A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a sweet person who reads my blawg pretty frequently. “You’ve seemed different,” she wrote, “since you got home from Africa. And I just want you to know that I’m praying for you.”

Oh, interpeoples. That email touched my heart right down to my liver.

Because I am different. There’s no doubt about that. But the problem is that I haven’t had any idea what to do with the different, so I’ve responded around by just sitting around and thinking about it.

A lot.

And just FYI: periods of great introspection do not exactly lend themselves to cranking out blog posts that pass for some semblance of witty, kicky fun.

Which has left me in a bit of a bloggy pickle.

And so, if I’m being completely honest, I’ve felt a little disconnected from the blog for the last couple of months. And I’ve given myself a hard time about the fact that I’m not exactly sure how to live and write in that tension, in that place where my heart aches for the despair and the poverty in third world countries while I sit in my central air conditioning and work on my laptop and drink diet Coke while I wait for my husband to walk in the door with a big bucket of fried chicken.

I’ve felt a little bit frustrated, to say the least.

Well.

A couple of days ago Alex and I were running some errands, and he asked me if we could go to Johnny Rocket’s for supper. I explained that we were cooking hamburgers on the grill that night, an announcement that was met with no small degree of displeasure. “BUT MAMA,” he said, “I LOOOOOVE Johnny Rocket’s. I think we should eat THERE.”

And even though I said I would NEVER do such a thing, I totally pulled the Africa card on my five year-old. I’ll spare you a repeat of my speech, but you can probably imagine the bullet points: children starving, children without meat, children without restaurants, children without choices where food is concerned, children who are grateful for God’s provision even if said provision doesn’t look or taste like what they’d hoped for.

Then I turned up the music so that I could silently convince myself to STOP TALKING, JUST STOP IT WITH THE TALKING, THE CHILD IN THE BACKSEAT IS ONLY FIVE AND PROBABLY COULD HAVE DONE WITHOUT THE LECTURE.

Alex was quiet for a few minutes, and then he said, “Mama? Mama? I think we should say a prayer for those children in Africa. I think we should say a prayer for the children who don’t have enough food. Can we do that, Mama?”

And once I picked up my heart and put it back in my chest, we did just that. We prayed for those children.

There were a lot of things about that moment in the car that struck me. If you’ve ever loved a child, you could probably rattle off a list that mirrors mine. But the thing that absolutely blew me away is that Alex DID SOMETHING with the information I’d shared with him. He listened, he thought, he prayed. There was no angst, no second-guessing, no strategizing.

He didn’t wait until he’d had some grand vision or had configured some master plan. He just acted on what he’d heard. And he taught his mama a thing or nine in the process.

So today, I follow his lead.

Right now, on Compassion’s website, there are eight orphans in third-world countries who need sponsors. For $32 a month – which is about what it would cost a family of four to go out to dinner – you can take care of that child. Your $32 will provide medical care, vaccinations, school fees, nutritional needs and – THIS IS HUGE – give that child countless opportunities to hear the Gospel. Through your sponsorship of one of these eight children, you can rescue a child who doesn’t have a mother or father from poverty.

Tuyishime, Caroline (just sponsored! yay!), Adera, Natnael (just sponsored! yay!), Nairesiai (just sponsored! yay!), Selina (just sponsored! yay!), Nevine (just sponsored! yay!), and Asnaku (just sponsored! yay!) are waiting.

And I don’t know about you, but I think it would be pretty cool if we stepped up and changed their lives today.

Just click on their names if you’d like to help.

Thanks in advance for what you’re going to do.

And thanks, Alex, for the lesson.

This post by David Kuo is absolutely beautiful.

And p.s. – Unrelated to Africa, but this post of Carlos’ made me cry.

Yes.

To every single bit of it.

And you can read it right here.

Several of you have emailed me to ask what, if anything, makes Compassion International different from World Vision.

My friend Shaw-awn has a most informative, eloquent answer.

And you can read it right here.

It has been well-established that I am not an outdoorsy girl.

Oh, I can dress the part, what with my fleece pullovers and functional-yet-appropriately-sassy khaki pants. Not to mention my Fundanas.^TM

But even if I have on the right clothes, odds are that once I get in the actual outdoors, something will go horribly awry.

Like that time in 11th grade when my youth group went on a hayride and everyone was swinging out over a pond on a rope, and I wanted to be a good sport so I swung out over the pond, too, only my hands slipped and I fell into said pond and jammed all the fingers on my right hand.

(Smooth.)

(Moves.)

Over the years I’ve learned to accept that I’m just more of an indoorsy girl. My idea of going on a nature hike is to look at pictures of a nature hike on my computer while I sit in an air conditioned Panera with a big mug of coffee (two Equals, heavy on the half & half) and a large piece of plate glass separating me from all the nature. Just as the Good Lord intended.

