The Courage to Let Go: Embracing New Normals

“How beautifully you are learning

the art of surrender,

the courage to let go,

in the wild of your unknowns.”

-Morgan Harper Nichols

This pretty much sums up where I’m at… I might not be learning it beautifully but I have definitely been letting go/ surrendering and can relate to the wild part too (it’s like a jungle). I’m trying to let go of high expectations, any hints of entitlement, and walk in the daily new normals of life overseas. We’ve been in country for 24 days and it already feels like months in some ways. Even though, right now, some tasks or circumstances seem odd, I know over time they will become normal to me, or at least more normal than they currently are.. 

Here is a taste of a few new normals we are getting used to…

New Animals:

One day this week we were engrossed in our Skype language lesson, as usual at 8:30 am, when we started seeing little brown furry creatures hanging from the windows.  They were soon swinging from the electrical wires outside the house, pulling branches off the trees, leaping around on the balcony, and making all kinds of racket. I looked over at the trampoline that we have temporarily inherited and sure enough, the monkeys had discovered that too.

Pro Tip: do not look monkeys in the eye, or they are likely to come right at you. And that’s the last thing you will want since they really are not as cute as they look!

New Cooking:

There’s a learning curve when everything is made from scratch (bread, biscuits, pizza dough, pizza sauce, granola bars, cinnamon rolls…). For meat we eat chicken, chicken + more chicken!  The small dish of chicken-pot-biscuit-pie that I made the other day, surprisingly turned out. In the future though, it (hopefully) won’t take 2 hours to make dinner as I get used to overseas-conducive recipes, ingredients, and the preparation.

This weeks menu: apple cinnamon oatmeal, grilled chicken tomato and cheese sandwich, pomegranate yogurt parfaits, banana pancakes, baked oatmeal, chicken-pot-biscuit-pie, chicken tikka masala and chapati (from a restaurant), and chocolate pie (with a few tweaks to the recipe).

New Language:

I now know what it feels like to be in preschool. Actually, a preschooler would probably know more words that we know in our language study at this point but it’s the closest comparison I could think of. We have officially finished our first week of language study and it takes everything in me to form a sentence such as “The picture is on the small door.” From the local language to English, the structure would literally be “picture small door on is” and if “door” is a masculine noun then the ending must be dropped and changed to a different ending. The other day, as I was practicing the word for “watch,” my friend told me I actually said the word for “female donkey.” Oops–they sound almost exactly the same. I’m sure I’ll have more stories to tell you later about language mishaps (stay tuned for more).  Trying to take learning language one day at a time and enjoy the preschool language phase.

I’m learning that letting go might mean that my to-do list for the day includes 1/2 of the first task on the list instead of the usual American 17 tasks per day. Letting go might look like being okay with daily interruptions and surrendering our agendas.

Surrender means dying to self and trusting the Creator. We see this in Gen 7:16, when “the Lord shut him in” and Noah lived on a boat for probably more than a year by the time the water receeded (Gen 7:16).  I’m sure he and his family had to cook and eat differently and they certainly had new normals when it came to their proximity to animals as well. In Gen 7:5, we see that “Noah did everything that the Lord commanded him to do.”

No matter what new normals you are facing, do you carry out what the Word commands? I know for me, I need to work on my obedience of the commands to rejoice, be thankful, and have joy no matter what new normals the wild unknowns may bring.