FINGER-PAINT IS SUCH STUFF AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON

I’ve been toying around with some dreams in between daily life stuff.

Bear with me as I sketch some of it out...and thanks in advance for sticking with me through this post--I promise it's important.

I promise this blog won't be all about Hungarian adventures, but, the fact is, those adventures excavated some serious life goals that I didn't even know were simmering way down deep. Soul-stuff. Sticky-stuff. The kind of stuff I can't let go...stuff God won’t let me let go.

Every day since November, I think about this little Ukrainian girl named Japuca. Here’s how it started:

We rattled up to this sketchy, communist-bloc-type children's hospital and wound our way up through stale and sickly smells to the abandoned children's wing. There were ten or eleven cribs in the three rooms we were in--none bigger than a small bathroom--and the kids were pretty much Roma kids. Gypsy kids. Dark hair, if they had any, deep dark eyes, and too many scars.

Yeah, the Roma people have scars.

See, the Roma sort of get shoved to the reeking outskirts of every city and country, glean what tin or wood or leftover stuff they can, then slap together their own ghettos out of everybody’s way. There’s this huge racial stigma that goes back about a thousand years, back to when they were known for being nomads and musicians and whatnot. People take one glance at their swarthier skin and spit out all kinds of hatred. It’s sick. I won't go into a bunch of detail today about all the institutional racism in Europe against the Roma--legislation, education, healthcare--just know that they don’t belong anywhere. So they scrape by together, anywhere they can.

So they’ve got, like, zero resources and a bunch of kids; so if you're a mom, what do you do? You think, "Hey, if I drop my kid off at this hospital for a while, she might get at least one meal a day, which is something I can't give her." (There are a lot of other reasons for abandonment too, but this is a huge one.)

So the kids just kind of show up there.

The children’s hospital is understaffed and under-resourced too, so there are barely enough nurses to change diapers and get everyone fed each day--which means each kid probably gets less than five minutes a day with another human being, unless you count the moaning or cooing or spitting up of the other babies in the room.

So we students just decided to love on them for a while.

I like kids, but I’m actually not that great with babies; while some people’s motherly instinct goes into full roar in a roomful of babies, that’s not me. But this was different, because Japuca was important to me right away.

They told us not to pick her up because recently she'd been hustled out of the hospital, horribly beaten up by her dad, then deposited at the hospital again. She had a lot of bruising and a bunch of scabs all over, especially on her head. But with all the other babies being toted around, you could tell she just had to be picked up too. So the nurses nodded an okay and pretty soon I was holding this baby girl in these pilly maroon fleece pants and a pilly pink sweatshirt.

She was beautiful.

Her eyes were like dark copper, and she was mostly bald. She didn't talk, just beamed at me as wide as her little mouth would stretch while we all talked and cuddled and sang kid-Jesus-songs and rapped to Flo-Rida. (It was a good mix, okay?)

Her legs were really bowed and stiff, more like stilts than baby-legs, so I was worried about trying to help her walk. But Jordan helped us, and we cheered as she sort of slid around in forward motion, both of us hanging on tight and supporting her body. She was so excited.

Japuca was about the size of a 10-month-old, maybe a year, I don't know. But her face looked older, so I checked the date on her crib: 7/7/05.

Japuca was three.

See, in the first five years of our lives, babies get cuddled and cooed at and passed around church fellowship halls until their moms are sure they caught some horrific virus; and eventually they start to toddle around and mumble baby-things; and then they get into learning games and puzzles and Memory; and even when their parents want to blow their brains out after playing Candy Land for the umpteenth time in a day, they are learning. Their synapses are crackling and all kinds of cognitive pathways are being formed. And they’re hearing words and learning to walk. And they're remembering mom’s and dad’s faces, and they’re getting love and attention all over the place.

The problem for Japuca is about much more than having enough food or clean diapers or cough medicine. The problem is, nobody is loving on her or being goofy with her or singing to her. So we did with a fierce passion for a while--I don’t know how long--couple of hours.

And then we had to go.

She was still beaming at me.

