My Life as a Compost Pile

This post may end up very meandering as I have pent-up thoughts to process, but hopefully it’s like winding around a dirty garden path to find newly sprouting flowers and wafts of sweetness in the midst of weeds and rocks. Perhaps, there is even a bench waiting for a reflective sit. 

As some of you already know, every year I try to pick (with God’s guidance) a word to embody the year. Just a single word to come back to and focus on. This year’s word is “alive.” So far, that word has seemed very vague in the best of moments and even cruel in the worst of moments. It’s the word I decided on in the midst of my grandfather’s battle with cancer, and it was a not-so-subtle grasping at hope that this year would hold new adventures, and I’d take new risks and learn new things. Now that I am more than halfway into this year, I am analyzing whether or not I’ve been living alive. I do feel like I have been learning and have tried new things even when my adventures haven’t been the ones I would’ve wanted in many cases. But, I still don’t always feel alive in a positive sense. Sometimes, this year seems better represented by the word “pain.” I suppose being in pain is an indicator of still being alive. It is a part of the experience for a lot of living things. But that understanding also begs the question of, “What is the purpose of pain?” Pain as a sensor is only meant to find the root of the problem; in the best-case scenario, it’s a pathway to healing. When you look up the word “alive,” you’ll often see it in the phrase, “to keep hope alive,” and I think that phrase is really at the heart of this year for me.

When I was in the States, I came across an article that relayed how those who are fully blind, or visually impaired, experience art that is typically considered a visual art—something like a painting. It was a fascinating concept that I must admit I had never considered. And, as I read about deep auditory descriptions, 3-D printing replicas, and tactile museum tours, I felt a Holy Spirit nudge. It was a general sense that I didn’t have time to unpack, but I felt Him say, “Pay attention. I’m here in this for you. This is a representation of your life.” Is it possible to feel the textures and shape of God’s art in my life even when I feel totally in the dark? Is it possible that the blind could appreciate art even more so than a seeing person because of their need to let it be something other than colors and light on a visual canvas?

I have felt foggy in areas of my life for a bit, and in the fog, I have questioned some of my fundamental decisions. I often remind myself of that catchy quote, “Never doubt in the darkness what God told you in the light.” But, I have found myself with more questions than answers and more dead-ends than green lights. In a culture where it seems to be screamed that spiritual success looks like huge numbers of followers, large physical buildings, measurable results, Holy Spirit super powers, and economic wealth—even when I don’t agree with many of those assertions—I still find myself sometimes drowning in the things that seem out of reach. And, spiritually, sometimes I feel a bit like the account of a blind person going on school field trips to museums before many of these efforts had been made to improve the experiences of the visually-impaired. It can seem that everyone around me seems to be in awe, marveling over the beauty of doors opening and direction becoming clear and the colors of their own callings and life-art falling into place. Or maybe they are people who simply don’t even realize that they’re in a museum of art—they saunter from wall to wall, from statue to painting, room to room, with a blissful lack of reflection. Life just seems to happen to them. It’s just another ordinary day where what they don’t know they’re missing doesn’t matter. Meanwhile, the grandchild of a watercolor artist, when in art museums or exhibits, I always want to at least try to appreciate the effort and technique before me even when I find little aesthetic beauty for my own personal tastes. So, I feel the lack. I ponder the darkness. I take in the sounds of those around me cooing in delight over the ways their crooked paths are being made straight, and often, because I love and admire those people, I feel true joy for them. But mixed in with the sounds of their triumph is that quiet voice that asks me, “Where do I belong?” I don’t necessarily want to be or want to do what someone else is doing. But, when I feel like I’m painting with the murky cup of water that is used to clean the brush, how can I see the art in what seems to be the fog of unending obstacles and my own lingering failures and limitations? Someone who I feel like is demonstrating that to me in honest strength is Katie Davis Majors through her book, Daring to Hope: Finding God’s Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful.

