreed distractedly to the voice on the phone. There it was again. This time I couldn’t control my paranoia. I had to look. I pulled the phone away from my face and gaped at it in abject horror. Swarming out of the buttons, battery compartment and every orific...

a Bougainvillea bloom on one of the roads where I live I sit on my bed after a full day.   My wet hair dangles around my face and I contemplate the peeling nail polish on one hand while I scratch one of my more than twenty mosquito bites with the other.   I can hear the bat flapping out of the guava tree in my front yard and night sounds pile up outside my cantilever windows like cans down an alleyway. Sometimes I’m amazed when I think about where I live and the work I do. I feel so average most of the time and tonight I certainly look it. But then I get to thinking about it. I live on an island in the South Pacific. Every day I speak a language other than my heart language and I emerge from my house to hibiscus and banana trees in the heart of a valley nestled among jagged, jungle-covered mountains. I walk down a dirt road and walk into a clinic that routinely sees malaria, dengue, ameobaisis, tuberculosis and other tropical disease along with everything from...

Here I sit, alone in my house, and listen to the sounds of afternoon fading into evening. The parrot screeches from its roost down the street and the smaller birds fuss like so many parents scolding their children to go to bed. The bright colors of day soften into the hazy hues of twilight. Clouds swathe the hills like a down comforter pulled over knobby heads, and everything drips with the remnants of the late afternoon rain. It is a cacophony of peace, a clamor of stillness, with which this valley so expertly surrounds its brood daily. The last couple of months have been a season of goodbyes. Many of the group that came at the same time as me have left for furlough or have finished their commitment to working here. The high school seniors I’ve come to know through helping with plays or mentoring them at the clinic have graduated and have gone back to their passport countries to start college or university. The constant cycle of time and the ebb and flow of change continu...

     This may come as a shock to some, but many days my work feels insignificant. I fill my working hours with checking vitals signs, charting, counting pills, giving instructions, performing treatments. I spend my lunches praying with a group, or listening to or teaching a Bible study, or meeting with one of the girls in my community group. At night when I’m not spending time with friends I’m whittling away at rewriting literacy materials so they can be used in the initial stages of Bible translation. One day flows into the next and I feel like I’m just living life. Nothing fantastic or dramatic or epic, just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to be faithful with what’s in my hands.         I guess, in a way I had envisioned something different for missions work. I think a lot of people do even though we try to bluster and say we know missions is about living life and sharing Christ in a different c...

     I gingerly pick up the microscope slide and set it on the microscope stage. Training my eyes on the tiny specimen beneath the magnifying viewer I focus it back and forth until the purple-pink blood cells come into clear focus. Then, I carefully place a drop of oil on the slide to go to the next level of magnification and look again. There, everywhere on the slide, are miniscule pink dots with purple rings inside the red blood cells. Malaria. Some of you may remember that I myself had malaria back in 2015 when I was training in the lowlands near the coast. It can certainly be dangerous if untreated and where I work it constitutes a significant portion of the patients that I help treat. In the tropics (especially lowland and coastal areas) malaria is a common ailment and where I live there are a few types that are common. It used to be that the mosquito that carried the malaria parasite was only found in the lowlands but we are starting to have an inc...

“ and He [the LORD] will be the stability of your times.” Isaiah 33:6a My fingers drum on the shiny silver hide of my laptop. I stare at the wood floor of my bedroom and listen to the dripping water outside my window. So much, too much to try to capture all of it in the tiny bonds of words. Words. Black and white and angular. Tiny bars wrapping around concepts that laugh at the thought of being contained in such a puny prison. Like a giant watching a toddler wrap a thread around his wrists, so the thoughts I want to convey smile condescendingly on me as I attempt to tie them down with sentences and phrases. Despite its condescension I set to, with furrowed brow and intent, fumbling fingers to secure the thoughts I’m having about the concept of transition. Some friends and I were talking about this gargantuan concept today. We’d all heard about culture stress and culture shock and the transience of the missionary community before we arrived overseas. However,...

My eyes snapped open. There it was again. Scrape, scrape, scrape. My body was rigid under my tightly clutched blankets, like a tightrope strung between two high-rises. In my imagination I fantasized that I was a calm, cool, collected woman, unruffled by strange noises that go bump in the night. But I knew the source of this noise and I was terrified. It was my nemesis. We’d glimpsed each other earlier in the night – sized each other up – but now our face-off was inevitable. Was my courage sufficient? Finally, I awoke the David in me and decided to face my Goliath. I clicked on the light and padded cautiously on bare feet to the door of my room. The hall was dark and the noises emanating from the kitchen grew louder. The belly of the beast I thought to myself. I crept down the hallway in fearful pursuit of my quarry. Scrape, SCRAPE!   I froze. In the twilight I could see my enemy. I snapped on the light and we gaped at each other in abject horror. This...