Love at the Speed of Email (16 page)

I can’t believe I ever looked that young.

I can’t believe how unmoored I felt during my first year and
a half in California.

And now, more than three years on, I find myself in a
different place.

The way I see God and the way I think God probably sees me
has changed. As core issues of living faith have become less neatly edged by
dos and don’ts, they have inhabited instead the far messier territory of
awareness, attitude, action, and intention.

I’ve changed in other ways, too.

I see and feel more as it’s happening, I think.
The cheerful beacon of a small orange flower by the path.
The grounding warmth of a cup of coffee against my palms.
The triggers and trajectories of my own mood swings, and the thoughts, fears,
and exhilarations they typically tow in their wake.

I value solitude more, and silence.

I’m a little less imprisoned than I was by my perceptions of
what other people think of me.

But it’s far easier to point to specific ways that I’ve
become more at home in my own skin in recent years than to explain exactly how
these changes came about. The catalysts weren’t the same things that had
galvanized me a decade earlier – or, at least, they didn’t result in the same
uncomplicated reaction. Services at the church of five thousand that I attended
in L.A. still sometimes stirred or challenged me deeply, but they also
sometimes left me cold, or contemptuous, or simply conflicted about my own
judgmental attitude.

The changes that have taken place during the last couple of
years certainly didn’t happen during early mornings spent reading the Bible,
because I wasn’t doing that.

I suspect things started to shift around the time, about two
years after I arrived, that I started to feel that familiar tickle pushing me
to seek new pastures and I decided to stay put in Los Angeles until I had a
better reason to leave than an abstract sense that my life would surely fit me
more completely and more comfortably somewhere else.
Anywhere
else.

As odd as it might sound, staying put was the harder choice.
I probably would have been more comfortable immersed in the intense dynamic of
learning a new place and new people than I was meeting the challenge of
continuity. But although I still longed for the adventure of change, I was also
getting tired.

Increasingly I was finding myself haunted by a doubtful sort
of melancholy, a constant low-level ache. On one trip to London around this
time – as I wandered through the chaos of Heathrow, as I manhandled my bags up
and down the Underground steps, as I ate alone in an Indian restaurant that
night – I was overwhelmed with the sense that my life was fracturing so
irrevocably into a thousand disconnected people, places, and sensations that I
would never stand a hope of feeling fully integrated.

“The glass window facing the street is entirely patterned by
a complex web of fine cracks,” I wrote in my journal as I waited for my food to
arrive. “It looks solid enough at first glance, but I wonder how hard I’d have
to hit it to trigger a noisy shower of shiny, sharp fragments?”

To others, I knew, I looked solid enough. To others, the
life I led looked fascinating, even charmed. But I was also sure that this – my
habitual tendency to judge my life through the prism of others’ perceptions –
was itself part of the problem

“Outside of comparing, we cannot feel,” Andre
Acimon
said when writing about the benefits of his own
globetrotting. But, I was starting to wonder, when does all that change? When
do all those differences, all that opportunity for comparison become too much
of a good thing?

At what point does a constant stream of change
blunt
our ability to feel and connect to
the present and to ourselves? At what point do we become the Transit Loungers
described so poignantly by Pico
Iyer
as those
“sitting at the Departure Gate, boarding pass in hand,
watching
the destinations ticking over. [Those] who feel neither the pain of separation
nor the exultation of wonder; who alight with the same emotions with which we
embarked; who go down to the baggage carousel and watch our lives circling,
circling, circling, waiting to be claimed.”

And at what point do we become such practiced chameleons –
sometimes choosing to blend in, others to stand out – that we no longer know
our native color?

How had I ended up with this life? And did I even want it,
or was I largely enjoying playing a role others marveled at?

These questions were among the many that demanded to be
addressed when, after breaking up with Jason, I slowed down long enough to hear
the internal clamor, and it was mostly writing that helped me start to address
them.
 

By the time I had been in L.A. two years, writing had
elbowed its way into my life and established itself as both a core passion and
a need. I had started writing my first novel without the faintest idea of why I
felt compelled to do so. After it was finished I turned to journaling and
essays to fill the gap it had left. Over time, without me even really noticing,
writing became something I
needed
to do,
and it was writing more than anything else that helped me name and face
questions Pico
Iyer
asked me, and others that I asked
myself.

