Breathe Part Two: Breathing for a Baby

May 31, 2014  As I ponder paint chips on our master bedroom walls—pastels, blues, whites, pale green, I recall the walls of the room where I birthed my first child. It was a wash of pale green, peeled and cracked on the concrete surface. The bed was small and, in the early 1980's, it had not a blink or beep from microchipped, diagnostic devices. 

This simple room was in a simple, sacred mission hospital upon the steep Himalayan foothills above Tansen, Nepal. There an American family on furlough let us use their apartment before our baby’s due date.

Away from the heat of the southern flat lands, we felt we were on a second honeymoon, smooching as the baby jiggled my belly. We enjoyed meals in the guesthouse and with families who were in our language class. We meandered foot trodden trails to stunning rural vistas.

Foothills near Tansen

After one afternoon trek, my labor started. My Irish midwife, Barbara, moved into our apartment. Just as we settled to sleep, around 10 p.m., it was time to hurry to the delivery room. I wore my own flannel gown as MBH carried a crocheted blanket my mom made. Then we met Nepali nurse, Vishnu, in a white cap and uniform green sari who helped us through the night.

Birth pangs ebbed and roared like tidal waves against the shore. I drifted in and out of sleepiness. Minute by minute, hour after hour MBH seemed always beside me, modeling the breath patterns he studied in the pregnancy book.  Slow breaths led to puffed pants, then slowed to deep cleansing breaths. In and out, in and out hour by hour, minute by minute, seconds by seconds.

We breathed in sync, MBH and I. As my pangs intensified, so did our breathing patterns, despite jagged spurts and contractions. My old diary reminds me that between breaths I also raved and ranted to give up the natural process with light meds. Thank God for God, Nurse Vishnu, Midwife Barbara, and dear MBH cheering me to carry on.

“It’s one less pain,” Barbara assured me often, in soothing Celtic tones. She nudged Andy to message my arm and move me into more comfortable positions. When dawn cracked, transition finally came, along with the delivery room staff. And finally entered the Doctor, an Aussie missionary, who spent then same night with a boy cut by a sickle, an operation on a four-day old baby, a predawn cesarean birth, and a patient who, in naive panic, mangled his IV tubes.

Dr. Geoff was there for me when it was time to bear down... once more and again. In my weariness I could not see that baby’s head had to be turned for the birth. I also couldn’t hear a baby’s wail.
Finally, at 5:25 a.m. Dr. G delivered my quiet baby, praying joyfully heaven’s blessings over us.

He quickly handed my baby to Dr. Sylvia, the German pediatrician. Her back to me, she cleared the mucus from our baby’s lungs. Her breaths via a tube blew the away the blue tinge in his skin. Then she turned to settle the baby in my arms.

His hair curled black. His fat cheeks were lively rosy. So handsome cute was and is he!

With many breaths my firstborn came to be alive and healthy. Thank God!

Thirty some years later this cheeky son would breathe with me via cellular devices... To be cont’d

LAUS DEO

Caught in flip-flops

This year’s weather pattern seemed to skip spring as it hyperdrived from winter’s Icelandic chill to a Tropic steamy summer.

Despite this heat you won't catch me in flip-flop footwear. Even back in third world Nepal, I wouldn’t wear the rubber ones imported en masse from China, sandals Nepalese and even MBH, my beloved husband, often donned.

Feet on Savannah street

These days in the first world nation of America, I note flip-flop wear from cheap to deluxe is THE fashion statement. Slaps and slides echo not just at the poolside but also around frigid grocery aisles and warm church aisles. But not for me. Though I disdain stifling regulations, I resonate with the PA state law forbidding drivers from wearing flip-flops after a gal's loose flip-flop caused her foot to accelerate her car into a store. Crash and sirens at that mall!

At many American shopping areas one finds pedicurists busily buffing feet and brushing toenails barn or blood red to look their best in open footwear. “If the barn needs painting, paint it,” is a proverb I first heard in my Deep South Sunday Class. My toes tend to curl together and under as if to revert en point to the one ballet class I took as a child. Polish and buffing might be my extremities’ necessity, but I refuse to indulge and often hide my tootsies in shoes. If I have to wear open-toed footwear it would be sandals that hide as much of my foot shortcomings as possible.

Jesus, who probably wore sandals, would have willingly worked on feet like mine. History records that Jesus kneeled with a towel and water basin to wash, at least a dozen sets of feet. He scrubbed the dirt, the camel, cattle, donkey and horse dung of the ancient roads off his followers’ feet. Feet certainly as dirt challenged as a Nepali on a steep Himalaya goat trail.

One monsoon summer my beloved hubby trekked one of those narrow trails, wearing blue flip-flops. A civil engineer he along with his co-workers went to inspect the extent of flood damage on the Tinau River Hydroelectric Dam upstream from our village. The trail perhaps was still muddy and, of course, narrow, 100 meters above the raging river gorge.

Tinau River Gorge and Dam

In an instant MBH slipped. Out of his coworkers’ eyesight he vanished. Over the edge of a steep gorge he tumbled.

A meter or so below, a tree stayed his fall. Correction, my analytical husband would state that our Creator stayed his fall with a tree. Not just any tree, but one Nepali tree that God seeded, one tree God watered, one tree God photosynthesized to grow stuck over a gorge to catch my beloved husband, God’s beloved child. Then the Perfect Hand of Mercy helped coworkers’ to pull MBH up, dirty, bruised, alive. Laus Deo!

