Compassion

This isn’t the short version

I don’t even know how to put this weekend into words. But let’s all believe that I will now attempt to do that very thing as I ramble until I end up with approximately 1,000+ of them. I’d been looking forward to this past weekend for as long as I can remember and I came home feeling humbled, amazed, grateful, inspired, and exhausted.

That’s a lot to pack into one weekend. In fact, as I attempted to recount everything to P on Sunday night, I suddenly burst into tears for reasons I didn’t even understand. He just looked at me and said, “Wow. You are all hyped up on some estrogen after being around all those women.”

I don’t know if he’s ever been happier to be trapped on a couch with me as I share my feelings as he was at that moment.

So, let’s start from the beginning.

I was born in Houston, Texas on August 14, 1971.

Oh I kid. Although by the time I finish this post you may feel like my life story might be shorter.

On Thursday morning, my dad dropped me off at the airport for my flight to Birmingham. It was then that I realized I’d made a serious rookie mistake and forgotten to check in for my Southwest flight online. This resulted in a B 22 boarding pass which isn’t as bad as it could’ve been, but certainly isn’t ideal. But I breezed through security without any kind of inappropriate groping and that felt like a win. I stopped at Starbucks for the Grande Peppermint Mocha I’d been anticipating all morning, only to be told that they were out of peppermint. How does this happen? It’s Christmas time.

I boarded my flight and spent the next few hours reading all about Prince William and Kate Middleton, although she apparently wants to go by Catherine now. It looks like the wedding is going to be April 29 at Westminster Abbey and there is much debate about which tiara she’ll wear. I just thought you might want to know.

Also, I promise I’ll quit with all these meaningless details as I flounder for a storyline.

Once I arrived in Birmingham I checked into my hotel room and then headed to the arena to start my official event team duties even though I had no idea what those were and what I was doing. We spent the next few hours looking for walkie-talkies and pulling out reserved signs for various seats and getting things organized for the next day.

Later on I headed back to the hotel and Sophie came to pick me up for dinner. I’d thought we’d eat Mexican food, but we ended up going to eat at some fabulous restaurant downtown. It’s safe to say I’d tell you the name of it if I could remember. I just know I ate some pasta that changed my life and a tiramisu I’ll remember when I’m on my deathbed.

Friday was filled with putting signs on seats and filling gift bags and making sure the merch (love the merch!) was all ready to go. I’m sure there were other things involved but I was too busy walking around asking, “What am I supposed to be doing? Do I need to be somewhere?”

Bless their hearts, they decided to give me a walkie-talkie anyway. Probably because they knew I was going to be in dire need of guidance and direction.

My official role was Greeter Assist. Which means I was in charge of the volunteers at one of the arena entrances and had to fake an air of confidence and authority. Fortunately this is part of my skill set. It’s how I rolled for ten years as a pharmaceutical rep. “ABSOLUTELY NOT! THIS DRUG DOESN’T INTERFERE WITH THE CYP450 METABOLISM!”

Anyway, the doors opened at 5:30 and that’s about the last time I had a coherent thought that day. CRAZY TOWN.

On Saturday morning, Betsy (our LifeWay event team leader) told us to be packed and downstairs at 6:25. In the morning. The good news is I’d managed to get about four minutes of sleep the night before so I was ready to go with my bloodshot eyes and feet that felt like I’d walked on a bed of nails.

I went back to my post as Greeter Assist until the crowd died down and I found Kelly and Heather holding my contraband Starbucks. That Grande dose of caffeine may have been what saved me. It certainly was the only thing that gave me strength to work the merch tables selling $2.00 t-shirts.

But, seriously, I’ve attended a lot of LifeWay events over the last three years. However, I’ve never done the event team thing and I had NO IDEA what all goes into the entire thing. They work so hard to make the whole thing come together and the thing that impressed me the most was that everyone just does what needs to be done. (In editing this, the other thing that should impress me is the number of times I used the word “thing” in the last two sentences.) No one says that something isn’t their job or they’re too busy. They just go. And they have fun while they do it. I’d never met the majority of women on the team, but I loved every one of them by the end of the weekend.

Okay, so the other component of the weekend was a Compassion Bloggers’ Reunion. Amanda worked with Shaun Groves to organize a reunion of all the bloggers that have been on various Compassion trips. They all attended Deeper Still, but I didn’t really get to see any of them during the event because none of them were in line buying $2.00 t-shirts.

But Compassion hosted a dinner on Saturday night for all of us. So after the event ended, I changed out of my green Deeper Still t-shirt and into something a little more dinner-ish. (I don’t know what that means.) And then Kelly, Amanda, Heather and I piled into Sophie’s car in search of some caffeine and a place to kill a little time since the dinner didn’t start for another hour.

