29/09/2019

I flew back to Singapore on Thursday. Things are still settling, and I'm aware that somewhere within me is a sadness I haven't fully faced about leaving England. But for the moment I am trying to remember my love for this place I am in. 

Yesterday morning I went for a walk with Dad in the cool morning air. We saw hornbills, pink-necked green pigeons and a kingfisher. We walked through many hued flowers and said good morning to older ladies out walking and maids with dogs on leashes. Dad showed me the exercises he does in the outdoor fitness corners, and I tried and failed to do a pull up (one day...). 

I am thankful for the beauty in this country, for the family I have here, and for the exciting prospect of starting work on Tuesday. I can approach this new season with fear or faithfulness, and I'm determined to choose the latter, knowing a good God guides me and those who know Him.

Now there's a storm brewing outside my window - oh, I've missed Singapore's sheet-like rain!

Break it or bless it

I wrote this a while ago - not sure why I didn't publish it but here we go:

In Taize, I sat down with a nun, and we ended up talking about how relationships are about risk.

Loving Jacob, choosing to love him, falling continuously in love with him - is the riskiest thing I have ever done.

(aside from maybe cycling in London or jumping into a ravine in Jordan.)

(And yet - still the riskiest.)

Let me go back a bit. Soon after I started going out with Jacob, I saw down with a woman in church and talked about relationships, and she told me about setting emotional boundaries. She described it as 'not marrying him in your mind', a phrase which I accepted but didn't understand.

Jacob and I set our physical boundaries pretty early on in our relationship - it was as simple as sitting down and saying 'Let's think about our boundaries.' I had physical boundary talks with my Mum and with a married friend, and those were so useful. That's not to say that keeping physical boundaries was a single event. We've had to continually negotiate and re-affirm those boundaries in these (almost) two years.

But the reason I went to talk to the nun was because I'd been turning over the concept of emotional boundaries in my mind. How do I balance keeping an emotional boundary with the intimacy of love?

It brought me back to a email (part of a weekly subscription I have to hannahbrencher's blog) I received:

'I am all about dreaming and having a vision but there’s a line we can easily cross in our brains. We shift from imagining the possibilities into marrying something in our minds. [...] It’s so easy to shift into this mode of thinking, “This person is going to be mine. This person is going to be my future.”
[...]
Let’s pause. For five seconds, let’s pause and pray a really, really hard prayer to pray: God, bless it or break it. Bless it or break it. It’s a gutsy prayer because God listens. It’s a gutsy prayer because he will move. And it’s a hard prayer to pray because it means you releasing control and you are basically saying, “Whatever the outcome, I’ll still say Amen to it.”'

That prayer is, for me, what balancing an emotional boundary with the risk of love feel like

Having to pray that prayer has become a very big reality this past week, as Jacob and I look to the end of this year and what will happen when I move back to Singapore to start work with NHB. We have dreams of him coming too, getting a job, moving over.  But getting a job isn't easy, nor is moving country, and at a lot of points last week I've felt like systems and circumstances seem to be very much in the way, leaving both of us feeling quite small and weak and unable. So one night we prayed to God to break it or bless it. It was directly the outcome of job applications, but also encompassed the relationship as a whole. I's suggested we pray it, but I found I couldn't actually say the words when I prayed because as Hannah Brencher said, they are really, really hard to pray when you know that God has the power to break something you really want him to bless. Jacob, thankfully, was strong for the both of us and prayed it so that I could nod along in my heart, submitting to God's sovereignty while knowing my heart could be broken, but knowing God is always good.

Back to the present i.e. 28th September:

Now that I read these words in hindsight, I am so glad we did trust God with the risk of holding our relationship. While I wasn't always able to not imagine the future and desire it in my mind (and learning to balance hope for a certain future and trust in God's goodness should it not materialise was a whole other lesson) Jacob and I were able to remind each other that that possibility rested on the grace of God. Jacob comes to Singapore in 2 days, and that fills my heart with gladness and thankfulness.

2 days!

Be still my heart.

Summer-Autumn

Goodbye August, Hello September.

Mari Andrew wrote 'The hardest part about summer for me is the relentless length: of days, of nights, of weeks. [...] But August is short. August is a three-week foreign love affair that you can't bring back home. August is a beautiful person who just got off the subway, or a tomato whose prime you may miss by a couple of hours. August is a sunset, a Sunday, the last hour of the best party.'

Each day passing brings me closer to saying goodbye to what has been four years of learning and growing, falling in love, falling off bicycles, losing things, losing people, breaking things, getting stronger, and weaker, and stronger, and weaker, and knowing both are part of life's ebb and flow. It has been a very good party.

--------

This month I read Gilead, and now am reading Mary Oliver's essays, lent to me by Lucy Boddington after I went to visit her one day in her lovely house, where we went on a walk and made Fimo clay objects and tried vegan magnums and she introduced me to the magical voice of Lianne La Havas. On that walk we waded into a stream, and saw a horse being washed (horses, it turns out, use tresemme shampoo too) by a bridge, and Kerry picked the very ripest blackberries off the hedgerows to be eaten there and then.

Gilead is a fictional autobiography written by Reverend John Ames, who is dying, to his son. It reminded me in ways of When Breath becomes Air, with all the tenderness of someone who is leaving the world and therefore has so much to say and also has the wisdom not to cling to what cannot be possessed. In one of my favourite passages, John Ames ends by telling his son, 'This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.'

If these were my last days, my actual last days, I wouldn't be sad about it. I've been trying to balance thesis writing with a deep appreciation for and attention to this interesting world around me. Blackberry picking is meditative, as is listening to Elgar's cello concerto at the proms. Different types of meditative, but great.

Today I noticed a leaf, green inside and framed by brilliant orange, like the amber sun setting in Highgate woods.

--------

And yet, I am sad about leaving.

I had a dream a few nights ago, which woke me up weeping. In the dream I saw grandma, walking slowly with her stick towards a cluster of sun dappled trees.

'Where are you going, grandma?'

'I am looking for four years'

Let me look with you, let me walk with you. To feel you. To hold you.

--------

Where have these four years gone? They have been eaten away by multiple hands dipping bread into hummus, danced away in ceilidhs, written away at all hours on essays from the trivial to the transcendental, whiled away lying in fields, whispered away in the dark, cried away in movie theaters and under the solitary cover of sheets and laughed away without fear of the future.

--------

Queen Elizabeth I was meant to have said one of two things as her last words: 'All my possessions for one moment of time' or 'I count this as the glory of my crown: that I have ruled with your loves.' Such different senses to an ending, and I would choose the latter.

I think I've come to realise a little better what Paul meant when he said 'to live is Christ, to die is gain'. I have felt the joy of living this past month, but also the felt longing for heaven as never before as I read and think about that place of no injustice, utter peace, and perfect relationship with God. So time is not what I crave really. What I hope, is to have lived with love - and to keep doing so.