africa herself

I'm ridiculously sentimental.

More than I wish I were, at times.

Places, songs, dates, smells, sounds... they all can instantly transport me back in time. Memories and meaning are attached to everything. Everywhere.

Which means I'm forever celebrating -iversaries. Friendiversary. Nashiversary. Monthiversary. Homeiversary. And yesterday? Yesterday was my Africaversary.

April 14, 1998 was the day I moved to South Africa.

A lifetime ago I lived there for 13 years.

I get that it's no longer really an -iversary since I don't live there anymore. But my heart hasn't gotten the memo. April 14th will always equal Africa. 18 years later (damn, I'm getting old), the sheer date on the calendar still escorts me right back...

I was 19 years old.

I landed in Johannesburg with two very-full suitcases, $200 in my pocket, and a heart drunk on a cocktail of faith, naïveté, foolishness, and passion. And what followed was a lifetime's worth of loving and laughing and leading on rich African soil that took root in my heart as deeply as I dug my roots into hers.

And somehow, in some strange, undeniably orchestrated way, Africa led me to Nashville.

And so yesterday I celebrated my 18-year Africaversary, right here in Tennessee, with a bottle of 13-year old South African wine... which seemed so oddly fitting and perfect and surreal and peculiar, all at the same time.

With the very real understanding that everything sweet is bitter and everything bitter is sweet, I raised my glass.  

Because this wine?

This wine is bold and strong.

It's complicated and complex and multi-layered. It tells entire stories with its bountiful color and aroma and taste. It's both intoxicating and sobering... and completely other worldly.

Each sip is Africa herself.

Each sip is me.

the girl in the brothel {VIDEO}

Last week, I told you about meeting Ang in a brothel.

That post was actually spurred on by a video interview I did.

The Exodus Road captured footage and stories during my time with them in Thailand — such a unique, captivating, and engaging way to help bring you to the front lines of experiencing their work in action. 

Though you're familiar with the story already, I wanted to pass along the video in which I share about my time with Ang. It was a definitely a conversation that will stick with me forever...

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$35/month funds one full day of investigative work in India (called BRAVO Team). BRAVO needs 50 more monthly donors in order to hire additional covert operatives, investigators, and social workers to maximize their impact.

Together, you and I can join the BRAVO Team as the brothers and sisters who show up to find and free the ones in desperate need of rescue and restoration. 

faith goes to the dark places

I grew up in a breed of Christianity that sought to be a light, but hid from the darkness.

Though it would never be said, deep down there was concern that the dark might extinguish our glow—or, at the very least, cause it to be misunderstood. 

So we lived with a sterile faith.

Non-polluted.
Pure.
Uncontaminated.

Prosperity was named and claimed, words of life were spoken (#blessed), and this little light of ours shone brightly within the walls of our sacred safe places. 

We claimed the American Dream as our Christian right.

And somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the picture that's actually painted for us in the Gospels. Within those pages, I don't see a sterile faith, holed up to avoid contamination. 

I see pursuit. 

Search.
Rescue.
Scandalous grace.

I see Jesus preferring to spend time with prostitutes, thieves, and those who make a living screwing over their own brothers. I see Him seeking out those who live in the shadows, those the faith leaders of His day shunned completely.

Jesus called us to a faith that is anything but sterile, for an antiseptic faith is powerless. 

Ineffective.
Empty.
Worthless.

The faith we're beckoned to is not concerned about preserving its image or "avoiding the appearance of evil." Instead, it walks down the back alleys; it steps into the slums; it pulls up a stool in the pubs; it sits in the brothels; it finds and frees the shackled.

Faith goes to the dark places.

It pursues the darkest corners of the night and the deepest depths of depravity.

It never fears that the dark will snuff it out. Faith knows that no amount of darkness can dampen its illumination, so long as it shines.

But even the smallest flame can shatter the blackest night.

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The Exodus Road goes into the dark places to find and free modern-day slaves. Please read more about their work and consider stepping into the darkness with them through your support.

:: :: ::

$35/month funds one full day of investigative work in India (called BRAVO Team). BRAVO needs 50 more monthly donors in order to hire additional covert operatives, investigators, and social workers to maximize their impact.