Which is how we ended up parked on a street in downtown Birmingham drinking various soft drinks from McDonalds. Sophie knows how to show some girls a good time. And she pretty much summed it up when she said, “Who would have ever thought I’d be parked in front of the McWane Center with a car full of people I met on the internet?”

We laughed and talked and told stories about our kids and other various things until we were crying and laughing. Then it was time to head to dinner at Cafe DuPont.

I could tell you about the restaurant and how much I loved it and how the dessert changed all my preconceived notions about the wisdom in combining cheesecake with acorn squash. (IT TURNS OUT THAT IT’S SO RIGHT AND GOOD.)

But none of that is the most important thing. The thing that mattered to me were the people in that room. The people whose words I’ve read and cried over and have been such an inspiration to me. (I honestly think I might have frightened Ann Voskamp a little. She is so graceful and beautiful and I went a little FAN GIRL on her.)

Steve Jones, who works for Compassion and went to the Dominican Republic with my group, stood up at dinner and told us that 5,000 kids have been sponsored through the Compassion blog trips. 5,000 little lives. I have no idea what part of that number is mine. It may be just one for all I know. (This is where I want to tell that story of the starfish on the beach but I will stop myself because seriously.)

It made me cry to hear that number. To be among people who took time out of their daily lives to write words that have ultimately led to impacting 5,000 lives. It’s humbling and it makes me want to do more and to live a life with purpose.

(Not that talking about the Real Housewives on the internet isn’t purposeful. Because, OF COURSE.)

Anyway, I have no way to wrap all this up in any kind of adequate way. It was just a great weekend filled with fun and friends and laughter and tears and so much more that will probably have to be another post at some point when I have the words.

So, for now, I’ll just leave you with this picture from the Compassion dinner. You’d think that after the weekend I had that I’d have a whole slew of pictures. But that would have involved taking my camera out of my purse.

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Compassion in India

About 7 p.m. last night, a group of bloggers flew out of the Chicago airport bound for New Delhi. And because I am a little obsessive, every time I woke up last night I would think about the fact they were STILL on a plane.

In fact, as of this moment, they are STILL on a plane.

That is a lot of honey-roasted peanuts.

Anyway, they’ve been on my heart because I know a little bit about what they’re about to experience, although I suspect that the Dominican pales in comparison to the poverty of Kolkata.

Please pray for them this week and make sure you follow along by going to the Compassion Bloggers site. I know what they share is going to be incredible because there is nothing like seeing the way Compassion International completely changes lives of children all over the globe.

And if you want a glimpse of what they’ll be seeing, take a look at these sweet faces waiting to be sponsored.

A little aftershock

I’m going to be totally honest with y’all today and say that I just don’t have much funny in me at the moment. In fact, I feel a little bit like I’m having the missionary version of post-traumatic stress syndrome, but without the trauma or the stress.

If I had to compile a list of my talents it would probably be a short list. However, chief among my gifts would be my ability to compartmentalize certain things. If there is something I don’t want to think about or talk about, then I just go all Scarlett O’Hara and decide I’ll think about it tomorrow.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to a group of high school students about Compassion and my trip to the Dominican. I’ve spent the last few days reading back over the posts that all the bloggers wrote about the trip and then this morning I googled “Everett Swanson” who is the man that founded Compassion back in 1952.

The last night of our trip, Shaun told us the story of how Compassion came to exist. The short version is that Everett Swanson was an American evangelist who went to Korea during the Korean War to minister to the troops. While he was there, he began to notice all the orphans everywhere. They were huddled in doorways trying to stay warm and starving to death.

One morning he saw a sanitation truck driving down the street. The workers would jump off the truck, kick what appeared to be piles of rags and then throw them in the truck. It turns out they weren’t just piles of rags; they were orphans who didn’t make it through the night being thrown away like garbage. Everett Swanson knew he had to do something.

Because of his commitment, Compassion is now in 24 countries and sponsors over a million children.

I shared that story with the high school students, along with my personal experiences from the trip.

After I was done there, I drove out to my church to record a short video where I was interviewed about the difference Compassion has made in countless lives.

Needless to say, yesterday was like the Big Mama Compassion Tour ’08. (Not coming soon to cities near you!)

Last night, as I drove to meet some friends for Mexican food, my heart was so heavy and I could feel tears right below the surface. I don’t know if it’s because I had talked about it all day or if it’s just taken this long to sink in, but I just felt a heavy weight of sadness settle over me.

