The Invitation to Wonder

Though I have lived in Honduras nearly nine years, there are still aspects of culture and relationships that I have a hard time wrapping my head around. One of those many dynamics is how renters and landlords relate to one another. I moved down here when I was 22, so really, my only renting experience has come from my time here. Thus, it’s very possible that the same kinds of things happen in the US or very different things happen here in Honduras, and I’m just limited to my own experience. So, all in all, this probably should not be a blanket statement over the landlord/lady tendencies of an entire nation. What I can speak to, however, is that privacy and individualism are not nearly as prized here in Honduras as they are in the US. Having personal space is a luxury in many cases rather than an expectation, and living in community is seen as more important than having the liberty of independence and self-expression. Again, every family and situation can be different.

I have lived in this particular house for six or seven years now since I lived in it before Raúl and I got married. When I first started renting it, it had a huge plot of land connected to it. Granted, it was covered in ants that ate everything we planted, but it had lots of neat little spaces under trees and with big rocks that provided a sense of solitude. I loved that space and yard; it was a big draw for renting the house. Only a year or so after starting to rent, the family who owned the house started building another house a stone’s throw away from the one I was living in. Aside from the invasion of builders all around the perimeter of my house washing their hands in my cistern and whatnot, I was also devastated at losing the privacy and space on my only side without neighbors with no notice. My landlady’s sincere comment was, “It’s so good you won’t be living all alone in this corner anymore.” What she celebrated, I grieved. Flash forward a few years, and the sweet grandmother who lives beside me uproots my plants without asking, sweeps behind my house when I don’t have my curtains covering the windows and may not be fully clothed, and there is no yard to speak of that I can call my own. Little by little, I’ve found my own ways to stake claim on privacy. My husband had a tall gate built to cover my kitchen door entrance, and I started a garden behind the house that we blocked off from anyone else because I needed to feel like I had some space that was just mine. It’s such a small thing, but it has made a load of difference in my morale. (If, at this point, you are feeling annoyed with me, it’s likely because you come from the same individualistic culture I come from. If you come from a more communal culture, you’re probably wondering what my problem is. Again, both cultures are totally valid.)

Last week, the family of my landlady approached my husband to tell him that they would be painting the exterior of our house. I was the first tenet to ever move in, and while I painted the interior to my liking with their permission, I never felt like I wanted to invest in painting the exterior because they wouldn’t knock any money off of our rent if we did. So, I was content with the rustic cement finish.

One of the issues I tend to have here in Honduras is how much I value consideration. I grew up in a household where consideration was probably in the top three of our core values, followed perhaps only by honesty. I grew up being taught to empathize with others and to treat them as I would want to be treated. I can’t say whether consideration is a high value in Honduras or not because my views are skewed by my own culture. All I know is that if it is, it plays out very differently in terms of culture than my own definition. For example, consideration in my family meant that you didn’t interrupt someone who was talking because it was rude, could cause the person to lose their train of thought, and ultimately, I didn’t like it when people did it to me (so why would I do so to someone else). On the contrary, in Honduras, it’s considered rude if you don’t interrupt everyone to say hello whenever you enter a place. Neither of these approaches to consideration is wrong. It’s just different and reflective of different values. Not interrupting is valuing the individual’s thoughts and conversations. Interrupting to say hello and acknowledge everyone in the room upon entering is valuing the collective group’s importance.

This aspect of consideration came into play in the painting of my house. In my world of consideration, I would have at least asked the tenet for input or would have offered some options in the paint color to someone who had occupied the house and always paid faithfully for the last seven years. But, my version of consideration isn’t something that I can almost ever expect to receive here in Honduras. It’s not personal or ever meant to intentionally be hurtful. It’s just a cultural difference. The day they started painting my house, I stayed inside all day for fear of facing what color it would be. I didn’t have high hopes since they had already painted the grandmother’s house a very dark, vibrant reddish-pink. This is another cultural difference—it’s very common to see very flashy colors in clothing and on houses alike. It seems the more attention you can draw, the better. US definitions of curb appeal and housing associations dictating what colors add to property value is just not a thing—at least not in this neighborhood. Thus, I probably should have been happy that the color wasn’t a lime green or a fluorescent orange. Yet, I deep sighed nonetheless when I saw a Pepto-Bismol pink covering my house in such haphazard ways that it was as if painting trim of any kind was much too great of an inconvenience. (But, maybe they aren’t done yet?)