Well.

I mentioned last week that we spent the last couple of days of our Uganda trip at a lodge near Murchison Falls. The lodge was straight out of a Hemingway novel – perfectly lovely in every way – but I would be lying to you if I told you that I didn’t panic just a smidge when Shannon and I walked in our room and saw that it was “open air.”

Now here’s a lesson you can take with you for the rest of your earthly days, and you don’t even have to pay me for it: “open air” is some fancy travel agent talk for WE AIN’T GOT NO AIR CONDITIONERS, Y’ALL.

However, given what we’d recently seen in Kampala, I was able to quickly put the no air conditioner thing in perspective. Not to mention that I was on a once-in-a-lifetime trip with some of the best people I’ve ever met in my whole life. And so if the Lord wanted to use my time in Africa to rid me of any freon-related strongholds, then I was not going to get in His way.

As it turned out, the lodge’s electricity came from a generator, and they turned off the generator three times a day. For those of you who are keeping score at home, that means there were three times a day when the ceiling fans didn’t work because, funny thing, CEILING FANS REQUIRE POWER.

Honestly, I didn’t even notice the power outages during the daytime. We weren’t in our rooms a lot, and between the hiking and the ferry riding and the river exploring and the animal watching, there just wasn’t a lot of time to sit in the room and think about how you couldn’t turn on the TV if you wanted to, only OH WAIT, THERE WERE NO TV’S THERE, CLEARLY I WAS TRICKED INTO CAMPING.

The first night at the lodge we had an absolutely delightful dinner, and once Shannon and I got back to our room it dawned on us that the generator was going to turn off around 1 in the morning. Which meant that the ceiling fan would not be operating. Which meant that between the mosquito nets surrounding our beds and the lack of air circulation, there was no way we could possibly continue to breathe normally after 1AM.

After a considerable amount of deliberation, we decided to sleep with the sliding glass door open. In retrospect this was probably AN INCREDIBLY FOOLISH DECISION, but at the time we believed that leaving the door open was a stroke of brilliance because fresh air trumps no air at all. Every single time.

About fifteen minutes after we opened the door, Shannon sat up on her bed and said, “WHAT ABOUT THE MONKEYS?”

And I was all, “HUH?”

And she was all, “THE MONKEYS! WHAT IF MONKEYS COME IN OUR ROOM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT? OUR DOOR IS WIDE OPEN!”

She made an excellent point.

Now in our defense, Shannon and I were both English majors at our respective colleges. And while I recall taking courses in transformational English grammar and Shakespearean poetry and whathaveyou, I was never required to take a course in How To Stop A Monkey Attack. I doubt that Shannon was, either. So we were both dealing with a pretty limited skill set in terms of How To Combat The Nature.

So we talked about some different solutions, and as we discussed those solutions – none of which, interestingly enough, involved sleeping with the door closed – I wandered into the bathroom so I could wash my face and brush my teeth. I kept thinking about what it would be like to wake up and see a real-live monkey on the other side of my mosquito net, and I decided that it would probably be a little alarming.

And I decided it would probably make me scream.

FOREVER.

Now I can’t speak for Shannon, and I don’t know this for sure, but I’m fairly certain that she was having the same thoughts. Because when I walked out of the bathroom and looked at our open doorway, this is what I saw.

Internets, I give you Shannon’s Monkey Alarm (patent pending).

For the record, I nearly wet my pants when I saw it.

Because monkeys? They can jump. From one tree to another tree, even. And so the notion that our two foot tall chair WITH A BACKPACK AND WATER BOTTLE ON THE SEAT would serve as some sort of Monkey Deterrent made me laugh until I cried.

Shannon’s rationale was that if a monkey ran into the chair, the water bottle would fall and wake us up. And that made perfect sense to me because then we would have plenty of time to, I don’t know, SCREAM AT THE MONKEY?

Or to run and jump in the closet while we SCREAMED AT THE MONKEY?

Or – and this, I feel, is the most likely scenario – to try to hoist ourselves up to the ceiling using only our mosquito nets, all the while SCREAMING AT THE MONKEY?

But never let it be said that English majors don’t know how to improvise. Because I’ll have you know that before the night was over, Shannon had TOTALLY revised her original Monkey Alarm (patent pending) design.

She recognized that we needed something on top of the backpack that was a bit more hefty and stable than the bottle of water.

So she replaced the water with a bottle of sunscreen.

We found great comfort in that modification. And we slept the sleep of angels. Because NO WAY a monkey gets past a bottle of sunscreen, y’all.

I feel certain that any respectable English major would agree.