The Pursuit of Treasure

In the Peace Corps, our desire for comfort hightens our longing for things that we miss.

I really miss peanut butter, and I’ll go to any length to get it.  

In the states, the anticipation of Smucker’s Peanut Butter and its familiar place between two delicious ego waffles for breakfast with a cup of coffee gets me out of bed in the morning.  

So when I find out that a store in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, sells peanut butter, I practically bolt there one weekend to buy some cheap, crappy brand of my beloved substance that would hold me over until my mom sends me my next jar.  I walk for forty minutes throughout Yerevan – a monomaniachal, fiendish determination soaring through my mind – before I hunt out only two jars on the bottom shelf in a grocery store wedged neatly between some jelly and Nutella.  I leave smiling with my prize, and make a mental note of where to come again the next time I run out.

We’re all treasure-seekers, and our pursuit of treasure can transform us into pirates. In Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack Sparrow accuses Will Turner of having acquired several very distinct pirate-like tendencies throughout the course of their journey.  Turner defensively denies Sparrow’s final and most damaging claim that he has become obsessed with treasure, to which Sparrow replies, “not all treasure is silver and gold, mate,” as he glances toward Elizabeth Swan, a beautiful woman, and the sole object of Turner’s infatuation throughout the movie.  

Our hearts long to worship; to treasure something above all else.  In his most recent sermon, Pastor Dan Nold speaks of a consultant who helped Coca Cola achieve their success.  The consultant asked the company to draw a box and to write what the company thinks they are “all about” inside of it.  At first, “great taste” was the concept in the company’s box. This concept failed, as anyone who would have tasted their “New Coke” product could have attested to.  The consultant later encouraged them to choose a different concept, so this time, the company went with “American Tradition.”  Once their new concept began to inform their entire production process, Coca Cola became what it is today.  

What’s in my box?  What do I treasure above all else?  I know where my focus and my attention should be, but I also know that I am often seduced, or “lead astray.” I’m challenged this week to press through false treasure and stay focused on Jesus, because that’s where I really want my heart to be.  

Weekly Grape:  What's in my treasure box?

You Can Never Go Home

Thanks to Bob, Marge, Casey and Ryan for making me feel at home

The other day a friend and I went to a restaurant called “Flamingo” with an English sign on the door and an English menu.  Its a rarity to find such a place in our small town of Armenia, and its even more of a rarity that such a place would have good pizza.  

My friend Don and I chat about my trip home to my family in America.  As I prattle on about how foreign I felt even in my hometown where everything pretty much remained the same, Don, echoing the great novelist Thomas Wolfe, tells me that I can “never really go home again.”

I start thinking about the immensity of change that has taken place in me since I began my Peace Corps experience.  I think about how all life experience grows, stretches, and changes us in some way. 

The idea that we can never go home resonates with me not only because I feel that my experience has impacted me so much, but also because my conception of what “home” is has so radically changed.  

Snakes shed their skin because their bodies continue to grow while their skin stays the same size.  As we gather more of an understanding of who we are and as meaning shapes the purposes of our lives, our houses remain the same size but we shed our conception that anything tangible can really be considered our true “homes.”

Humans long to find a home that we never have to leave. Lydia Brownback writes, “We can have the contentment of home right now, wherever we are, because home for us is wherever God has us.” 

Some of us have to press through the discomfort of leaving our homes, or our friends and family.  But if our conception of home is grounded in faith, then there’s no verb to worry about, because even if we can never “go home,” we’re actually always home.

The restaurant’s pizza was delicious.  Some things – like pizza – remain so consistently delicious throughout the globe, that home is never more than a hungry bite away.  

Weekly Grape:  Have I found myself a home that I never have to leave?

Do for One

Overwhelmed and fed-up puppy

In the Peace Corps, there are a lot of opportunities to help those in need.  Most of the time I do nothing but feel overwhelmed by how many things I could be doing to help impact my community. In my last entry I wrote about “holy discontent,” and how it can move us to take meaningful action if we allow it to.  But most of the time I’m paralyzed to inaction because my heart breaks for too many things. 

The word “overwhelm” derives from the Old English root word “whelm,” which means to engulf or submerge.  To overwhelm, according to the omniscient Oxford dictionary, means “to submerge beneath a huge mass.”  How often can we identify with a sunken ship, too overwhelmed by the ocean’s magnitude to do anything but barely stir in the muck?

I’m challenged this week to “do for one what I wish I could do for many,” as Pastor Dan Nold claims God would want us to do.  I’ll pet one dog in my village (one who doesn’t bite, hopefully) and maybe ask its owner if I can take it for a walk or give it a bath.  I’ll tutor two girls for free who can’t afford to get help with English because they deserve it.   I’ll spend time with someone who is lonely. 

So many people say they don’t want to do anything about one problem because there are just so many that solving one won’t make a difference.  But I doubt that the one or two people who are on the receiving end of that one problem we do decide to invest ourselves in would see it that way.  

The one puppy I decided to adopt

Pressing through feeling overwhelmed and focusing on smaller changes will prevent me from feeling underwhelmed, which I am doubly afraid of feeling.  Strangely enough the dictionary claims that “to underwhelm” means “to fail to impress or make a positive imact on,” without any mention of flooding or defeat.  Its what happens when we don’t allow our holy discontent to move us to action.  

Mother Theresa said that it’s not about what you do, but about how much love you put into doing it. Imagine how much more powerful it would be to focus on doing less but loving more, instead of on doing more but loving less.  If we saturate everything we do in love, no matter how small it is, we’ll have a greater impact.

We can never know how powerful a plant God will grow from the one seed that we give to Him, or who He will send to help us to water it along the way.  But, as Pastor Dan says, “don’t miss your one because you’re so overwhelmed by the many.”

Weekly grape:  Am I missing the one because I’m so overwhelmed by the many?

Holy Discontent

Sometimes people throw rocks at animals in the street here in Armenia.  Dogs sleep in the freezing cold without shelter.  Calves are taken away from their mothers at birth.  

If you’re like me, those thoughts made you want to leave this page, never come back, and push the ideas out of your mind until they don’t bother you anymore.  I cried the other day because of a dog and spent the rest of the day working hard to forget about it, because I was convinced there was really nothing I could do to help him.  

What does your heart break for?  Mine, for some reason, breaks for animals.  So much so that all of my life I’ve resisted working in shelters or vet care because I over-empathize with their struggle to the point of personal torment.  Over the years I’ve learned to activate a deflective emotional shield whenever I think about animal suffering, the way that I hold my nose when cutting an onion to keep from crying.  Factory farms in the US, for example, don’t bother me, because I force myself not to think about them.  

Maybe that’s the exact opposite of what we should be doing with our short lives.  Pastor Dan Nold, in his last few sermons given at Calvary Church in State College, PA, has reminded me to ask God to break my heart for what breaks His, to allow my “holy discontent” to create a vision for change, and to allow that vision to lead to action.  

Maybe the reason that there are 163 million orphans in the world or that 319,000 children under the age of 5 have already died from preventable poverty conditions since jan 1st is that we don’t allow ourselves to be struck deep enough by our holy discontent.  

Its uncomfortable and painful to allow our hearts to break for someone or something else.  But if we really listen to our heartbreak and make the brave decision to immerse in it, it might lead to meaningful change.  Martin Luther King Jr. did it, and so did Ghandi.  

I’m challenged today to press through the discomfort of seeing animal cruelty and to begin to pray for an action plan of how to postively combat it in here in Peace Corps Armenia.  

Weekly grape:  

Am I letting my heart break for what breaks God’s heart?