How did I answer when a friend asked me whether I was
“fulfilled”?

What did I think of when I heard the word
hope
?

How did I really feel about being by myself when my younger
sister announced she was pregnant or yet another good friend got engaged?

What could pull me back from the edge when, temporarily
overwhelmed by the scope of tragedy and pain in this world, I felt temped to
level the playing field and join others in their distress?

Usually it wasn’t that I found great
answers
to these sorts of questions while writing. It was more that
the writing forced me to stick a flag in the sand, no matter how small, and say
something
. It pushed me to figure out
what I actually thought and wanted rather than simply reacting to a constantly
revolving merry-go-round of people and events. It helped transform happenings,
thoughts, and moods into things acknowledged, clarified, and manageable.

It made me commit to being more myself.

It made me own my life.

Vancouver,
Canada

I’d told Mike that I was nervous about the interview I was
flying to Canada for, and it turned out that I had good reason to be. In
addition to the expected discussion of work and my novel, the host of the show
didn’t hesitate to venture into completely unexpected and far more difficult
territory.

“With all your experience and training,” he asked me during
the second half of the interview, “what do
you
think we should be doing in Sudan?”

“You’ve worked in the past with sex offenders – are these
people redeemable, are they fixable, can you heal them?” he asked.

 
“How have you shifted
in your theological positions and spirituality over time?” he asked.

If there are truly excellent answers to any of these
questions that can be delivered in less than thirty seconds, I’d like to hear
them.

“I’ve shifted a lot in terms of how I act and interact with
people,” I said in response to the last of these questions. “I think, I hope,
that I’ve gotten a lot better at asking questions, at being genuinely curious
and accepting of where people are at. I have more questions and far fewer
answers.”

As Mike and I continued to email each other throughout
December while we waited to hear whether he would be granted leave from work to
come to Australia, Mike also – one country at a time – systematically sent me
all the mass emails he had sent out during the previous five years. There were
about forty of them. He had several years’ worth of my monthly essays. I guess
he figured fair was fair.

These earlier emails weren’t written to me, but I pored over
them just as carefully as I read his current ones. I knew the broad details of
where he’d been, what stuck with him, and how he talked about it all now – that
showed up fairly clearly in our give-and-take. What I didn’t know was how Mike
had felt and reacted in the pressure cooker of then. How he’d gotten from there
to here.
Who he
had
been, not just who he was now.

This story mattered, I knew. It would provide clues to how
Mike might cope with the pressure cookers of a future I was starting to sense
just might be a possibility.

Dushanbe,
Tajikistan

Around the same time that I was drinking myself to sleep on
the couch at night, wondering where my faith had gone and asking myself whether
I’d made a mistake in moving to Los Angeles, Mike was wondering what, exactly,
he was doing in Tajikistan.

“Once upon a time there was a young man named Mike,” began
one of these mass emails, written almost six months after Mike first set foot
in Tajikistan. “Mike enjoyed traveling around the world spending time in
various countries. He easily befriended people from different cultures. He
learned languages quickly. Then one day Mike came to a place called Tajikistan.
Now there’s a different Mike.”

In his own words, Tajikistan
broke
Mike.

He arrived outgoing, passionate about development work, and
so eager to embrace the language and the culture that he moved in with a Tajik
family.

It wasn’t one thing that broke him; it was many. It was the
complete lack of privacy, the squat toilets, spotty electricity, revolting
food, and cold brown water. It was the fact that it was so frigid during winter
that he had to wear five layers of clothes to the office. It was spending much
of his time being sick with
giardia
and other nasty
ailments. It was serving as the engineering expert on a seismic awareness
project when all the technical materials were in Russian. But more than
anything else, far more, it was his failure to live up to his own ideals and
expectations regarding what the work should be, how it should be done, and how
he should live while doing it.

Six months after arriving in the country, Mike hit bottom.
He didn’t like Tajikistan, he didn’t like the
Tajiks
,
he didn’t like himself, and he had a hernia that needed surgery. During the six
weeks that he had to spend in Australia over Christmas having that surgery, he
realized that he couldn’t continue to live as he had been. When he returned to
Tajikistan he moved out of shared housing and into a small flat. He reported in
his emails that he was trying to be less consumed by his job. He was going on
more hikes, he wrote, and had learned to unwind at the end of the day by
listening to music.