For those of you who aren’t acquainted with her story, Katie Davis Majors is more or less my age, and she’s been a missionary in Uganda since she graduated from high school. In ten years, she has adopted 13 girls, started a massive ministry that just finished building its own boarding school across some sprawling acreage, written a best-selling book, gotten married, and had a biological son. On the outside, she seems like one of those people who should be delighting in all of those spiritual triumphs and measurable numbers, someone whose art is apparent and visible. But, in reading her words, the thoughts she wrestled with after the deaths of many women she cared for during their battles with AIDS, and the emotions she had to give space and time to in order to be able to heal following the loss of one of the girls she had adopted, I am realizing that even those who have undeniable art on display sometimes still have to feel their way through the museum of life. Aptly enough, her chapter called “Come to Life” spoke to my heart when she talked about taking a step back from the duties of her ministry to just be a mother and to give herself a chance to breathe through the pain of disappointments and prayers not answered in the way she had wanted. She touches on the stealthy feeling of not being productive enough in these excerpts:

“Slowly, I was beginning to understand that it wasn’t my productivity that God desired; it was my heart. It wasn’t my ministry God loved; it was me. God was glorified, is glorified, when we give Him our hearts, give Him ourselves, and faithfully do the thing right in front of us, no matter how small or trivial.”

She goes on to talk about how this lesson took her off-guard because she had initially served in such astounding ways, and God had opened the doors for provision and family and ministry in ways that people often only dream of. Yet, in the stillness of routine and ordinary moments, she noted,

“By contrast, in these recent months, God had been teaching me the extraordinary strength it takes to just be ordinary. . . . In a full life of trying to do great big things for God and see His glory in great big ways, He showed me that He is glorified in the small too. . . . When the ministry feels stagnant and there is no astonishing growth to show for long hours of hard work, on days I don’t receive extraordinary answers to prayer, He is still glorified in my faithful pursuit of Him.”

And in the following chapter, “Choosing to Believe” she confesses what I think every missionary or minister eventually feels,

“I searched my mind and heart to identify what I really was feeling. The words came out quietly: ‘I am tired.’ And then louder and louder until I was sobbing repeatedly, ‘I am tired. I am tired. I am tired!’ . . . I am not, He answered. I know you are tired, child, but I am not. I do not grow tired. I will never become weary. Lean on Me, for in your weakness, I am strong. When our energy is spent and our hope is on empty, . . . Jesus sees us and He is not tired. . . . He looks into our eyes and says, ‘Take heart, I am with you. I am for you.’”

That concept of God being for me is something I’ve known in my head but that has felt distant often over the past couple of years. When I returned to Honduras from the States two weeks ago, I felt like a cactus. On edge, defensive, and ready to needle anything or anyone that could pose a threat of perceived harm. On the tangible side, I returned to a broken sink, a mouse infestation in my house, paperwork missing for Raúl’s green card process, yet another error on our marriage certificate (the fourth made by these offices), a broken-down vehicle, and two mechanics who had apparently already cheated my husband out of some money without solving the problem. Add to that mix the grief from the loss of my grandfather and leaving the environment of my loving family to come to an environment where I am just beginning to develop some kind of support system and where I am isolated with the lack of a vehicle and the lack of the social energy needed to haggle with a taxi driver over prices (because I’m a pasty white girl often the target for over-charging) or the social energy for the alertness to take a bus somewhere. The result of that mix is what Hondurans sarcastically call “divine.” But, in the down time alone, I am letting myself feel. I am asking the questions of my pain sensor hoping that it will lead me to the root of the problem. The truth is that I crave some sense of stability and purpose. I long to belong.

I struggle with writing this next paragraph because I want to be honest, but I also really want to be a person of honor and respect. I want to vulnerably represent the ways my experiences have contributed to my struggle (because I feel like others may be able to identify) without slandering imperfect people who serve a perfect God. So, let me say this—my experiences with the Church as an institution vary drastically from my experiences with the Church as relationships with real people. My perceptions are just that—how I interpreted my experiences—and they are not meant to be condemning blanket statements. I want to believe that not all physical places called church cultivate the same kinds of atmospheres or carry out the same kinds of actions. But, the root of a lot of my struggles stem from my perceptions of these experiences. Since I grew up going to church and served in various ministry capacities since childhood, I’ve collected a lot of experiences and memories over the years in several different places. And what my perception of my experiences have led me to feel about the institution of church is this: It’s a club I often feel like I can’t break into. It’s a club I feel like I have broken into at times but have later found that when I am craving relationship, I am valuable to the institution only inasmuch as I serve and give in a ministry capacity. Once I am no longer in a place of serving or once I have a need even just for relationship, I am forgettable because I am what I do in the institution of church. Within the institution of church, I have experienced a desperate longing for honest connection with someone only to enter a series of superficial programs that suck all of the social energy from my veins and still leave me without any real covenant relationships. In my experience, you can only find relationships in the institution of church when you start serving in some capacity, but once you start serving, you aren’t actually allowed to be fully yourself. Your responsibility and service and consistency are valued. Your opinions, your needs, your questions, and your insights often may not be. In the perceptions of my experiences, the institution of church is a hierarchy where it is both lonely and very exclusive at the top, and the moment you try to pursue a real relationship with your authority, you are met with rejection and indifference because of the fear of being exposed as a real person with real weaknesses. Within the institution of church, all too often, for me, it has seemed that the moment that you disagree with something or someone, you are out of the club and shouldn’t be there anymore. I imagine that it is taboo as a missionary to make statements like this because I myself am a representation of the institution of church just by my choice of vocation. But, I have found before that I am not alone in these experiences though I often have felt like I am. With that said, these are my experiences through my own lens, and I desperately want to be proved wrong.

Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, my true relationships within the Body of Christ have often been some of the most healing, supportive, and helpful. Members of the Body of Christ (who often participate in the institution of church) have extended hospitality to me as an invitation to eat at their dining room table. They have listened to my doubts and stomached them with a smile and a reassurance that I’m not alone. Within these relationships, I have felt encouraged and a lifting of my burdens when I’ve been sick in the hospital or have been boarding a plane to go to a funeral. These friends have let me cry without judgment and have handed me tissues. They have seen me at my weakest, carried me in my frailty, and have told me truths I haven’t wanted to hear when I’ve needed to hear them. With all of that said, these relationships, though my best representations of Jesus’ love in my life, have been few and far between. Yet, they are the threads that often maintain my hope.

Because of my experiences with the institution of church, I have struggled with believing a lot of lies. I grew up in a godly, very loving and supportive home. If it weren’t for my family, and always feeling like I belong with them, I don’t know who or where I’d be. It has been because of the stability I have received from them that I’ve been able to weather countless difficult situations of hurt and rejection. But, since I moved to Honduras and have been far from them, I have found it more difficult to maintain that stamina in having the hope that what I experience from humans is not how God feels about me. Before, it was easier for me to seek God’s truth in a situation of hurt, always believing He was good, and to dust myself off to try again with other people in a different place. But, the lack of stability in Honduras has led to really struggling with the sense that I don’t belong anywhere, that God has only led me to pain, that every relationship I have here will end in rejection, and that some how I am not worth weathering disagreements or differences in opinion. These lies have affected my relationship with God a lot over the past couple of years and have affected my marriage. A lot of the time, when good things are happening, I am waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me. I fiercely guard my heart, and my levels of compassion and mercy have lessened with each time I’ve invested deeply only to be rejected. I’m not very good at patiently weathering little hurts because they feel like steps to bigger hurts that won’t ever end. I can recognize with my head that these are all lies. But, since I’ve moved here, I have seldom had time to catch my breath before the next big disappointment, rejection, or betrayal has hit me. It feels a bit like being sucked under ocean waves and being knocked down as soon as I stand up again. I haven’t always had the hands of others to steady me.

With all of that said, God has sent me some lifelines over the past year. For one, my husband has a patience and mercy with me that I’ll likely never understand or deserve. He stays even when I’m pushing at my hardest out of fear that he will reject or abandon me too. And, I’ve found some amazing women who I am still getting to know but have truly been a life-preserver in the sea of thoughts that I can’t continue without some kind of healthy relationships. I want to get better. I want to be that person with childlike faith in the midst of rejection—the person I once was before moving here. I have learned and have grown and not always for the worst. I am renouncing lies from the enemy, and I am trying to breathe in His grace. Change feels slow, and I tire of myself. But the breakthroughs emerge when I least expect it.

Just this morning, I was watching a WorshipU video with a message from Steffany Gretzinger. She starts with the question of why God placed the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. She talks about how it feels like God set up Adam and Eve to fail in a way, but she goes on to note that God really desired familial relationships of covenant. Thus, intimacy isn’t possible if both parties aren’t presented with the choice to participate or not. The Tree provided that freedom of choice. When Eve encountered the serpent, she didn’t realize that she was already like God. She was made in His image. And, as my Dad has pondered with me since I was young, she notes that the knowledge from the Tree wasn’t really the problem. It was the timing. God wanted to teach Adam and Eve about good and evil on His timetable according to what they were mature enough to handle. But, they decided to step outside of that relationship because they felt like God was withholding something from them. And the result has been a lingering sense of shame over humanity. We overlook the fact that when God created us, He breathed His life into us and called us good. Apart from God, obviously we aren’t good. But with Him, we can see ourselves as something truly valuable.