As part of the counseling course I just finished, I learned about the elements of character structure: attachment/bonding, separation/boundaries, integration/reality, and capacity/adulthood. Part of the program is being able to develop and heal our own character issues just as much as it’s about developing competency in our professional abilities in counseling others. Thus, we have plenty of opportunities and assignments that ask us to be self-aware about our own character deficiencies. While I have had previous seasons of improving in having deeper, more vulnerable relationships or in having clear and healthy boundaries, I feel like this is the season of growing in integration.

Integration is our ability to reconcile good and bad within the world, to live peaceably in the tension those two aspects of life create. Healthy integration looks like being able to accept and deal with our own flaws and failures, the flaws and failures of others, and the injustices and sin we will inevitably see in our world. Unhealthy integration can look like perfectionism, unforgiveness, the inability to grieve, living in denial of the negativity in life, and having a very harsh inner judge toward oneself and others. I feel like the deficits I have in this area have emerged greatly because of living in another culture. So many little things—like expectations of consideration almost never being met—tend to build into an underlying hum of anger beneath the surface. While I can logically know that truly people have no intentional malice toward me, because my definition of love is slow closely entwined with my understanding of consideration, my environment can feel like a very unloving, hostile place sometimes. I can have trouble reconciling the hurts and flaws around me with the security of being loved regardless.

Because this is the area I want to be intentional about growing in, I wanted to lean into this disappointment of my house color. It’s such a small thing, and I’m sure coming from a missionary, it seems ridiculous that this, of all things, would be a bummer. At least we have a house to live in, and it ultimately belongs to my landlady. She can do whatever she likes to it. But, I’m a creative person. I like to decorate, and I value art and aesthetics as a means of self-expression. As I held this situation and asked myself what bothered me about it, the answers were layered. One answer is the matter of preference and genuinely knowing I’d never pick that color for any house exterior. Another aspect is that every time I see the outside of my house (at least while all of this is fresh), I feel the sting of a lack of consideration because I wasn’t asked for input. Knowing that I would never treat someone that way amplifies that frustration. But, the deepest answer is pride—I don’t like knowing that someone could see my house and think lesser of my taste because of the color or my excellence in work ethic because the job that was done that doesn’t reflect the standards of excellence I have for myself. It feels like a reflection of my person that I have no control over. That’s a little hard to verbalize honestly because it seems so petty, but this is part of growth—being able to openly admit how I really feel about disappointments even when I know that there are more important things in the world. If I don’t admit how I really feel and bring those emotions into the light, they will always camp out in a burrowed part of my brain every time I see my house or my landlady. I won’t be able to let them go. We can’t grieve the experiences that we refuse to acknowledge as hurtful or disappointing.

As I’ve been pondering all of the aspects of integration where I find myself lacking, I stumbled upon an Amanda Cook song from years ago that I loved when I first found it and still love now. The song is called “Wonder,” and the lyrics go like this:

May we never lose our wonder
May we never lose our wonder
Wide-eyed and mystified
May we be just like a child
Staring at the beauty of our King
Fill us with wonder

‘Cause you are beautiful in all Your ways
King of Kings
You are beautiful in all Your ways
‘Cause you are beautiful in all Your ways
‘Cause you are beautiful in all Your ways

You fascinate me, You fascinate me
You fascinate us with who You are
You fascinate us, You fascinate us
You fascinate us with Your love

The truth of the matter is that even in healing, we’re invited to look at the One who created us. In looking at the Creator, we can be reminded that we aren’t problems to be solved. Even with all of the self-awareness in the world, we’re still mysteries to explore, and the more that we discover Him, the more He shows us the truth of ourselves. At the heart of integration is the question of what we’re looking for. If we look for flaws, imperfections, sin, injustice, pain, and the enemy we are always going to find them. If we’re looking for Him, if we’re seeking His gaze from across the room, we will find Him even in the midst of those failures of the world to reflect the eternity we were made for.

When we are obsessed with perfection, when our hope is extinguished by the injustice in our world, when we are consumed by unforgiveness toward ourselves and others, we reduce humanity to a set of problems we’ll never be able to solve. And we lose our wonder. One of the speakers in the conference of my first class was Dr. Curt Thompson. During his time of sharing, he talked about how when we approach life as a set of problems to solve, we get stuck in our left brains and limit the kinds of solutions we can come up with. How often can our brains get stuck in a loop of frustrations because the biggest item on our horizon is viewed through the lens of problem solving instead of the lens of creating? If we want to have access to our right brain with all of its intuition and emotional ingenuity, we have to shift our perspective to one of wonder rather than one of self-preservation, to one of hopeful creation rather than one of shameful failures to rectify.

