Spinning (January 11, 2012)

Hey everyone,

Do you remember as a kid (or possibly when you’re older) spinning in circles? You spin, and spin, and spin until you plop yourself down on the floor and then for some reason your head is still spinning even though your body isn’t. It takes a few minutes before you get reoriented enough to get up and do it again. I used to do this, spin until I just fall down on the couch. I did it just so I could watch the ceiling fan continue spinning, it seemed like a shadow would detach from the ceiling fan and make big circles around it, and the circles would get smaller and continue to get smaller until it the shadow fit right into the ceiling fan itself. Then I would get up and do it again.

Recently, I’ve feel like the shadow of that ceiling fan. The semester is finally over, the spinning has stopped but my head is still spinning. During the semester, when everything is busy, I can think of a million things to do when the holiday comes. I’ll clean, write supporters, apply for graduate schools for next year, and spend good time with Father. But when the holiday began it seemed I’d forgotten everything I wanted to do, my shadow was still spinning. The last week or so has consisted of restless days going for walks, starting movies and not finishing them, walking around my apartment, and wishing it was warmer outside. To top it off, my time with Father has seemed to be just as restless. He was silent. Finally, after about a week of this, I finally hear Him whisper, “find me.”

Then, I realize that I’ve not been restless the past week because I’ve not had anything to do, I’ve been restless because I’ve spent it filling my time with things that won’t give me rest. I expect Father to shout at me over the noise of a movie or even over the noise of my friends when I should be spending time with Him. But He won’t shout (I mean, sometimes He does but I don’t think usually), He waits patiently for me to find Him. I’m learning that how much I hear Father’s voice is directly related to how much I seek His voice. Of course! It’s so simple but oh so, difficult to carry out. I want to find Him, I want to hear His voice, see His face, sit at His feet as He speaks. He is there waiting for me (and you too!)

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” Jer. 29:13

Please as you seek Him; ask Him for me that He won’t let me be so easily distracted. That He will keep His pull on me and let me get my shadow to fit where it is supposed to be. Thanks for reading everyone, I love and miss you all very much and I hope you have had wonderful holidays.

-with all my heart

Ashley

p.s. I’ve listed my traveling plans for this vacation if you’re interested.

January 22-27: Spend a week in a city called Chengdu. There is a counseling program there associated with ELIC that I want to check out, they counsel Chinese people. It’s a possible future plan. J

Jan. 27- Feb 8: Spend a week in Thailand for the Annual Thailand Conference for ELIC.

Feb. 8-16^th: India. Because we have two months off, some of my team thought we’d spend it visiting the Mother Teresa Home for the Destitute and the Dying. We will be there for one week as volunteers.

Then it’s off to Beijing for a few days before classes start at the end of February.

Somebody's Dream (End of November)

I never thought I would be told I was someone’s dream before, especially sitting in the back of a three wheeled taxi, in my puffy marshmallow-resembling light blue down coat and pink gloves. But that’s what happened two weeks ago. After one dinner together at a nearby shopping street, my student, Jody, put her arm in mine, leaned her head on my shoulder, sighed and said, “This is my dream.” She went on to tell me that when she was in middle school she always dreamed she could go out shopping together with foreigners when she got to college.

It also happened yesterday, this time sitting in a smoke filled ma-la-tong (spicy Chinese soup) restaurant with 4 people, two were my students and two were their friends. One of them was one of my students’ boyfriends and he was pretty excited to meet me. I had helped out with a birthday video for him. This had apparently made me famous with both him and his classmates. After our semi-awkward greeting, we were sitting at the table and one of my students looked at me laughing and said, “You fulfilled his dream.” I replied, “If I told my mom I was famous in China, she would think I was crazy.” They laughed, but it’s true.

