Tough

I’ve always thought that I was pretty tough.  When I was a little girl, my brothers and I joined co-ed rec soccer teams every spring and fall and spent many sunny Saturday mornings at the Blue Ridge Park.  I was a bony little kid swallowed by my jersey and outsized by most of the other kids, but a real fighter on the field, especially if someone fouled me.  My mom (and my soccer coach for many years) would always say that she secretly hoped I got knocked down early in the game because I would get up with a fire in me.  Mom was constantly telling people, “Watch out for Leigh Anne, she’s a feisty one” and I felt like the toughest kid out there.  I can still remember one soccer game when I must have been about seven and, after several falls, a referee asked me to leave the field because he was afraid I would get hurt.  I huffed off the field, with scraped knees and a hot throat.  Mom, always quick to defend her children, puffed up with anger and told me something like, "You just keep playing the way you always do."  To this day, whenever someone calls me feisty, I take real pride in it just as I did as a kid on the soccer field.

Yet it is through experiences like this summer that I realize I am not tough at all – not compared to the people I have met these past two months.  I think of Lidiannet and Carlos, who work tirelessly in the strawberry fields, yet never seem to miss a sermon or a prayer meeting.  I think of their daughter, Andrea, who works at the Poas Volcano Lodge six and a half days a week washing dishes, yet comes to English class two nights a week so that when her English is better, she can get a job as a telemarketer.  I think of Sandra and Gabi, two of the high school students who have to walk a twisting mountain road an hour from the main road, and then a 10-minute van ride just to get to school.  I think of Eugenia, living in temporary housing after the earthquake and taking care of her 14-year-old sister, who just had a baby and whose husband isn’t in the picture.  These people are tough.

I pray that I would live with utmost simplicity for these, some of the feistiest and truest and best people that I know.  And also for Jesus who calls us to give up everything we have and follow him.  I often try to twist this explicit command from him to suit my lifestyle or justify the ways I am not giving.  But I think he meant exactly what he said and he calls us to give all energy, time, money, and even comfort to follow him.  In this call, Jesus sounds extreme, maybe even unfair, but he also offers us these words as well:

“But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

“Surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

 “Whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

He offers us strength, his own presence, and even eternal life if we will only have faith and then turns to us and asks, “Do you believe this?”  I can see his face, gentle but sincere, as he places that question before me, not just once, but again and again as something to wrestle with for the rest of my life.