Mike had enough determination to finish out the last six
months of his contract, enough sense to leave at that point, and enough honesty
to lay
himself
bare to faraway friends.

“For the rest of my days, I hope that my expectations of
myself and my outlook upon life will be different,” he wrote. “Part of me would
still like to view myself as extraordinary, unbreakable, and indestructible.
But I’m not. I’m flawed, weak. I’m ordinary. I’ve failed my own expectations of
myself.
Failed miserably.”

But even after the beating Tajikistan had dished out, Mike
also had enough spirit left to say, “I am profoundly grateful for these painful
experiences. There are many things over which I have no or little control, but
I can take specific actions to move in the direction that I want to travel in
my life journey. And despite my weaknesses and limitations, I can offer love to
fellow travelers I encounter along the way. Onward.”

* * *

Continuing onward took Mike next to northern Uganda to help
provide water and sanitation facilities in camps for people driven from their
homes because of a particularly vicious ongoing civil war. Eighteen months
after that, Mike moved to Sri Lanka to help rebuild the tsunami-devastated
coast. Eighteen months after that, Papua New Guinea.

The transparent honesty I’d seen in Mike’s early letters
from Tajikistan continued, month after month, in these mass emails. From them,
I learned that he loved Australia so much he’d applied for permanent residency
in 2004 and just missed out. I learned that after his last girlfriend had
called it off by phone while she was in Indonesia and he was in a hospital bed
in Sri Lanka, he had only ever written of her circumspectly and graciously. I
learned that he usually managed to hold light and dark together in the same
letter.

I also saw some things in these letters that raised warning
flags in my mind. Mike had been hospitalized three times in Sri Lanka for
stress-related infections, and I recognized in his emails periodic episodes of burnout,
with all its attendant self-questioning. How long could he keep doing this? Did
he even want to anymore, anyway? Where had his early passion gone?

But I also saw Mike turn a clear lens on his struggles with
a daily slog that was anything but glamorous and repeatedly search out moments
of beauty, hope and humor in the midst of it all. I saw much to respect.

Lira,
Uganda

During his stint in Uganda, Mike was shadowed for a week by
a
National Geographic
photographer as
he went about his work. When the issue came out, the online feature was titled
Hope in Hell: The reach of humanitarian aid
.
One of the photos illustrating this article features Mike. In it, he is a
six-foot-tall white beacon surrounded by dozens of children all reaching for
him. He has his arm out, passing something into one of the waiting hands while
scores of others clutch at him. The sea of cupped palms is very dark against
the pristine blaze of his T-shirt, and Mike’s expression is difficult to read.
His eyes are fixed on the one hand he’s grasping, but his forehead is lined,
his eyebrows tipped up toward each other in a small, worried salute.

Representing hope in hell did not look like an easy gig.

“I've been circling back to this topic of hope a lot lately,
but I haven’t even come close to figuring it out,” I wrote to Mike in early
December, shortly after returning from Vancouver and reading his letter about
the
National Geographic
article.

“What is hope?” I wrote. “Can hope exist independently of
something to place that hope in, some larger external source, or framework? Joy
seems simpler to me, and being joyful in life is something I feel I have a
better handle on than being hopeful. But hope – it’s a puzzle. Attached to this
letter is an unpublished essay called
Hope
Chases Us
about an anti-trafficking benefit dinner I attended earlier this
year.”

Los
Angeles, USA

Hope Chases Us

What do you wear when you’re going to spend the evening
learning about sex slavery?

This was only one of the many important questions in life
that I didn’t have a good answer for on Saturday. Two hours before I was due at
a benefit dinner for International Justice Mission, I was staring into my
closet at a loss.

