Rebooting Life: ReDaisy

You know how they say, don’t quit your day job? Well, I quit my day job.

It wasn’t that quick and easy, though. Sort of happened over time, a gradual flaking away of the old Daisy and new skin growing. Scar tissue sometimes. Sometimes beautiful new skin. A reboot, a restart.

It started like this – surely you’ve had the thought – there must be more to life. My life needed a reboot. A restart. Redo. Renew. ReDaisy. But I knew I couldn’t just quit and then go find out. What if there really isn’t more? I mean, for me. Could be all my snarkiness, insecurity, over confidence, inferiority, creativity, wear that old robe all weekend depression – all my issues – would just sabotage the freedom I dream of. After all, my issues are part of me and they may just show up no matter what I’m doing or where I go and so I’ll still have all that crud and none of the structure and comraderie and income that somehow keeps it all manageable. So I needed to experiment a little with the free time I already had.

Everyone has some free time, right? I don’t have to wait until I retire to write, paint and enjoy art. So I did some art and you know, it felt pretty good to get some paintings done and make some creative craft kinds of things. And I can still find time to write a little. Mostly in my mind. Crawling in traffic every morning and evening, I could name the characters in my novel-to-be and spy into their lives and somehow figure out how to weave their stories together into an awesome plot that would miraculously make the New York Times Best Seller List in warp time. Okay, I had a few fender benders, but my drive, alternating between talking with God and talking out my characters, was so much better.

I decided when I have my coffee alone each morning before everyone else gets up, and I have to go rushing around to get ready to go to the office, I could replace that worry over the to-do list in the day planner time with…what. A morning devotional time. I heard of that. Start my day out with my Creator. That guy who made me and knows what the heck He designed me for. Awesome. Yeah, it was awesome, just like I’d hoped. I still do that. I just show up and say good morning, God. I love you. Thank you for being awesome. Let’s talk. Unfortunately, I do most of the talking. But God is a good listener and doesn’t give out BS advice. Crazy seeming advice sometimes, but no wrong direction stuff. And you know what? He found ways to give the time back to me. The call journal beside my phone had fewer and fewer pages of “concern” calls, and my staff became really great at being kind to people and helping them deactivate little time bombs before they could blow up and fire missiles into my office. I’ve thanked God so many times for that alone. I didn’t deserve it, but He blesses every little baby step toward Him. So I don’t think there’s not enough time to pray anymore. Life on this planet gets wild and wooly and telling my Father about it is the only way the boogers are gonna go lay down awhile.

Devotional time every morning made me want to do other stuff, though. I started watching some of the TV evangelists and saw their mission outreach to children and whole villages in other parts of the world. And my heart just went out to those folks. I wanted to be a missionary when I was a little girl. Then the never again land of high school came and the salute to liberalism of college and the exciting but confusing first marriage, and then the teaching job I became so enamored with and the addiction to work at work, and family, and work on work at home, and trying to make my family and home the best, and you know the drill. Then before I knew it, my darling son left for the university, and I wanted to leave too. I said, Lord I work hard, but it seems so trivial now. I want to help but where are these people? And He started showing me homeless people, and refugees who didn’t have furniture or know what a stove was; and my students told me about incest in their friends’ families, and child abuse, and drug abuse, and gang trains, and some told me how they got out. I'm not sure I was ready for this, but there it all was in the raw, and I could no longer deny the existence of evil in the world. My world.

I said Lord, there's so much work to do - outside my career job - which one of these things do You want me to help with? And He said, Pick one. I’ll bless whatever you pick. Let them know I’m here and just put your arms around them so they’ll know in the way that humans know. Speak kind words to them so they’ll know My voice. Well, with my job and family, I didn’t have a lot of extra time, and sometimes these people I loved most in the world didn't even get the kind words. I had already practically cut out all the TV time and I cut back on some of the gardening and decorating frenzy I used to do to “relax.” 

There were these homeless people I would see ducking behind dumpsters and into the woods close to the fast food places when I drove home from work around sundown. These were the real homeless, not just panhandling entrepreneurs, so I started chasing them down. If my husband knew this back then he would, well I’m not sure. I made gallon bags filled with things like toothpaste, deodorant, band aids, a stamped envelope or post card with a pen so they could write home, telephone numbers for services, soap and shampoo samples collected from hotel stays, a little phone money, peanut butter crackers, maybe a can of tuna with a pop top, and a bottle of water. And I would say, Can you use these? And they would say, Bless you mam – yes! Then one lady asked if I had a sleeping bag, and another said You got any socks, Mam? Another said, You got any more - I got some people camped out over yonder I could share with. It was more fun than gardening and decorating and getting my nails done and giving advice to my sisters. I started shopping sock sales (homeless don’t know where the sales are). I started going to church again. A whole ‘nother story for another time. All this went on for several years.

I went to Africa. When I returned, things just weren’t the same for me. That’s when I went to my boss and said, I’ve loved this job, but it just doesn’t leave me enough time for the things I need to do now while I’m young and healthy. Things I must do. She asked me to wait awhile, frankly for months longer than I planned. So I did. But I knew I needed a whole organization, a team, and lots of funds to help those cute little kids and their hard working parents in Africa to fight the stuff that was attacking their blessing. I went ahead and did all the legal work to found a nonprofit. I had to let it lay fallow awhile, but I felt compelled to be in the field of that work God described like this and was repeated by Jesus,

“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in ___, to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”

Beauty for their ashes. Joy instead of mourning over their little children dying of things we hardly ever hear of. If even just one of our kids died of malaria from a mosquito bite it would be on KENS 5 Nightly News. Anyway, every time after that, when someone at the school came to my office and complained about whatever they complained about, it just started to feel like I was living in an alternate universe where trivial things were mammoth, and mammoth things were ... not mammoth.

So I gave notice to my boss and my boss’s boss that I would leave at the end of the next month. We got everything in order, and I left about 2 months later. And hey – I actually got paid for all the sick days I hadn’t used, which was a lot because I was a workaholic up until the last couple of years. Seed money for the nonprofit. Turned out, I had actually been there long enough to get a decent monthly annuity for the rest of my life, so that helps.

So today my husband tells me I shouldn’t try to go back to Africa. He said, You’ve already been to Africa twice. And now you want to go to China and Tibet. We don’t have enough money for all the traveling you want to do. You need to get a job if you want to travel and do all that stuff for other people. Wha…?! How will I see the school and orphanage and clinic go up. This is not tourist travel I'm doing. God planted the seed for service to the international community in my heart at age 9. I'm finally gonna do it and now I'm never gonna do it? Why do I feel held captive? I have a comfy life in a comfy home and drive a nice car and eat wonderful food. Why do I want to opt for cool showers, squatty potties, and riding in a car filled with folks who also had a cold bath, shoulder to shoulder over dirt roads with potholes bigger than jeeps, and sleep without a/c or heat and eat mashed maize. And why the heck do I feel so much joy there? 

Stay tuned. I’m not sure how all this is going to play out. But the fight is on. The spiritual warfare in my head, in my home, in my world will be won one battle at a time. God is in the Renew business.  I didn’t quit a paying job that I was good at to leave this new phase of my life defeated before my restart launches. I'm remembering the magnet I kept beside my laptop at the office the last several years, “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me."  Yeah, because “The joy of the Lord is my strength.” 

Whatever gives Him joy, that’s what I’m trying to focus on.  A mockingbird prattle-singing, little African kids playing and doing homework under a mosquito net, and a homeless person with new socks. Joy gives strength - better than a protein Boost! This redo, reboot, this reDaisy, will bear fruit. Fruit for the Kingdom.

Blessings,

Daisy Rebooted