Living a blog-worthy life

 Editor's Note: The Phifer-Houseman family consists of three adopted kids who recently went to visit their Ethiopian birthplace after many years of being in America.  They blogged about their experience.

 From Gayll, on the plane ride home:

For the most part, I don’t take pictures.  Not because I don’t value pictures.  I’m always impressed by the photo journalism in National Geographic or that of my notoriously photographic scrapbooking friends.  I wish I could be more like them, a better historian, who can somehow document life and live it as it happens at the same time.

Unfortunately, as it does happen life is almost always a little too much for me in the moment.  I feel challenged enough by the call to be present, aware, active and alert in any given moment.  I can’t seem to divide my limited consciousness into both observer and participant.  In this three-week return to Addis Ababa I’ve barely been able to keep my wits (or my temper) about me.  Reflection has come to seem like a Minority World luxury --- a little bit like consistent internet service or reliable electricity.  “Wouldn’t that be nice,” I’ve thought, as the exigencies of the moment have strained even my list-making abilities.  Bulleted do-do lists have become the pinnacle of reflection here.  

Just getting the have-to’s down on paper has seemed like a major victory of mind over matter---“What’s next?” providing a kind of dike against the surging tide of event-orientation, relational commitments, expectations and conflicts, and inadequate infrastructures that don’t quite work or actually create more work---stretching the limits of one’s patience.  So much for the real-time blog.

I don’t quite know what to do with all that --- how to let go of the ideal of capturing life in photos or reflections and to be OK with offering presence alone --- ephemeral, fleeting presence.  What will I have to show for it?  How will I answer those who ask, “So, how’d it go?  What did you think? Learn? Do?”

Is it enough to have lived in the moment and loved the people around me (my kids, the teachers or school kids that we volunteered with, our house workers or relatives, the beggars on the street) with as much attention as I could muster?

Well, not enough for a spiffy up-to-the-minute blog (as this retroactive reflection on the plane ride home attests).  But, maybe enough or more than enough when you are attempting a cross-cultural service trip with your kids in tow.  Serving with your children is an all-hands-on-deck experience.  You are participant and pastor, servant, shepherd, and sinner all rolled into one --- often without the luxury of time to mentally or emotionally re-group before the next need, experience or reaction comes rolling through.  It’s enough to make you want to stay home and try something as challenging as watching the next season of West Wing.  Who needs to take on real-time life as it happens, with kids no less, beyond the controllable confines of our well-mapped suburban schedules?

Well, we do---precisely because kids learn not what we say, but what we live out in front of them.  If we want them to serve, we must serve.  If we want them to become intrepid, generous, conscious, involved, present to the world’s needs rather than consumed by personal preferences or comfort  then they must see us and be with us (in action) out beyond our ability to neatly package life.

I wish there was another way.  I wish you could say, “Do what I scrapbook (or blog), not what I do.” I wish a trip like this was not so enormously costly in terms of 24/7 emotional availability (including the on-going need to apologize or ask forgiveness for one’s lamentable character defects which become so frighteningly obvious on a trip like this).  But, perhaps it is this kind of expensive offering of one’s self that demonstrates as nothing else can what we hope to teach our children.  Do as I do:  take your whole self (not just what you think you can spare) and offer it up, glaring inadequacies and all, to be fully present to and for others.  You may come home with fewer pictures, but it would be a life worth blogging about---if you ever get the chance.