New Growth

In an unprecedented decision, Greg and I travelled for 5 weeks across the United States, sharing the Freedom Firm story.  This entailed leaving our four kids behind in the middle of their school term with good friends of ours.   As we travelled from Georgia to New York and Pennsylvania to Kentucky, we saw winter thaw and spring arrive. Grey trees glimmered with the faintest hint of green, and crocuses and daffodils lifted their heads from the damp earth.

Freedom Firm too is entering a season of new growth.  We needed new partners, new churches and new volunteers.  Everywhere we went we found the issue of sex trafficking was already on people's hearts and minds, and many were eager to hear the first hand accounts. Churches and individuals rallied around us and eagerly sought ways to volunteer and help Freedom Firm.  Spring has arrived for Freedom Firm.

We've come back to India, profoundly encouraged and affirmed. We have a growing network of people with deep expertise dedicated to furthering the work of Freedom Firm. The fight to free girls is a massive one, and it requires thousands of people willing to get involved. We are getting there.

Today I am sitting in my garden, with the children back at school, with a day, finally, to write.

Its summer now in Ooty, with a constant breeze rolling through the mountains and temperatures in the mid-seventies. Our garden, in miraculous leaps and bounds is blossoming in a profusion of colors and scents. Foxgloves, Bachelor buttons, Daisies and Sweet William take the edge off our wilderness and give us a bit of the “English Cottage” look, and suddenly we feel a little civilized. Kavi brought six friends for a sleep over and they played croquette on the lawn. Now that is civilized.

But, lest we get too comfortable, wild bison jumped our stone wall and planted their enormous hooves everywhere in our organic vegetable garden, and, with amazing discretion, ate my entire crop of carrots and peas, and left the garlic, lettuce and cilantro. I guess I should be grateful they left something behind. We woke to the sound of our dogs barking at 2 am and with the help of flood lights spied an enormous bison calmly grazing our lawn just feet from our house. We've had a week of putting in higher fences (made out of branches), hoping to keep them out.

As we arrived back in Ooty, the children started their half-term break. We had a great week of catching up with them after the five weeks of separation. Watching new movies we picked up in the States, eating lots of candy I brought back and taking a couple days by a pool down “on the plains,” was the perfect re-entry to life here. Now, back to work.

My first blog I mentioned how I was grinding to a halt. That I couldn't really “do” anything more for Freedom Firm. I wasn't sure I wanted to. I had no energy left, and hardly the will to stay here any longer. All I really knew was that I needed to rest.

“Rest” to me meant changing my activities, radically. I gardened fanatically, and taught a lot at Hebron school. I ignored most of my old responsibilities. I rode Shadow deep into the forest for hours at a time. Often I sat and read books or journalled in front of a fire in by my bedroom hearth.

Slowly, the changes began.  At first, there was a barely perceptible lifting of my spirits. Then, faint glimmers of joy at small things: making a new recipe in the kitchen, a joke from one of the kids around the dinner table, the stumbling efforts of the kindergarteners I taught at Hebron, the sound of birds in the garden, and bees sipping nectar from our flowers. Perhaps its these small things that make up life. Small moments of beauty that I was rushing by.

Greg and I learned new ways of speaking together, and he took my old job of directing Aftercare of the girls. I had secret smiles of triumph when he came back after a long day on the job and sat staring in silence for several minuites before saying, “ I think I know a little of what you must have felt all these years.”

Most profound is the spiritual change that has rolled over me like sweet and living water, as I have extracted myself from ministry. While I intellectually understood the concept of grace since my childhood, I have never lived it. My life was a constant battleground of grace vs. works.

Here is an excerpt from my diary in October that charts my revolution.

“I am more and more convinced I have only just now understood the truth of Christ in my heart, soul and emotions. ... my life was a struggle to align myself with the confusion of ideas presented in the Bible. Nothing ever seemed clear to me (about the way to Heaven) and so I latched on to something I thought I could do: care for the widow and the oppressed, those in bondage and the broken hearted.

I did my best and gave my all for the dream of being justified, the dream of living out a part of the Scripture (See Isaiah 58, my motto).  My core belief was that no matter what I did, I wasn't good enough. I know now that my efforts cannot save me, rather, they have almost destroyed me. It is only Christ. It is He who justifies.

Trying to reach the unattainable. Always striving, never reaching. . This has broken me. I believe now, that God takes me as I am. I hope God resurrects a new person, born of a new and true paradigm.

So, at age 40, the faith of my fathers has finally become my own faith. My birthday is April 24^th, and I will be celebrating Easter Sunday this year with deep gratitude for His Resurrection and, consequently, my own.