Together, you and I can join the BRAVO Team as the brothers and sisters who show up to find and free the ones in desperate need of rescue and restoration. 

sitting with her

I was in a brothel. 

In front of me, girls danced on the stage. They swayed back and forth on their high heels, and watched themselves in the mirror as they gripped the poles.

Their faces said it all. 

Flat affect. Emotionless. Vacant. Eyes far off. 

Occasionally one would make eye contact with me. I'd say hello with a slight wai bow and a smile, and usually she would smile back before quickly looking away.

This one girl, though—marked on her armband as #37—kept my gaze. We smiled at each other until our smiles erupted into laughter. She looked away, but kept looking back over, a smile plastered on her face.

We asked the waiter to have her join us for a drink. 

This is how it works, I learned. The patrons of these brothels request a girl by number, offering to buy her a drink. In exchange, she spends time with them... and, depending on the amount of money exchanged, provides certain "services". 

Around the room, men were fondling girls' breasts. They were gripping their faces, keeping them from turning away as they forcefully kissed them. Men were thrusting their... parts... in women's faces, touching them in all manner of inappropriate ways, and often interacting with more than one girl at a time. 

The men's faces also said it all. 

Blank stares. Lifeless. Empty. Hollow. 

These had to be some of the saddest people on the planet. Right? I mean, they're engaging in absolutely appalling and nauseating acts. What situations, what circumstances, could possibly have driven them to this point? What do their lives look like that this is where they turn for attention and affection and intimacy (a mere mirage which they are grasping for, but never quite lay hold of)? 

So much heartache in that room, on both sides: victims and perpetrators alike. 

That's a hard pill for me to swallow.

It's not easy to view these men with the same eyes of compassion that wants to wrap my arms around these girls and steal them away. It makes me uncomfortable to acknowledge that brokenness sometimes looks like a stripper, and other times it looks like a john. 

But despite the tension, the discomfort, and the fact that I may not even like to admit it, I know this to be true:

If I say I love Christ, I have to love the johns as well as the girls.

My girl—#37—came and sat with me. Though she didn't know much English, we Forrest Gumped our way through a conversation, asking questions back and forth, sharing little bits of our lives with each other. 

Her name is Ang. 
She came to Pattaya 3 years ago. 
She misses her family.
She does not like dancing in this club.

Sprinkled throughout our 30-minute conversation, she said the words "thank you" over a dozen times. It struck me as so remarkable that I kept count. 

"Thank you for letting me sit with you." 

I squeezed her hand (which had been holding mine). I smiled, and I told her I was so glad she was sitting with me. 

At the end of the night, my mind wandered back to Ang—the very first girl I'd met hours prior. I knew I'd walked away from that brothel without making a life-altering impact on her. I didn't save her from the (possibly) abusive and awful position she finds herself in. Nothing about her circumstances changed because I had been there. 

But I'd sat with her in the darkness. 

I sat with her in her darkness. 

And simply by doing that, she had a half-hour of being treated like a human rather than a commodity. For 30 minutes, she wasn't groped or fondled or sexualized. Instead, she was treated with the respect, dignity, kindness, and love she deserves. 

Maybe that is Gospel work after all.

I went to sleep with Ang on my heart, with whispered prayers of grace for her...

...and for the johns.

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Please take some time to read about The Exodus Road, and continue to follow along as I learn more about their radical work of empowering rescue for trafficking victims.

:: :: ::

$35/month funds one full day of investigative work in India (called BRAVO Team). BRAVO needs 50 more monthly donors in order to hire additional covert operatives, investigators, and social workers to maximize their impact.

Together, you and I can join the BRAVO Team as the brothers and sisters who show up to find and free the ones in desperate need of rescue and restoration. 

chasing down community

Though this Long Island girl never imagined she'd live in the south, the decision to move to Nashville was a relatively easy one, all things considered. After all, I'd packed up my life and headed to southern Africa when I was only nineteen. Choosing a U.S. city to settle in on my return Stateside didn't seem quite so consequential. 

But that didn't make my transatlantic move any less heartwrenching.

The summer of 2011, I arrived in Nashville, broken in every way.

