… I totally have this! I’m a rock-star! I can drive, sort of communicate, drop my kid off at a French speaking school every day like it’s no big deal, make friends… life is a breeze! Just at that moment, I realized I don’t have this. At all. After a busy week shuttling Ben and hosting visitors from all over the world for Burundi’s most crucial coffee moment this year, the Burundi Prestige Cup (a precursor to the Cup Of Excellence), and taking Myles to his first week of school… Ben landed up in the hospital. In Burundi. The place every foreigner hopes they never ever end up. A Staph infection. A big one. A cut on Ben’s leg had gotten infected, began poisoning his blood, and soon every tiny little scratch on his body was a festering open wound. Not exactly his prettiest moment, or mine.
Where we grew up in America, there is a tendency to glorify people who never take time for themselves, those who are truly “selfless.” Why do we do this? The people we should look up to are those who work hard, but have set good boundaries for their lives. There is no glory in not taking time to clean a scratch and ending up in the hospital for a week, possibly needing to be airlifted out to Joburg or Nairobi. No glory at all, and Ben will tell you that.
In the moment that Ben said “hospital” I knew something had to change. Fear had me by the neck right then. “We need to slow down,” I thought. To take time for the little things. Breathe in the precious gift of air. Let it soak into our souls. Watch that sunset, go to that park, watch the hippos in the surf like we did last night. Be still. Take the time. Work hard, do work that matters, use our time wisely… but build in time for rest and care. That is our lesson, not that every staph infection has to have one. We have hit the ground running so hard that I feel as if I have tumbled over my feet and landed flat on my face. There is nothing glorious about that, but we are getting up… carefully.
