I haven't posted on here in about a week because I've been in the throes of house cleaning. If you had seen the "before" views of my house, you'd understand how I could be in the "throes" of house cleaning. I estimate about 55-60 man hours of labor were put into getting my house in decent shape over the previous 3 days, and there is still more to do. I mean, I know there will ALWAYS be more to do, but there is still some catch-up cleaning to do, not just maintenance stuff. Anyways, all of this is to explain that I was busy each day and exhausted each night, and blogging just wasn't going to happen. I'm taking a bit of a break from cleaning today though, and I thought I'd share my next journal entry during this "break."
On Tuesday, June 25th, I presented 2 lessons to women leaders in Jinja on the 2nd day of our conference. By the end of that day I was pretty exhausted too, so my journal entry for the day is quite short. In fact, it was my last journal entry of the trip, so after this post, I'll have to just fill you in on what happened as I remember it now. Since this journal entry is pretty skimpy, I'll throw in some more at the end, sort of like Cindy did with this photo that day...
June 25, 2013 9:30pm
It is finished. Not really though. The whole trip isn't finished yet, just my lessons got finished up today. That means that the 2 days I was most concerned about, Kampiringisa day and my teaching day, are both done now. I expected to feel relief once I was done with today. Instead, I'm mostly just tired.
My heart/passions session was the 1st full session of the day. I think it went really well. The ladies seemed engaged, and I felt so energized being up there teaching them. In fact, Brenda had to motion to me 3x to slow down or reduce my volume. That often seems to happen thought when I'm teaching adults. I get so into it that I get faster and/or louder. I think it went well overall though.
My 2nd lesson (on experiences) was the last full session of the day. Some women gave some good but long examples early on when I asked, and that crunched my time even more. I felt like I lost most of them to fatigue or interest in their new journals by the end, and I couldn't take the time needed to try to re-engage them. I was tired by the end too -- no need to slow me down or quiet me in this session! I think they got the big picture though and probably some details too.
In fact, I was encouraged a bit in the testimony time afterwards by a confusion that they had. Instead of sharing traditional testimonies during the testimony sharing time, they were sharing painful experiences that God had used in their lives -- like my lesson had talked about. Agnes (a conference attendee) even prompted them to share with a Scripture from my last lesson.
Regardless of my time constraints, fatigue, or weaknesses, God can still reach them. I place my trust in Him.
I told you that was skimpy! It shows pretty well how tired I was by that point though. In retrospect now, I think both lessons went well. The women were able to share pertinent examples during the lessons, showed their understanding by sharing what they learned during the small group time, and thanked me for the lessons afterwards.
In the first lesson, one of my illustrations involved pouring dried lavender buds into a fabric heart that my mom and I (mostly my mom) had made prior to the trip. I was very grateful to have a team member that liked sewing there to sew up the hole while I finished teaching. I use this heart sachet in my dresser at home now. (I gave each woman a homemade heart sachet while there too. It's a nice connection to have with them now.)
My 2 lessons were not the only lessons of the day. In between my lessons, my roommate presented 2 lessons too. Her 2 lessons were on using your natural abilities and understanding different personalities.
During the personality lesson, the women were given a quick personality test to fill out. It was a DISC-based test, even though it wasn't described as such. The assessment was based on choosing which word, out of a row of 4, best described you. There were dozens of these 4-word rows, and whichever of the 4 columns had the most marked words by the end would indicate your personality type. Anyways, this meant there were A LOT of adjectives on this page describing different personality nuances. As many of these women did not speak English as their first language, and even those who did, didn't necessarily know these very specific American English words, we had a lot of explaining to do. Somehow, I became the go-to girl when another team member couldn't quite figure out how to explain a word (e.g., "brassy," "nervy," "reticent," and "blank"). From this activity, I was called a word-nerd and Ms. Words a few times, and I had multiple conference attendees later tell me that I had a large vocabulary or was quite bright. It wasn't until I got home weeks later that I saw more of the irony in this.
In my last post, I mentioned the 2 "lemontations" that I had written on a lemon before I left for Uganda. The 1st was that I can't squat stably, and I talked about that in my last post. The 2nd one was that I only speak English. I find it amusing in that God's-sense-of-humor kind of way that I considered my language skills to be a weakness before I left on the trip, but He showed me once again that He could use precisely the skills and lack of skills that I have. I don't have to wait to say "yes" to God until I've accomplished more. I see my monolingualism as a deficit, but I didn't need any more language skills than I already had for this trip. In fact, He used precisely the language skills that I do have in a pronounced and obvious way. On the other hand, I'm not a remotely competent sewer. Even though that was a skill I needed for my lesson's illustration, that didn't throw Him for a loop either. He provided my mom's (and even my grandmother's) sewing skills prior to the trip and a team member's hand-sewing skills while on the trip. He put people in my life with the needed skills to fill the gap.
God is bigger than my skills or my lack of skills. I see my teaching day as a success not because I'm so skillful that I rocked it out of the park but because He is so loving and skillful and faithful that He orchestrated the details, the teaching topics, the spiritual gifts, the natural abilities, the personalities, the passions, and the experiences of everyone in that room in order to effect His will amongst all of us who were saying "yes" to Him. I'm thankful that I don't have to achieve some particularly advanced level of skill or knowledge before He can use me to effect His will in this world.
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