Meant to Be - The Love Story (or, how I met Jesus in Vietnam, and why it matters)

I have been coming to realize, with a greater and greater certainty, that the Lord has placed me here in time and place and among the people I am with...He planned out where I would be today BEFORE HE CREATED THE UNIVERSE. There are no random occurrences, no accidents with God. I am 100% certain that I am where I am supposed to be. This is a wellspring of joy into my soul that makes me eager for more of the Lord. The more I have of Him, the more I long for Him.

I am aware, as we are called to share in Christ’s suffering on the way to being like Him, that this may involve hardship the likes of which I have never known or expected. But I also have never been more prepared for it, in that I am secure in the knowledge that I am headed HOME to my Lord, to live forever with the best Father, brother, friend, Savior, King, Captain, Counselor, Shepherd anyone can have.

How am I confident I’m where I’m meant to be?

What follows is a look back through time, from the 1960's to the present, at the Lord's providence for me, particularly as concerns Vietnam. He built this country into me as carefully and intricately as any of my organs, any freckle, any pre-existing condition.

1

My father enlisted in the Marines in the 1960’s, during the Vietnam War. For whatever reason, he intended that he should die fighting. He wanted to be a helicopter gunner, an extremely dangerous position that meant almost certain death. This was before he met Jesus, and long before I was born in 1983. As you can imagine, since I am sitting here writing this, he did not get what he wanted. Instead, he was made a radio repair technician, and he never saw combat. He returned after only one tour, met my mother, met Jesus, and settled in for a mundane life on Earth in exchange for hoping in the glories of Heaven.

My father brought many stories home from his time in Vietnam, but none of them involved the tragedies that so many other soldiers participated in, like killing innocent civilians. He was enthralled with the country: the food, the starry skies at night, the beaches and beauty. And when I got old enough, he started to tell me some of them.

I was curious enough about the war and that he was there. He didn’t tell me the story about wanting to die until I was an adult, and so there was an air of mystery over much of his experience. I read novels and biographies about the Vietnam War, listened to Bruce Springsteen, wrote stories and poems about it. I took Astronomy in college and learned enough to develop a multi-spectrum photo of the Orion Nebula. Eventually, in 2006, I drove across the country, from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, Oregon, and settled there to write poetry. I even took a class in Vietnamese at a local language center for a while.

2

In Portland, I met my husband, and when we married, we had a narrow list of places we wanted to visit for our honeymoon in 2014. One was Ireland; another Cuba. The last was Vietnam, this country I had always been curious about. I’ll give you 3 guesses where we went.

We chose to visit Hanoi in particular, the northern city from which the country finally shook off its aggressors and former colonizers and gained independence. We fell in love immediately: with the people, the history, the food, the unusual architecture, the grit and determination of a long-subjugated country only now rising to its feet and finding its place in the world.

3

We never intended to have children, but in 2018, we changed our minds. The same year, we decided to move overseas to teach. We drew out extensive lists of places we might like to live, along with various criteria - income, cost of living, quality of life, and oddly enough one of the necessities was that the country not quarantine pets for months - because our 2 cats would not be able to tolerate it. We got two job offers that fell in line with those criteria: Cairo and Hanoi.

In December 2017, the same day we signed a contract for the school we now teach for in Hanoi, we also learned that we were going to have a baby - our son, Ernesto.

That first year was AWFUL. Among other things, two days after I gave birth to Ernesto, my beloved cat Bunny, aged 12, died of a mysterious fast-acting pneumonia-like illness. We had been in Vietnam for about 8 weeks. Depression, post-partum and otherwise, plagued my early months with my baby. We moved out of our first apartment and into the building we are in now, across the street from the school, which helped a little in terms of feeling less isolated, but I continued to suffer from anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, and general lack of hope or happiness.

Things started to get better as the baby grew. Neto is a great sleeper, and has only gotten sick once or twice in his life. He is incredibly smart, and strong, and funny...and I couldn’t appreciate any of these things. Our housekeeper, a young woman named Nga, took a liking to him, and he to her. She has two boys of her own, and just seems to know what to do with them. Watching her care for my boy made me realize that there might be something wrong with me. I didn’t feel much of anything towards him, and the only times I was anything close to peaceful was when he was sleeping.