It’s a strange experience to see everything we saw that week, the extreme poverty, the sadness, the presence of hope in spite of the bare minimum of material possessions, and then come back to America at a time when everyone is freaking out about our economic crisis and big industries are requesting multi-billion dollar bailouts.

We’re a week away from celebrating Thanksgiving, which should be a time to reflect on our many blessings, yet we’re inundated by Christmas catalogs with the sole purpose of making sure we want more than we already have.

Caroline and I look through the catalogs while she picks out what she wants Santa to bring on Christmas Eve and then I’ll feel guilty because do we really need any more toys in her already packed playroom?

Do I really need any more clothes in a closet full of things?

What’s the balance between my reality and the reality of the kids in the Dominican Republic?

Why do I have moments where I fully realize I’ve seen the worst and yet still have moments where I feel discontent with what I have?

Am I an idiot?

Don’t answer that. It’s intended to be hypothetical.

Most of all, I can’t get this precious girl off my mind.

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Because the one question she asked me was, “Can I go home with you?”

And two weeks later I’m still wishing I could have said yes.

I’m worried about my delts (and I don’t mean a sorority)

Before my trip to the Dominican, I wondered what the food would be like. What exactly is Dominican food?

(Hey! Have I mentioned my trip to the Dominican? My word, it’s overkill at this point and I apologize.)

I still can’t really say for sure but Dominican food seems to involve various unidentifiable meats fried into a ball-like shape, vegetables steamed beyond all recognition and color-definition, plantains, some kind of fried chicken (Please God, I hope it was chicken.) and something called Monfogo that involved pork-cracklings.

Mmmm…just like mama used to make.

And really nothing made me feel better before a meal than when our leader Brian would say, “You can eat the fruit. It SHOULD be okay.”

The difference between SHOULD and DEFINITELY is a big gamble. And losing means you might find yourself doing the walk of shame to the airplane bathroom about 152 times. In ten minutes. I believe I’ll take a pass on the papaya.

Thank goodness for beans and rice. They were the light in my darkest culinary hour.

Needless to say, since returning home, I’ve been on a bit of a food binge.

I’ve eaten untold quantities of Mexican food. Seriously, if you hear rumors of a worldwide avocado shortage, it may be my fault. I’ve had breakfast tacos, tacos nortenos, puffy tacos, crispy tacos and quesadillas. And that was just yesterday.

Thank you. I’ll be here all week.

I made chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy for dinner last night and washed it down with an iced sugar cookie in the shape of a turkey that I’d bought (and HID from my beloved family) earlier in the day.

Gulley invited me over for lunch because she’d made chicken salad and she knows I love her chicken salad. What she didn’t know was that I would eat 3/4 of the bowl by myself.

The eating isn’t the problem so much as my lack of activity over the last two months. My morning exercise regimen has basically consisted of multiple reps of lifting a Starbucks Grande cup to my mouth.

When Caroline started Kindergarten way back in August, I had the best of physical fitness intentions. Mimi and Bops have an elliptical machine, so my plan was to drop Caroline off at school every morning and then go work out on the elliptical.

I have executed that plan exactly NONE times. Really, I blame my car and its obsession with the parking lot outside of Starbucks.

I told myself that I was just enjoying my free time for a little while, but would really get serious in September.

But then it was still so hot.

Then I got bronchitis.

And then I broke my toe.

Clearly, I have been the victim of some kind of mass anti-cardiovascular health conspiracy.

But after evaluating my intake of cheese, tortilla chips, and refried beans over the last several days, I realize it’s time to step up my exercise game.

Which is to say I’m actually going to do some.

I think the lowest point came yesterday morning when I attempted to adjust the strap on my bra and my deltoid and pectoralis major totally cramped up from the over-exertion.

Sadly, that’s a true story.

And even more sad, I just shared it with the internet.

Thoughts after three days and a lot of Mexican food

We left the Dominican Republic at 9:20 a.m. last Friday morning and I finally arrived at the San Antonio airport at 5:45 p.m. after two time changes, six bags of in-flight snak mix (Apparently the airlines can no longer afford the “c” in snack), countless Diet Cokes, and finishing “Such a Pretty Fat” by Jen Lancaster. (Hysterical book, by the way.)

P ended up having to be out of town to guide hunts for a friend, so I called my daddy when I landed to let him know he could begin circling the airport while I waited for my luggage to make its debut on the baggage carousel, otherwise known as Suitcase Roulette.

I made my way down to the Baggage Claim area, taking my time since I knew I’d have to wait, but then I looked up and saw Caroline holding a big, pink rose, with a huge grin on her face, waiting for me. I ran the last few steps, picked her up in my arms, and started to cry. It’s a moment I’ll never forget.