My decade-long marriage had ended, my ex running off with my (ex-)friend. As founders of a donor-driven nonprofit, when news of infidelity and then divorce was made public, financial support started to dry up. Eighteen months later I was forced to make the most devastating decision of my life: closing down our organization (and, in doing so, laying off over 60 staff members).

In one grand swoop (that seemed equally far too fast and painstakingly slow, all at the same time), I lost my marriage, career, home, friendships, future, and country. My entire adult life had been spent on African soil. And in a proverbial instant, it had all vanished... shattering into a million pieces. 

When I relocated back to the U.S. after 13 years abroad, I felt like an absolute and utter failure. 

Friends graciously welcomed me into their homes with open arms (and open hearts) in far-flung places around the country, like Ohio and Georgia and Oregon. Most days, getting out of bed was considered a win. The days I went to counseling, or engaged the "free therapy" of my own writing, or swallowed my Prozac (along with my pride), or allowed myself to laugh? Those were the days I knew I was taking healthy steps forward.

Don't ever let anyone fool you: Healing is hard work.

All the while, I had my sights set on Nashville. I'd visited a few times over the years, had some friends here, even completed the half-marathon just days before the fateful flood... After living in a rural agricultural region of South Africa for so long, I craved city life. But I'd also grown to love some aspects of small town living that I wasn't ready to give up just yet. Nashville seemed to be the best of both worlds, fitting the bill of the "manageable" city I was looking for. 

But the biggest reason I moved to Nashville was to chase down community. 

I knew I needed to be intentional about surrounding myself with quality people. If I'd learned anything in my 30+ years of life, it was that I can't do this thing on my own. I need a strong support system. We all do. We're wired for it, built to require it. And the handful of friends I had here (almost all of whom I'd met through social media in my early days of blogging from the mission field) were the primary reason why I knew this is where I should put down roots. 

Chase down community. It became my mantra. My touchstone. 

And it proved to be far more difficult than I ever thought possible.

In my first year here, almost all of my friends moved away, relocating for work or love or adventure. Others drifted in the way that friendships sometimes go when different life seasons take over. I struggled to build new relationships, having limited opportunities or contexts in which to meet people. I was left feeling incredibly unanchored. Disconnected. Unsettled.

Community isn't as easy to come by as I'd hoped. Maybe it's Nashville. Maybe it's my age. Or my stage of life. Or my personality. Or maybe it's a Rubik's Cube combination of all those things together. Who knows.

What I do know is this: Developing a life support system gets way harder the older I get.

And it will never just happen on its own.

It demands all kinds of time and effort and intentionality. It necessitates vulnerability and risk. It requires that I keep putting myself out there amid the (disappointingly) often hollow Southern platitudes about "getting together sometime". (It took this Yankee a long time to realize that phrase is more of a pleasantry than the start of a plan to really connect.) 

But eventually, slowly, I began to find those true heart connections again. One relationship at a time, I started to find and build community. I've found it in Instagram connections turned friends. And in wine-infused porch conversations that run late into the night. I've discovered it in the bartenders and staff at my local Cheers. And in laughter and heartache and shared bowls of pasta. 

It was years in the making, but I realized its presence in a solitary instant one night last fall. As my autumn porch party was winding down, I looked around at friends old and new, spilling from the kitchen in the back of my house all the way through to the front yard, and it just hit me all of a sudden: I finally have that community I'd been chasing.

I noticed it in the same way you suddenly realize, as winter starts to fade, that it's no longer pitch black out by 5 PM. 

That seasonal transition never seems quite as gradual as it really is. It sneaks up on you. You just look around one evening and it takes you by surprise to discover that there's sunlight where previously there had been only darkness.

My circle of friends is small, but deep. And they strengthen and support me in countless ways (as I hope I also do for them). But I finally feel that sense of belonging. Of connection. Of settledness. I feel more anchored than I have in years, and as I approach my fifth Nashiversary, I do so with immense gratitude.

My heart discovered sunlight again in this little big town, with its creativity and innovation, its social mindedness and collaboration, its food scene and its musical pulse. And, most of all, its community.

I didn't find a home here.

But I'm building one.