Ten years ago this week, I was embroiled in making an excruciating decision. After five months in Bangladesh with the Peace Corps, I was beginning to recognize that it was a posting for which I was quite unprepared and badly suited. Yet, I had not yet relinquished my fantasies of doing "the toughest job you ever loved" as one of the first group of PCVs to serve in Bangladesh since 1963. I was in the grips of indecision, unable to make one of the most momentous choices I have had in my life: do I stay or do I go?
There was a lot riding on this decision for me. I was in love with the romantic ideal of Peace Corps service from the time I was ten years old. I dreamed of falling in love with a country and its people. But even more, I was in love with my own history of achievement. I had never really "failed" at anything up to this point. I had graduated from college with honors in Sociology and Anthropology, which ought to have meant I could handle the adaptation to Bangladeshi culture.
However, from almost the first day, I seemed to be struggling to survive Bangladesh. It began with a bad host family experience during training. Though my second host family was wonderful, the first one set the tone for my life in Bangladesh. My attempts to adapt always seemed to fall flat, bringing more trouble into my life. Every new behavior I tried on, hoping it would help me somehow integrate into life in Bangladesh, was a kind of ill-fitting clothing, stifling and smothering me.
The photo above represents my happiest times I had as a Peace Corps Volunteer, alone on a rooftop, above the chaotic reality of life in Bangladesh, reading or writing in my journal. But it also represents a fundamental problem I had relating to people in that place and time. I was extremely self-absorbed, in part because I was pretty confused about who I was and who I wanted to be. I wrestled constantly with what I now call the "should-demons," my critical inner voices, which made regular, coercive attempts to conform me to an unreachable ideal. With such inner conflict, I could hardly even see the people around me, which certainly inhibited the love affair I had dreamed about. All that inner wrangling eventually took so much energy that I could hardly function, let alone make good decisions to improve my situation.
Often, I simply shut the door on Bangladesh, barricaded myself in my room, and went deep inside myself. I went over and over the details of my story, looking for options. Every doorway I could envision out of that room seemed to involve death in some way. If I gave up and went home, I would see myself as a failure, and I thought everyone else would, too. If I stayed, I would have to keep trying to make this thing work, and the effort to do that might kill me. There was no way to come out of this thing living, it seemed, so I continued in the path I was on, my indecision rendering me inert, dead weight.
But then, in March 1999, I met some Christian missionaries. They opened their homes to me, invited me into conversation about my vocation, and prayed with me. They had a deep sense of call, empowered by their confidence that Jesus Christ could redeem anyone in any situation. I won't name them, in case they are still in Bangladesh, because "missionaries" were and probably are still officially not allowed there, if they intend to preach to Muslims. These missionaries came from a more "conservative" Christian perspective than I have myself. But however I feel about their efforts to evangelize Muslims, their Christian witness had a profound impact on a young woman from Indiana. In and through their testimony, in both their words and their actions, I met Jesus Christ.
Sure, I had been born into a Christian family, attended church my whole life, confirmed in eighth grade, and so on. To a certain extent, I was already a "believer," if believing means having a kind of intellectual agreement with various statements. And yet, I wasn't a believer at all in many respects. Certainly I saw Jesus as an important teacher of moral and ethical behavior, and I thought I was following him. But my self-absorbtion and strangling indecision in Bangladesh showed up the deeper truth. Yes, Jesus Christ lived, died, and rose again, redeeming sinners and reconciling humanity with God. But what did that really have to do with me?
"Judge not, lest ye be judged," Jesus preaches. When one of these missionaries quoted this statement to me, the light began to dawn for me. I valued my own judgment above and beyond God's judgment in Jesus Christ, whom Barth describes as "the judge who was judged in our place." The only problem was that my testimony against myself was inevitably damning. Believing the story my "should-demons" were telling me, I could never come out alive.
But, as the missionaries reminded me, Jesus had already been tried according to systems more unjust than my should-demons, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Jesus died, and Jesus has risen from that death. Jesus' resurrection was God's vindication, breaking forever the power of the unjust systems which had convicted him. By faith in Jesus, Christians join themselves to him, claiming his vindication as their own. Christians stake their lives on Jesus' witness to God's forgiving and vindicating love, which overcomes every barrier and births in us a new, empowering, eternal kind of life.
By April 1999, I had come to the crossroads. Any decision I made would determine the whole course of my future. I could stay in Bangladesh, finish out my Peace Corps term (another 18 months!) and go into the international non-profit work I had always assumed would come naturally after Peace Corps service. Or I could turn around, go home and start over, begin living out of a new direction for my life.
What it came down to was, which story would I stake my life on? If I continued to believe the "should-demons," all roads would lead to my death. I would be strangled, sooner or later, by impossible expectations. But if I began believing, truly believing, in Jesus Christ, and I began trusting that I, too, was forgiven and redeemed, than all roads would lead to life. I could even choose to stay in Bangladesh, empowered by that incredible love to exit the prison I had created for myself and take the risk of relationship. Or, I could go home and begin again. God would love me and empower me as a disciple in either place. I was free to choose.
I'm preaching this Sunday on Jesus' post-resurrection appearance to the disciples in Luke 24:36-48 (off lectionary). In that appearance, with his testimony, in which Jesus showed himself to be really alive and helped the disciples understand the scriptures, Jesus turned a bunch of fearful, undecided people into a powerful community of witnesses. In staking their lives on his story, they broke out of their closed room and risked relationships. Whenever and wherever those witnesses tell that story faithfully, in their words and in their deeds, the witness to Jesus Christ has transformed the world, bringing true, eternal life.