For a long time, I felt like my tendency to seek the potential for improvement or growth in myself, others, a church, a creative expression, etc. was a negative trait. How could I be such a critical, insatiable person? Yet, I have learned over the years that when I am looking for Him and stumble across an area that could use some healing or some growth, this is my greatest gift because it’s an invitation to bring more of Heaven to earth, to return to God’s original design. It’s an invitation to co-create in connection with the One who created us. Since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, our world was not meant to offer perfection. We were thrust into a narrative of return—return to the Father, return to intimate relationship, return to loving and being loved, return to a perfect eternity. The imperfections and pains that we see and experience are whispers imprinted on our souls as reminders that this is not our home. We can feel them fully and hold the Father’s hand through them; we can grieve and forgive precisely because this is our way of co-creating and bringing Heaven to a broken earth.

As I am stepping into the realm of counseling, I am recognizing quite viscerally that the only way that I am going to be able to enter into the pain and experience of someone else fully and still point someone to the hope of a perfect Creator unraveling their hurts, is if I cast aside any delusions I may have of being able to fix or to inspire myself. My greatest role is to embrace intentionally and deeply my own limitations—not in an apologetic or reluctant way—but in a glorious display of the beauty of His Creation in my areas of lack. It doesn’t feel like shame. It doesn’t feel like a diatribe against myself for not being enough. It feels like wonder. It feels holy. It feels like the freedom to co-create and to do exactly what it says in Isaiah 58:11-12:

“Yahweh will always guide you where to go and what to do.
He will fill you with refreshment
even when you are in a dry, difficult place.
He will continually restore strength to you,
so you will flourish like a well-watered garden
and like an ever-flowing, trustworthy spring of blessing.
Your people will rebuild long-deserted ruins,
building anew on foundations laid long before you.
You will be known as Repairers of the Cities
and Restorers of Communities.” (Passion Translation)

The irony of the Pepto-Bismol pink house is that when I was little, my bedroom was sponge-painted just such a color by my own choosing. My dad used to say that it looked like a Pepto Bismol factory had exploded all over the place. Yet, in that space, I saw possibilities and figures in the sponge designs that were only creations of my imagination. As girly as it was, choosing to paint my room that color was part of my journey of self-expression. When I look at my house now from a lens of wonder, I feel the Father’s joy over my love of creating aesthetically and my eye for detail and excellence and even over my preferences that so differ from what colors my exterior walls. I feel permission to grieve, yes, but also an invitation to remember to look for Him in everything.

I choose the narrative I connect with this experience. I can try to problem solve and make sense of why my neighbor would choose this color, why they wouldn’t include me in the decision, and how I’m going to convince myself to like it. Or, I can position myself with a posture of wonder and see my neighbors as wanting to add more color to their environment, wanting to create beauty in this time of lockdown, and I can ask why the Lord would allow my home to be marked with this specific color in this specific season. We can create a new narrative together.

Just because I am that nerd, let me share what I’ve uncovered:
Pink in the realm of worship, specifically flags used in worship, often represents intimacy, child-like faith, right relationship with God, tenderness, God’s embrace, compassion, and the Bridegroom’s heart.
Pink roses are typically associated with grace and refinement.
Bismuth, the non-toxic metal that gives Pepto-Bismol its color is created as a by-product of refining other precious metals. It’s the ingredient in Pepto-Bismol that also provides pain relief. It’s also used in a lot of cosmetics to give shine. It is durable and makes alloys easily.

While my first association with the color of my house was a lack of consideration on the part of my neighbors, in looking for my Heavenly Father, I find that He has demonstrated careful consideration in allowing my home to be marked so specifically in this season. As I enter into educating myself and pursuing emotional and spiritual health so that I can be a counselor for others, He has marked my place of refuge with intimacy. In the midst of a seemingly never-ending lockdown, He has painted my only place to be with His embrace. When I look at my house, I can receive His invitation to child-like faith and to enter the Bridegroom’s heart for me. As I seek to be refined, He extends His grace. He has granted me a visible reminder in the perfect season that He has given me compassion, that He can move through my life to provide relief of pain for others, and that He has equipped me to be long-suffering in love, to unite with others in community and care, and to call forth the shine that exists in broken places.

Maybe that seems like a stretch, but it’s no more of a stretched narrative than believing that my neighbors don’t care about me or that my tangible world reflects continuous hostility toward me. I choose wonder. I choose to see Him and feel His love in this one, seeming folly.