A black dress and
boots doesn’t work. I love these boots. They’re the most extravagant pair of
shoes I’ve ever bought – knee-high, buttery, black leather with mini-stiletto
heels. But leather-clad calves and dark draped curves feel too vamp to me. A
suit and jacket seems too clinical. What I really want to wear, jeans, is too
casual. In the end I go for international eclectic – a blue cotton shirt from
India over black pants, embroidered platform shoes from Malaysia, and a silver
Orthodox cross from Ethiopia…

It’s been two hundred years since the first abolition act
was passed that made it unlawful for British subjects to capture and transport
human beings, yet there are still about twenty five million people in the world
today who are being held as slaves. That’s almost twice the number trafficked
from Africa during the entire four hundred years of the transatlantic slave
trade. The buying and selling of people is now the world’s second-most
lucrative illegal profession, outranked only by the global trade in illegal
arms.

Twenty five million is a number so large it defies
comprehension. It’s more than the entire population of Australia. Who are they,
and where?

They are Cambodian men trafficked to Thailand to work on
construction projects. They are Yemeni children smuggled into Saudi Arabia to
work as street beggars. They are children from Mali working on cocoa
plantations in the Ivory Coast.

To bring this slightly closer to home, the Ivory Coast holds
forty-three percent of the world’s market in cocoa, and the USA is the world’s
largest chocolate consumer.

To bring it closer still, the U.S. government estimates that
about fifty-thousand women and children are trafficked into the United States
every year for sweatshop labor, domestic servitude, or the sex trade.

…I pull up behind a
shiny Corvette at the Millennium Biltmore and hand my keys to the valet. I am
ashamed that after several recent stints in airport parking lots my car is
filthy, and then proud that I do not own a Corvette. I’m
ashamed,
again, at the self-righteousness I recognize shadowing this thought. Then I am
proud of my own humility.

I am only distracted
from these mental gymnastics by the grandeur of the hotel lobby – acres of
marble, ornate columns, and gilded ceilings…

The program that I am handed as I enter the event informs me
that, for this evening at least, I am a 17-year-old girl named
Panida
from a hill tribe in Thailand. When I was twelve, my
family sent me off with a man who visited my village and promised that if I
came to work in his cigarette factory my earnings would be enough to support
the rest of the family. He lied. I ended up in a brothel, where I worked for
three years before I was rescued.

…I sip an apple
martini. It is cold and sweet against my glossed lips – the bite of spirits
cloaked by gentle green. A maraschino promise glows red from the bottom of the
glass. I wonder whether
Panida
likes martinis. Then I
remember she’s still too young to drink…

The walls of the ballroom are lined by carved pillars. An
enormous chandelier hangs like an inverted wedding cake from the ceiling, four
tiers of crystal falling toward the floor like a ballet of raindrops. At our
table there doesn’t seem to be enough space for all the cutlery and
accoutrements: two wine glasses, bread, individual pats of butter, our own
personal dessert platters, and salads of braised pears and honeyed pecans.

Staff member from International Justice Mission mount the
stage. They speak of modern-day slavery with a facility honed by years of
witnessing what generally happens when power operates for too long in an
accountability vacuum. Laws are just words on paper, the speakers say, until
they are made reality in the lives of the vulnerable. And the vulnerable are
just statistics until there are faces and stories to put to the violations.

Grainy black-and-white footage of brothel raids taken from
hidden surveillance cameras is projected onto a large screen behind the stage.
We see dozens of
Panidas
in seedy rooms, awaiting
customers. A ragged toy perched neatly on a bed is a heartbreaking symbol of
one little girl’s attempt to preserve some tattered remnant of a stolen
childhood.

…Dessert taunts me all
through dinner and in the end I don’t know which to start with. The small round
of raspberry cheesecake, the brandy-snap basket filled with cream and
strawberries, or the chocolate truffle? My carefully chosen black pants feel
too tight…

It is too easy to simply showcase the irony of dining on
steak and chicken while these videos play.
Too easy to only
raise an eyebrow at the fact that a mere twenty-one percent of my expensive
ticket for the event actually went to the charity.
But I am reminded of
a familiar biblical admonition to look first to the log in my own eye. I am the
one who owns so many clothes that I can spend half an hour deciding what to
wear. I am the one with enough disposable income to afford the ticket in the
first place. And I’m now the one responsible for how I respond to the
information that’s being served to me on a silver platter right alongside three
types of dessert.

The statement that catches me most off guard during the
night is spoken near the end of the evening. It isn’t the shocking statistic
that the trafficking of women and children for sex brings in more money
annually than the entire Microsoft
empire
. It’s just
six brave words.