Goa – Marilyn R. Gardner

Glory Tea – Sunsets in Goa

Published on January 17, 2014 by Marilyn8 Comments

She’s back from India! Robynn is back and with it Fridays with Robynn. Communicating Across Boundaries is not the same without her voice so I welcome her with virtual open arms. Her piece is a delight of words and pictures, bringing solace and beauty into my mid-January funk. Welcome back Robynn!

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Glory Tea – Sunsets in Goa by Robynn

Goa sunsets 2

In the heart of December, when life here in North America is typically grey and cold and long and dark, we luxuriously spent five nights and four whole long days on the beaches of Goa, India. Four days we basked in Sun and Nothing. It was a soul’s bubble bath: rejuvenating and restful. Those four days gave us a chance to process our time in that great nation, to reminisce and tell stories of other times in India and to look forward and imagine when we might be back. We laughed a lot, we layed around a lot, we walked on the beach, swam in the sea. It was pure bliss!

Each night we returned to the sand to watch the sun set. Slowly the sun would turn bold and golden and would begin to dip across the sky. She would tiptoe backwards toward the horizon, gathering her skirts in her hands, ever so slowly she would go. And we watched with bated breath, curious, expectant, even though we knew how the story would end. She would eventually curtsy and take her leave. It’s happened the same every day since the beginning of suns and seas.

The sea, in anticipation of the great farewell, would change her clothes as well. She would quietly don radiant ambers and glorious golds; molten and melting; shimmering and alive—a roseate sari with an exquisitely embroidered border of embossed brocade. Every evening seeing her so transformed was exhilarating and breath-taking.

And we watched…

We came to experience the holiness of it all, but so did everyone else! It was a community event. People who had been at work all day, came. Vacationers, holiday makers, the lazy and the idle came. Whole families came with their grandmas and grandpas, the babies, the toddlers, the gangly teenagers. Newly married couples came shyly, hands held quietly. The lame, the lonely, the isolated, the misunderstood, they too came. Groups of friends, laughing, teasing, pushing stopped to see. Brown people. White people. Skinny people. Round people. The young and the old. The smooth spread of sand welcomed everyone.

It was glorious.

As the ocean rolled out the red carpet for the sun’s final curtain call, many of the bystanders stepped out into it. It was as if it called to us. Deep to deep. We were all invited to be steeped in the glory of it all. The community some with their toes wet, and ankles splashed, the waves sprinkling up across their faces; others immersed and fully drenched watched and waited.

And it was holiness and it was glory. For me it was also a sweet reassurance that God is and that he invites us out into the mystery of life and faith. We are steeped in His Glory Tea. We are dipped in the sweetness of His presence. Everyone watches but few really see. When you catch a glimpse….you’re speechless and out of breath. The sun set is proof that the sun rises daily with glory and joy and radiance and great spectacle.

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I’m trying to remember that, now, today. Winter has locked Kansas in. The slush is the closest thing I have to sand. The snow is my sea. And it pulls me in and under and I feel myself drowning in the grey and cold of it. It’s not as easy for me to remember the warmth of His presence, nor the glory, nor the holiness when I feel tired, and cold and sad. I pour myself a cup of ginger tea. I dip the tea bag up and down, reverentially into the wet…and if I squint my eyes just a little I can call to mind the sun’s golden setting and feel the mist of the sea. And I sip my tea and a slow tear slides down my cheek.

There is glory here too…in tea and warm places. I will savour it and sip in His holiness.

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Kaleidoscope of Colors

Published on September 4, 2013September 4, 2013 by Marilyn10 Comments

Life feels like a kaleidoscope of colors and fabrics, textures and sounds. So much of life here in Goa is lived in living color.

The northeast and its chic black is miles across oceans and through airports, a world away from color.

This area is new for me, yet feels so similar to the memories of the heart and soul with its vibrant colors, sights, and sounds– all the things that those of us who grew up in the east miss so much in our western world of efficient grey.

This kaleidoscope of color feels like it brings a flash of light and hope to seemingly desperate situations. Is it an illusion?

I don’t know.