Ultimate Good, Your Creator, the Perfect Hand of Mercy--God exists. Into our fallen, divisive world God sent his perfect Son to cleanse, to serve, to rescue and save us just as we are ... with or without curled in toes. God loves us so!

GOLDEN SUNDAY THOUGHTS

"Your golden Sun will shine on me!"

May Day a golden sun shined through a cloudless sky onto crepe myrtles that shimmied to the rhythm of the breeze. The official trees of our city are in full spring green leaf. Soon the myrtles will burst up and out with colorful blooms like flaring fans in Flamenco dancers’ hands.

Wearing capri blue jeans and a brown knit shirt,  I  prop up my sneakered feet. It’s 11 a.m. on a Sunday and my laptop clicks on my lap.  I should be dressed smartly with a church bulletin open.

Such was our family’s Sunday custom-- to dress up as well as my late Daddy insisted his family be at church or in the public eye. Oahu born he’d cringe at the Hawaiian Shirt Days some workplaces now permit.  His brothers used to tease him as he ironed his blue jeans for plantation work. On the mainland my father went to work in a white collared shirt that demanded cufflinks, a smart thin necktie, and a perfect dark suit.

During the 1960’s dapper Daddy drove his decked up family to weekly Mass. Sepia snapshots show his gals lined up in black patent Mary Jane shoes and folded over white anklets, edged in lace. Mommy tailor cut and stitched the flared dresses and lined coats. Our hands in white gloves and our heads under straw hats, we sisters could have bested the smartest females attending the wedding of the Prince and Princess William of Cambridge.

But on this peculiar Lord’s Day I remain au casual at home. You see the 11 a.m. service we usually attended has been folded into the Saturday evening service. Our service had contemporary songs while theirs had Lutheran hymnody. The new music, which yours truly helps to lead, we pray will be a sweet worship offering, pleasing to God and to the joined congregants. So it seemed this first Saturday.

I reminded MBH that we worshipped on Saturdays in Nepal. The Asian attendees come to worship in their best dress, perhaps the single good outfit each has. The men wear pants and shirts, the women, short-sleeve blouses and yards of cloth wrapped around their waists, the last yard pulled across and over their shoulder. Cotton saris swirl in patterns and neon hues, a garden of visual delights.

In confessional prayers, men bow their heads. Across the aisle women cover their heads with the sari or shawl. They heed God's word. As they sing, hands lift up and out to the Lord.

Each Sunday or Saturday we believers willingly pause our week. We join the local church family to let Word and Sacrament shine God’s Son on us, through us, out to others. God’s Son absolves us, sanctifies us, refreshes and empowers us to relax in Him. . . for the rest of the week.

These weeks after Easter, just keep coming. BTW no new sari or hat needed.

Terribly Alone and Forgotten, Part One

Back in the pioneer years of our marriage, MBH deployed to a distant corner of Nepal to handle a design conflict on a school. I stayed that week in the centralized capital city. A mere seven days of Incommudicado separation and this selfish, twenty-something girl felt terribly alone and forgotten in Kathmandu.

7:45 a.m. MBH kissed me goodbye at the guesthouse. Across the valley to the Himalayas, cloudless skies arched azure over green rice terraces. As I hand washed laundry, the roar of twin propellers affirmed that my beloved was en route to the peaks just below the snowcaps.

We were married a mere six months when we left for mission service half a world away from family. We bonded overseas, inseparable 730 days straight through language school and our work in Butwal (boo-twall').

He said he’d miss me as he tried to calm the sobs out of me that night before he deployed. He believed that we’d live out the truth of our devotion to God above that to each other. Apart he felt we would discover the work God had for us individually.

While he soothed construction conflicts to the west, I worked through angst in Kathmandu. I washed buckets of laundry, helped around the guesthouse, attended meetings, and arranged delivery of goods to our village.

That week God grew my extended family “in Jesus.” Spying my red eyes,  British sister Joy told me she got headaches when she cried. So she took me to on a shopping trip where I bargained for a Tibetan dress.

With fellow expats, the Snyders, I experienced my first scooter ride on the narrow city lanes. Not quite like a James Bond run, but thrilling.

On a bus back from Nepali church, I asked how I could pray for my Dutch sister Rut. Her requests I wrote in my journal, a harbinger of work to come. . .

Finally, I learned more about a retired grandfather we encountered at a restaurant the week before, Dr. Robert L. Fleming. He founded the UMN, our multi-national, interdenominational United Mission to Nepal.

On a birding expedition into the jungles of Butwal Dr. Fleming and other westerners first entered Nepal. This Hindu kingdom of all altitudes had all varieties of birds. Avian enthusiast Dr. Fleming rode in on elephant to capture their beauties for his classic book, “Birds of Nepal.”  Just after WWII, the doctor met with the king who requested medical and technical aid for his peoples locked by geography in medieval poverty, disease, and illiteracy.

UMN built and staffed hospitals, clinics, schools, water projects, and hydroelectric plants. Despite laws that forbade proselytizing,  God revealed himself. At every project God birthed native Jesus believers and indigenous fellowships.

The Nepalese may have been isolated from modernity. In reality they, like I, were never terribly alone or forgotten. In the shadow of Everest they and I were truly beloved, cradled by the Mountain Maker’s hands and his believing family.