This is an on-going joke among my teammates. It’s a bit shocking the first time you walk down the street and everyone looks at you or when your students clap the first time they meet you; now we just make light of it and ask each other what we’ll do when we go back to America and no one pays us any attention anymore. This amount of attention is fun to make light of when it’s just people doing double takes on the street but when it’s my student who leans her head on my shoulder and with complete sincerity says, “this is my dream,” it hits me at a different angle. I wonder, how in the world can I be somebody’s dream? How can this girl, from a small town in Kentucky, someone who is only known in my little sphere of friends, have that big of an impact on a girl I’ve never met before?

It makes me think about my responsibility. The Father said, “Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.” (Luke 12:48). I’ve been given over 200 Chinese students. I’ve been given teammates to love and buildup. I’ve been given Chinese brothers and sisters to love and buildup and I’ve been given lost Chinese friends to share the love of the Father with. To me, that’s “much.”

Please, right now, before you close this e-mail, talk to the Father for me. Ask Him, to him to lead me in every step of this responsibility. Ask Him, to let me love my students with His complete and un-lacking love and ask Him, to let me fall even deeper in love with Him.

Thank you so much!

Love with all my heart!

Ashley

This is only picture I have of Jody, at our Halloween party. She's the girl in front of me.

“Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.”

Ever seen Charlie Brown? Linus is my favorite character, I want to share a picture I recently had of him with you. Imagine this, he is waiting on a cold night on the 31^st of October. He is waiting for the great pumpkin. He believes that if he waits in the most sincere pumpkin patch the Great pumpkin will come and give him gifts. If you look close, you can see Linus’ face as he explains this, eager with anticipation. Then he looks around and claims, “Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.” The camera zooms out to a scene of the endless starry sky covering a big ol’ patch of pumpkins with Linus and his friend in the middle.

“Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.” Linus knew that he had to be surrounded by sincerity before the Great Pumpkin would pay him a visit. The truth in this grabbed onto me and I found myself searching for understanding, I looked up the word “sincere” in the Word. I found it in ps. 145:18, “The Lord is near to all who cry out to Him, all who cry out to Him sincerely.” The Father wants more than just us crying out to Him, He wants us to cry out sincerely, He wants our complete raw self. He wants our good moods and bad moods; He wants our big problems and little annoyances. At the end of the day He wants to know how it went. Of course He already knows all these things, but I think He likes to be told anyway.

The Father is calling me to sincerity. It’s so easy to get caught up in everything that is going on at Hua Qiao and neglect my time with the Father. It’s so easy to go through the motions; spend time at fellowship, read the Word, sing songs, and fast; but the result is always a worn out and confused Ashley. If I just give Him sincerity, if I just sit and wait for Him, telling Him all my heart, I think the Great Pumpkin or in this case the Great Father will come and give me the greatest gift; He will draw near and give me intimacy.

Orphanage (November)

I hope you can bear with me for this e-mail. It’s going to be longer than normal. Before I go into my story I’ll share a little about where I’m at with finances.

This month has been amazing. So far my expenses have totaled $4,944.94. For the months of August and September, $375 and $500 came in, that left me about $4,000 behind. But like I said, this month has been amazing. The Father has brought in $1,500 for October! I was in shock when I looked at my monthly profile. That’s a whole $400 over my monthly expenses for October. I am still behind about $2,500 but I am so happy and astounded at His provision for this month.

Thank you so much for remaining faithful to the body and to the Father. Knowing that I have you at home lifting me up and supporting me gives me so much encouragement. Please continue to give and pray. I love you all so much and I want to support you too. So please, let me know how you are doing! So send me an e-mail and let me know how you’re doing!

Okay onto my story…

When I was in college I read a book by Mother Teresa. I learned about her life and how she went to the streets, literally. She went walking up and down the streets gathering people and taking them in. She would go to the dirty, the sick, the mentally ill, and the lost and look past their smells and their dirt covered faces and see J-sus.

“As you’ve done it to the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matt 25:40)

She was completely devoted to these people, to her each of them were just J-sus in another form. One of my favorite quotations is from her:

“Love has a hem to her garment,

That reaches the very dust.

