love languages in missions

Hickory Dickory Dock

The Zambian mouse ran up the clock.

The clock struck one

The mouse started running down... but then he stopped to talk to his neighbor for a while and three hours later he reached the bottom without feeling at all late…

Hickory Dickory Dock.

There, I fixed it.

One element of Zambian life that I’ve imperfectly chosen to embrace is that of time. Zam-time is enough to make even the super-relaxed white girl crazy. I mean really. I knew white people were uptight about time but I didn’t realize how clock-centered I am until Zambia beat every last bit of sensible time-orientation out of me. For years I showed up to church at 9:00 because every week, they announced that church would start at 9:00, and every week, I sat there by myself for over an hour until the church secretary (who the week before had said the words, “come at 9:00”) rolled in at 10:30 and asked me why I was there so early. I learned that my pace of “casual stroll” was basically a dead sprint as the people walking with me started wheezing while we walked together. And after a few dozen scheduling debacles, I accepted that when someone said they’d stop by for a minute, that the rest of my afternoon was shot as we would indeed be enjoying that minute for a few hours.

White privilege means that my clock-orientaiton is honored in most parts of the world but in rural Zambia I simply unclench my fists and accept a more fluid concept, which is, in many ways, a true gift. 

This gift of time has come into focus for me in the past several months as I feel like I have less of it now than ever before while also finding myself busied with some of the most time-consuming activities possible.

I don’t know exactly how it started, but for quite some time, I’ve basically been running a burn and wound clinic out of my house. We’ve long known that the clinic doesn’t really do burns or wound care. They will tend to you once, swabbing you down with bleach and wrapping you with gauze but Lord help you if that wound needs more than a day to heal because “once and done” is all you’re getting at the rural health center.

Some time back, a patient came to me with a massive wound that was getting no better and after begging for help, I agreed to care for it. This particular woman’s story found its way into village twitter and it became known that I possessed ointments and bandages and skills that actually prevented scaring and gave people their bodies back. The clinic knows this and lets me be, accepting that they can’t complain about my lack of official licensure when they aren’t willing to take over for me. And the patients keep coming. Recently, it has felt like as soon as one person gets better, someone else is wounded and we’re just blowing through sterile gauze and antiseptic ointment and literally hours of my day – every day – are now gone.

honest emotions as I wished for everyone to stop getting hurt

With a school to run, funds to raise, my own children to tend to... I still feel guilty saying that I don’t have hours to spend on this task; I hate that: that by virtue of my clock-centered complaining I somehow make light of what some of these people are enduring. By and large, these are not minor boo boos that need a band aid and a prayer. The majority of people who end up at my front door are there because they need intensive care and the government medical system has utterly failed them. If they were in a first-world country, many would be in burn units and ICUs. My house is, for at least some of them, a last stop before amputation.

its not pretty underneath

I have had to excuse myself from tending to a patient so that I can go and sob on Jeremy’s shoulder over the injustice and the medical malpractice that makes our front room better than the hospital. This should not be, and yet, sometimes it is. The time that this particular outreach takes up feels like it should be of no consideration to me, and yet, with everything else on my plate, it is.

The pain and the injustice and the guilt take their toll and so it meant something that at a particularly low point, a mom of a boy I had treated came back to me to say, J has been asking about you. He told me, “Mommy, Bethany really loves me.” This is the boy that screamed bloody murder every day for six weeks while the burns on his arm healed at a snails pace. He can now hold a pencil, and the grace in his words healed something in me.

this boy - he has spent more than his fair share of sick time with me, but the smile is how I know he's better.

Later, the mother of a child that scowled at me and pushed my hands away as I wiped weeks of dirt out of the filleted skin on his foot came back and said, “Every time we walk past your house, C looks up and smiles and when I ask him why he’s smiling he just says, that lady who loves me lives there.” And as if two rounds of Hallmark quality lovey comments weren’t enough, God gave me the gift of a third and then a fourth who said that word LOVE and I wondered if there wasn’t something to this.

The adults are less cheesy, but I’ve seen a similar affect. When the bandage changes are done and they want to sit and talk a while. When our kids start calling them grandma and missing them when they aren’t there. Every visit hurts, physically, but there’s a deeper healing at work too and all present can sense it.

daily snuggles with grandma, before and after dressing changes are good for both of them.

Despite the fact that I continue to pray through every bandaging and treatment session, “Lord, heal them quickly – for their sake and mine” the un-asked for bi-product of the daily care and the daily concern is that it communicates love in ways that a once-and-done couldn’t have.

to make you feel extra cared for, the babies will put bandaids on your perfectly healthy skin too. 

I’ve spent the last 12 years trying my best to love people. That’s our mission statement in a nutshell. And if I really assess our work properly, our best programs and projects are the ones that afford us the opportunity to spend concerted amounts of time with people. When an area of our work puts us in front of the same people day after day, there is a love language being spoken and clearly heard.

Twenty six years ago, Gary Chapman taught us all that there are different love languages and that if you really want someone to feel loved, you have to speak their language. After the six hundredth super-long chat around someone’s fire or even just standing in the bush path, Jeremy and I started joking that it felt like all Zambians possessed the love language “quality time.” And after logging hundreds more hours spending time with people in the burn and wound arena, I’d say that yeah, it probably is. There is nothing efficient about loving someone through the time it takes for a third degree burn over ten percent of the body to heal, but in terms of communicating love, the relational investment trumps my productivity every single day.

waiting for pain meds to kick in with the distraction of America's Got Talent
(we've watched all of the Zambian gospel YouTube videos already.)

The western world historically has “loved” poorer, third world nations with money. It’s fast, its easy, and above all, super efficient. Even amongst overseas workers, there still exists a mentality of “present the gospel, move on” or in development-worker speak, “dump and run.” We make up for in material gifts what we aren’t willing to give in time. And suddenly, the mission field sounds really noisy.

First Corinthains 13 says that if you don’t have love, you are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. I think that if we, the west, take an honest look at our programmatic efforts, even those that try to be gospel centric, we’d have to admit that the love language of the recipient has not been considered.

If spending quality time with people is the greatest act of love in this context, then I wonder if 1 Corinthians 13 could stand an update:

If I speak an African tribal language, but am too busy to love with my time, I am a clanging cymbal.

If I plant churches and build schools at all over but am too busy to love with my time, I am nothing.

If I sacrifice my American comforts and move my family to the bush but am too busy to love with my time, then I gain nothing.

Love is patient with those who want to be with us; 

love does not boast of how busy she is;

it is not arrogant or rude in needing to do “more important” things;

it does not insist on getting back to work;

it is not irritable when things take too long or resentful of lost hours;

it does not make light of the hospitals shortcomings, but rejoices in best-practices; 

love bears tears and the blood;

believes that God is good;

hopes that healing will come;

endures the pain when it all takes time.

Love never ends. As for development, it’ll fall apart; as for workshops, they will cease; as for sermons they will pass away. … So now faith, hope and love abide, but the great of these is love through time.

I still struggle with feeling inadequate – not accomplishing what I need to and feeling like I’m coming up short in every area. And I still hate that so much of my time is going to medical care that isn’t my field of expertise nor really – in the grand scheme of things – my responsibility. But for every person, to step into that space, and allow me to place hands on tender spots for weeks on end in order to see them heal and enjoy their body again  – the process that takes so much care and so much time – if that is what it means to love, then bless it.