All I know is this: I love the colors.

A Dream Becomes a Reality and I Become Afraid

Published on August 29, 2013 by Marilyn28 Comments

I like to communicate. A lot.

I love speaking and leading workshops – in fact, it’s my favorite part of my job as a public health nurse. Hand me a topic and a microphone and I’ll have at it with pleasure. (In a way this blog feels a bit like a microphone but I digress)

I do all my speaking in a non-religious context. While I’ve gone across the country to speak on culturally responsive health care or patient navigation and community health workers, I am never asked to speak about faith. Ever.

Truth be told – this is hard for me. I long to communicate my faith across boundaries and barriers and I’ve long prayed for opportunities. But they have not come and I have slowly realized that it’s okay. Very few people who are regularly asked to speak in faith circles have the speaking opportunities that I have in my professional role, the opportunities to connect with people from a broad spectrum of beliefs and world views, and I need to continue to embrace these opportunities doing them as well as I know how.

But in the spring, the seed of an opportunity came and, with my husband’s encouragement, I decided to move out in faith and see what happened.

Let me explain. For about four years now I’ve been involved in the Alpha program at a church in a nearby town. Robynn has written before about Alpha, but to recap – Alpha is a program to introduce people to Christianity. It is based on a lot of listening and an environment that values questions, even and especially the hard ones. A church in Goa, India asked the church here to send a team to teach them how to do the Alpha program. A ‘train the trainer’ if you will. The trip would involve going to India and introducing the Alpha program through live demonstration talks and discussion.

So I applied and was accepted to be a part of this team. The visa is stamped into my passport, tickets are purchased and I’m going. Tomorrow.

I didn’t know when I applied what I would end up doing, I didn’t know if I would end up working on the sidelines or speaking. It turns out that I will be speaking along with a few others. The leader has asked me to do two talks – One is “How can we be sure of our faith?” and the other is a practical talk on presenting the Alpha program.

But here’s the deal: Now that this dream of communicating faith,communicating what I believe to be the most important thing in the world, is a reality – I have lost my words. I sit down to prepare my talks and fear creeps up like a figurative hives rash and suddenly I’m itching and red and so uncomfortable. My breath starts coming faster and I realize I am panicking. What is this about?! I can do an interesting talk about a vacuum cleaner if you ask me, make people want to buy that sleek, expensive Dyson. In fact, they’ll be lining up for back orders.

But this, this most precious, beautiful story of a faith and how to be sure of it and how it matters….tongue tied, fingers paralyzed, mind spinning.

I always thought I’d be ready for a dream becoming a reality. But here I am, confessing before all that along with the dream becoming a reality is a fear. A fear of inadequacy, a fear that I will not communicate clearly, a fear that I will not do this amazing topic justice. A fear that deep down I am an impostor, uniquely unqualified.

In the middle of this I looked back on a blog post I wrote a year ago. It’s called “And Failure Comes on Like a Virus” and I said this:

“…truth is that I join the “march of the unqualified”, that group of people I read about who were inadequate, who failed. The King who stayed home from battle and slept with another man’s wife; the prophet who ran from the call of God and ended up in the belly of a whale; the man raised in the Pharaoh’s household who said ‘I can’t do it! I can’t speak! Let my brother speak for me’; the woman who said ‘Let’s trick your dad into thinking you are your brother so that you can get the birthright’.*

All these, uniquely unqualified, somehow survived the virus of failure, and were met by God, were used by God.”

The panic slowly dissolves in what is overwhelming Grace. This fear? It’s grace in disguise – the best thing that could have happened to me. It places me solidly at the mercy of God. It brings me to my knees (literally) and I beg God to give me words, words that bring glory to God.

I have no idea how this will go, but I know a couple of things:

God is so much bigger than my words
I am so much smaller than his Work.
Over all of this – the visas, the plane ride, the funding, the preparation – is a blanket of Grace that reminds me God is in the business of using the unqualified.

And there you have it.

Readers – I’m not sure how much I’ll be writing from Goa – I hope to do a few updates so stay tuned and thank you for tuning in to my fears and his Grace.