We immediately headed to the nearest Mexican restaurant because I was feeling faint from lack of chips and salsa. It’s like my body had been in detox for a week and was beginning to revolt. Two taco nortenos and a bowl of guacamole later, I was a new woman.

So I’m home.

The weekend was full of activity. We went to see Madagascar 2, we explored a cave, and spent most of Saturday with Gulley and her youngest son, Will.

I went straight from temporary missionary mode to mommy mode in 2.2 seconds without a moment to catch my breath.

But even in the midst of all the activity and all the laundry, the children from the Dominican Republic were never far from my mind. I’d hear Caroline laugh, see her smile, watch the way she and Will were playing in the backyard, and I’d see the faces of those precious kids that I may never see again.

They have left a permanent mark on my heart. And I miss them.

On Sunday morning, I was sitting in church and we began to sing “Everlasting God”. There is a line in the chorus that says “You’re the defender of the weak, you comfort those in need” and when I sang it I felt the tears roll down my cheeks because now I know what need really looks like. I saw it firsthand last week.

But I also know what comfort looks like. It looks like a handful of letters from sponsors that have been kept in plastic bags for years. It looks like children singing in their classrooms knowing that they are going to get a meal and an education.

It looks like little kids running up to us and yelling “JOHN SMITH??!!” because that’s the name of their sponsor and since we’re from the United States they assume we must know him.

I saw need.

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I saw sadness.

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I saw comfort.

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I saw joy.

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I saw the difference Compassion is making in the lives of children all over the world one sponsorship at a time.

And it’s amazing.

The post that should have gone up on Friday night

Clearly I am no longer on the airplane because that would be pure torture considering we left the DR two days ago, but I wrote this on the way home. Then I got home and was nearly assassinated by a huge pile of laundry and forgot all about it. So I’m posting it a little late. Just pretend like I’m not and the world will be a happier place.

At the moment I’m writing this I am on the plane from Miami to Dallas. I’m listening to my sweet 80’s mix on my iPod because international travel puts me in the mood for Chicago’s greatest hits with a little old school Michael Jackson and some Tiffany thrown in for good measure because who doesn’t like Mall Rock. I won’t lie, it’s a mix that is 31 flavors of awesome.

We left the hotel this morning at around 7:00 a.m. and I immediately regretted my decision to stay up until 2 a.m. the night before and then take a Benadryl. The good news is I’ve been able to sleep intermittently on various legs of the flight and treated the people next to me to the glorious sight of me sleeping with my mouth open.

When we got to Miami we had to clear customs, which took a sweet forever and then headed straight for some comida Americano (that means “American food” for those of you who aren’t bilingual). Most of our group decided on California Pizza Kitchen, but I went straight up Burger King because my gastrointestinal system hadn’t been exposed to fine fast food cuisine in six days and that is too long, mi amigos.

I am so ready to get home to my peeps I can hardly stand it. And I’m not just saying that because we’re going straight to eat Mexican food the minute they pick me up from the airport. I’d be glad to see them with or without the presence of warm chips and guacamole. But don’t think I’m not going to scarf down copious amounts of avocado and cheese-based products.

This past week I’ve talked a lot about Compassion and the people of the Dominican Republic, but there’s a whole other element of the trip that I haven’t discussed, spending a week with eleven people I’d never met before.

It’s kind of a weird thing to go to a foreign country with a group of strangers. If you don’t like them then the best you can hope for is that you find a few locals to hang out with who don’t get tired of you asking them how old they are because it’s the only Spanish phrase you know.

I can say with all honesty that the group exceeded my expectations. And there’s nothing better than starting a week off with everyone being polite and ending it being comfortable enough to make fun of each other.

On the last night, we all met in the conference room of the hotel to talk about the week and share any thoughts we had about the whole thing. We talked about the serious aspects and then talked about some of the other things we’d done, such as jumping off a cliff into the Caribbean. (Not me, by the way. My days of jumping off cliffs are long gone, if they ever existed at all. Which they didn’t. Risk taker? Not so much.)

One day a group of us went down to the beach area outside the hotel to witness the aforementioned jumping off cliffs. I made the comment that I’d stuck fairly close to Marlboro Man on the way down to the water because I figured if he can wrestle steers (cows?) to the ground, then he could probably take on a thug hiding out near the ocean if the need arose.

Shaun asked why I didn’t feel that way about him and I had to tell him it’s because he’s a musician AND he went to Baylor. Neither of those things really scream BODYGUARD MATERIAL.

But, Shaun, if I am ever in the need for some great adult contemporary music, you are totally my go-to guy. And if y’all don’t believe me you can go here and listen to Shaun’s new song. I’ve probably listened to it a hundred times in the last week.