I really identified with this message. Over the past few months, I have struggled with feeling like God set me up to fail here in Honduras. With every step I have made that felt like obedience, I have met more failure, betrayal, and rejection. Every time I feel like, “Finally, I have what I need to start moving toward the vision God placed in my heart as a missionary to Honduras,” inevitably the rug gets ripped out from under me, and I’m back at square one. It has felt like God is not on my side. Then, in the darkness and the fog, I have felt abandoned, like God is hiding from me on purpose. And, as we do, I have usually sought His direction and next step rather than seeking His Person because I’m afraid of Who He actually is. I’m afraid He’ll ask me to be in a situation where I’ll be hurt again. At times, that isolation and lack of forward motion has been something I’ve wanted to blame on God. But, a lot of times, I just internalize it as my own personal lack, the belief that I’m not who and what I should be. And each rejection or failure in ministry only seems to reinforce that lie.

At the end of Steffany’s message she makes the plea to her audience that they take a step out of the mentality that they aren’t good or have nothing to offer. That they would reflect on the fact that God made us in His image, and He is undeniably good. And as she began to sing the chorus from “The King of My Heart,” I could feel God singing over me too, “You are good. You’re good.” I let myself really feel that, really receive that song, and believe it could be true. It felt like the smallest yet most hopeful of starts to remembering His kindness toward me.

Here in Honduras, I keep a small compost pile. I’m not obsessive about it. I often don’t remember to save my egg shells or banana peels or lime rinds. But, when I meal prep, I keep the discards of my fruits and vegetables and toss them into my compost pile. When I was in the US, it was springtime, and I was surrounded by my green-thumbed family members. I saw just how therapeutic digging into the earth, nurturing a plant, and watching it grow was for my mom and my grandmother. My grandmother’s flower beds are flourishing, and she keeps a careful eye on every small tree even when it’s seeded itself. My mother’s herb garden fills her with delight, and she spends her days off tending to her tomato plants. I came back from the US wanting to feel that sense of accomplishment and that partnership with God’s creation. If I couldn’t feel productive and full of life and fruit in ministry, I wanted to do so tangibly through a garden. I have basically no yard other than a tiny perimeter around my house, so that is a project that will take some time and creativity. But, when I got back from the US, I was overjoyed to find that from my compost pile, a spaghetti squash plant had emerged. It as not just a small seedling. It was a vibrant plant spilling from the compost pile and growing down the hill, complete with a growing spaghetti squash. The product of a discarded seed.



Now, I know that the plant and sowing and reaping spiritual metaphor is greatly overdone. But, the truth of the matter is that what struck me, what has oddly been healing my heart, is not the plant itself. It’s the compost pile. I have spent the last nearly seven years of my life—nearly all of my twenties—here in Honduras. I have sown into teenagers in government homes and juvenile delinquent centers. I have sown into young people living on the streets. I have sown into women’s ministries, rural churches, urban churches, dance ministries, children’s ministries, worship ministries, small groups, discipleship courses, educational endeavors, neighbors, mission trips, orphanages, and short-term teams. I have been a jack of all trades in ministry (and certainly a master of none). And at the end of the day, rather than feeling like a lavish garden full of fruit, blossoming with promise and sustained relationships, and a wealth of experience, I have felt like those discards in the compost pile. A peel from my time doing administrative work. A rind from my time in 21 of Octubre and Teen Challenge. The grounds from being a single mom to Marvin and Josuan. The shells of conferences, short-term mission trips, and offerings. The stale crumbs from creative ministries. The pits from hours of advice giving. The dead flowers of visions and hopes never realized. All parts of me that I’ve loved and have shed. Yet, in the midst of those things that at some point in time have all been determined to be a waste, used and rejected, there is still life. In that dark, earthy soil, art can still emerge. There are seeds that will sprout from the ongoing death of myself, my varied identities, and my sacrificed dreams just out of reach.

I check on my little spaghetti squash every day. I thrill when it rains, filling my unexpected plant with life. And, I feel slim seeds of hope bursting from the dark night of my soul. There is beauty in you yet.