I had to put her in her crib while she whimpered and clawed at the wooden bars (which are totally not safe for babies and were banned in the US, which is why they have them in the Ukraine). And my friend Debbie was putting her baby Ivan in his crib too, and we had to leave; and it was like somebody was ripping into my lower intestines and throwing all my guts on the floor and then stomping on them and then pouring lighter fluid on them and then burning them in a great big pile in the dirty cement hallway. Yeah, it felt like that.

And they were screaming as we left and the screams were just echoing through those awful empty stairwells as we sprinted down the stairs and out the door. And I didn’t think I’d ever breathe again. Because, suddenly, it only felt right to breathe the same air as Japuca and all those kids, even if it stank and nothing was very pretty.

It felt wrong to leave.

And nothing will feel quite right until I go back.

And I will go back. I will bring friends, and we will play as long as we want (maybe forever?), and there will be finger-painting involved.

We can play all kinds of puzzles and Duck Duck Goose and sing-songy things and rhyming games, but mostly I think we will finger-paint. Because every childhood should involve finger-painting. And somehow I think there might be a connection between finger-paint and making Japuca smile again and maybe hearing a word or two, even if they are in Ukrainian or Romanian.

This is one of my kingdom-dreams.


Please pray over it.

Pray that God provides the paint and the program and the plane tickets. Soon.

Please pray for the Roma people.

Please pray for the abandoned kids in that Ukrainian hospital.

Please pray with me for Japuca; pray that someone will hug her today. Pray that someone tries to teach her a word. Pray that somebody will take her for a walk outside. Pray that I will get the chance to love her and many others like her again—in a tangible, present, physical way, not just this prayerful, spiritual way.

Dream with me. Pray with me.

Thanks.

SMACK! PAY ATTENTION

I recently began reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Besides being delightfully witty and fun, it is seeded with great advice on, well, writing and life.

Something I read today:

"An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift."

Many times, in an effort to make someone notice, writers (of books, TV scripts, news articles, whatever) get carried away with being overly radical or profane or intellectual or just terribly witty. It's more about them and about the witty words and less about what's actually being said (check out any TV round-table--whether its FOXNews, SportsCenter, or Oprah).

Don't get me wrong; I love words. And it is a joyful thing for me to put them together, to hear a great rustle or smack! in the way words collide. That's nerdy, and it's true. And sometimes it really is okay just to mess around with words. But now and then, I get so caught up in me being noticed for my stunning wordsmithing (you may laugh here--I am) that I forget why I write in the first place.

I write to make someone sit up and pay attention to something that is true. Something that needs to be said. And that starts with being alert, with paying attention to worthwhile things, and that starts with life.

You'll get tired of hearing me say this, but I really am most concerned with being true. I desperately want to write something really great, but I am most concerned with writing something that's worth reading, that needs to be read. So I live with expectant hope that this journey takes me to places that are full of stuff that needs to be said or heard...and that my desire to be great or smart or witty won't get in the way of what's being said. And I suppose, if it turns out to be witty or enjoyable or good now and again, that would be a great surprise, wouldn't it?

That's all for today. Thanks for stopping by.

NOT QUITE FINISHED

Oh, hi there.

I decided we're not quite finished here yet.

I started this blog because I was going on a Hungarian adventure--there was so much to do! to see! to learn! I didn't want to let any of it slink away...I wanted to keep all the smells and rumblings and foreign words and good things and true things and ugly things. I wanted to be true to the people we met, to the places we traveled, to God, and to all of you. I wanted somebody to know how I was growing and changing over there. (Secretly, I also just wanted a place to play around with words.)

Guess what.

Even though I'm not currently world-trekking, I'm still doing that whole living-learning-changing-exploring thing. Because I sort of see life as this great, continuous exploration. That might sound a bit cheesy, childish, or maybe just idealistic--but I figure that God is just brimming over with surprises, and, as long as I'm chilling with him, there's bound to be plenty of adventure involved.

So here we are again!

Learn with me.

Share with me as I share with you.

As always, I promise to be thoughtful, to be honest, and mostly, to live deliberately.

Here goes.