It sweeps the stains from the streets and lanes,

And because it can, it must”

I wonder if it was always that way. I wonder what it was like for her when she went searching for the first person, when she smelled a mixture of body odor and trash from the street; I wonder what it was like for her the first time she was rejected by them, when they didn’t want her help.

I remember reading her quote in college; I was completely taken by it. I wanted to be that way. I wanted to go to the streets, to see J-sus in the beggars and the poor, and I wanted to have a burden for it, “because it can, it must.” But the truth was, I had never been, I was ignorant of what going to the beggars was like. I prayed for a burden for something I had never experienced before.

Since being in China, I’ve seen more of what it’s like. The beggars in China aren’t just the old men or women pushing shopping carts in America, some are much more violent. I’ve seen people pulling themselves up the street by their hands because they have no legs, I’ve seen people’s faces swollen or covered in some disease or arms burnt off. I’ve seen an old woman lying while a young boy prostrate swung his head down violently, saying over and over, “xie xie, xie xie” (“Thank you, Thank you”). I won’t lie and say I ran up to them and poured love on them because I saw J-sus when I looked at them. I looked and them and was afraid. I know each of them were created and are loved by the Father, but I am at a loss to know how to love them. I feel I have asked for a burden from the Father that I don’t know how to fulfill. I had a similar experience with this last week.

I went to my first orphanage in city about two hours from here. As soon as we went up the stairs to where the kids were, some ran at us. They were so happy to have visitors. I followed some of my friends into a room where many of the younger kids were kept. I stopped short in the doorway, three babies, 2 years or younger were lying on the floor, two other babies one of them less than 6 months old and the other less than 1 were in cribs. All of their heads were flat in the back because they don’t get picked up often. (Let me make a disclaimer and say this neglect is due to a shortage of staff and not to intentional neglect from them.)

I ended up spending most of the time with one of the kids who were originally on the floor. He was about 2 and had never walked because his feet were curved (not sure what he had). His whole body was stiff when I picked him up and he reeked of the orphanage. After a while and with the help of a friend we got him to bend his legs and sit up in my lap. I followed the direction of another friend and started singing to him, “Oh, how He loves us” and he began to smile and do his best to sing with me. I have no idea what his name was, where he came from, even what was wrong with his body, but I got to spend an hour with him, singing to him and remember that He was created and is loved by the Father.

I won’t lie and say it was easy. Honestly, I hated the orphanage. I hated the smell, I hated that the kids were just lying on the floor, and I’m extremely uncomfortable with mental illness. But I know that the Father loves each of those children with a jealously enough to split the sky to come to rescue them, just the same as He does for me, and I want to love them with the love He has. I think if you have a hard time loving something and you just do it anyway and act like you love it, you’ll eventually find yourself loving it (C.S. Lewis said something like that). So while I hated the place I chose one person. I looked at him and thought about how each curve of his face was formed by the Father, I thought about his past and his future and smiled at him and sang to him until he smiled and sang back at me. I found I formed what attachment you can in an hour with the little guy.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to go back and see him or any of the other kids again, but the people who live in the city will and I hope that one of them or one of the workers keeps picking him up and singing to him. Please lift him and the other kids up to the Father, there’s no way for me to know what will happen to them but we can lift and have faith that the Father will take care of them. Also, please continue to lift me up; I still have no idea what the Father wants for me or why He gave me a desire for a burden in the first place. I feel totally inadequate but I’m slowly learning how to love.

I also want to ask you, Thanksgiving is such an important time in America. Please, don’t just spend it in your comfortable homes. It’s so great to do that, to be comfortable and enjoy time with your family eating and loving each other. But don’t just stay there, go to where people are alone and poor and don’t have families to love them. Go to the nursing home or to an orphanage. Go and love them or try to love them.

Thanks for reading and for your continued support.

Ashley

Here is the kid when I first picked him up.

This was after a while. Look at the difference!