Anyway, we returned to the US for summer break, visited family, and had a great time introducing him to everyone (on Chad’s side of the family at least - my parents don’t really travel, and we could not afford to visit two places, so they have not met him yet...we were planning on visiting them this summer). Little did we realize that it would be the only visit we would have in the US for some time.

4

When we got back to Vietnam, my anxiety returned. I was mostly coping by reading science fiction every moment I had, and trying to write my own fiction (see my post about giving up writing). I was delving into more and more exciting, bizarre, escapist work - other worlds, other beings, magic, etc. I was running out of books available for free, so I was always Googling for recommendations for more.

And this is where the Holy Spirit stepped in and made His own recommendation.

I was searching around the term ‘mysticism’ one day in September 2019, and I came across an essay called “John, the Mystical Gospel” by a Chinese missionary named Witness Lee. And in a moment, my need for the supernatural, for SOMETHING that rose above the mundanity and despair of this current planet, connected with Christ. (I’d grown up in a Christian home, and believed intellectually, but had not been given the gift of faith). Lee, in his incredibly unique voice and style and God-given insight, poured out the Gospel of Jesus as laid out in the Book of John, and the Holy Spirit took hold of me.

“In resurrection the Spirit of God was mingled with Christ’s humanity, with His death and its effectiveness, and with His resurrection and its power. The issue of this mingling is the compound, consummated Spirit.” I really recommend that you read the essay. Lee does a much better job of getting at this deep, wonderful mystery than I could do summarizing it.

No one had ever spoken about Christ this way to me before. Here was all the science fiction I could ever want, only the Holy Spirit had “flooded the eyes of my heart with light” as my favorite translation of that verse puts it (Ephesians 1:18), and I now knew it was true in every cell of my being: Jesus Christ is God. Not only that, but He is MY GOD, and He had come for me. God wanted ME to be with Him, in Him, and to give up my fruitless life in exchange for His life. 

This is crucial, friends. I was not (at least consciously) looking for Him. I had stopped any semblance of Christianity years ago. But I WAS looking for something. And at some point in my fruitless searching for the perfect, most satisfying adventure story, the greatest escape, the most mind-blowing love story, I had actually begun looking for the reason to go on living. Because there was nothing on Earth anymore that I wanted to live for. Not my husband. Not career, not writing, and not my child. Nothing. If I could not find a reason to live every day, I did not want to go on. My misery, despair, hopelessness for the future and the present, was too great.

All this to say (to get back to my original tack) I do believe that the Lord waited to come give me the gift of faith, the personal saving faith in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for ME. He had waited for the moment that He knew would come: that I would come to the end of everything. To look beyond that present moment and not see...anything worth living for. (This is not to say that you have to get to a point of despair in order to see Jesus for who He is, but you do have to surrender any idea that you are in control of your life, or that you are "good enough" to please God...)

I took Him at His word: I repented - that is to say, I changed my mind. I fell onto my knees in front of my computer, where I’d been reading, and told Him to take my life. Whether He meant to give me life or death, I didn’t care. I was ready to surrender control to the mysterious, terrifying, loving Creator of the universe.

This is the meaning of Galatians 2:20:

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

And He gave me life. And JOY! For someone with severe depression, coming into a state of joy (and I am only just beginning to understand what joy is...I will write about that later) is nothing short of life-changing. And peace, and love. I love that little boy of mine more than I ever thought I could love anyone. My anxiety has left me, my depression is no more. I have a living hope and that hope resides in the beating heart of my risen Savior, the only place where hope is safe and secure and guaranteed to be satisfied.

5

Since then, I have often wondered why the Lord waited so long to grant me the ability to believe in Him, when I had known and largely agreed with His truth for most of my life.

In recent months, I have begun to see (and marvel at) His amazing and careful planning. As I have said before, He exists outside of time, so it can take a lifetime for His full plan for someone’s life to be revealed. I don’t think it’s uncommon for the person whose life He is guiding to only see the tip of the iceberg.

Anyway. After the Holy Spirit introduced me and bound me to the Lord, things began to happen rather rapidly. My once mundane, depressing life became very, very interesting:
     + The Lord granted me a few extraordinary gifts of supernatural grace, in the form of some dreams and waking visions, words of wisdom, etc. As He built my faith, He lovingly used some extraordinary means of communication, which comforted me much during this early part of our relationship.

     + A tax issue we’d been dealing with (that involved being honest with the government even though cheating would get us a bigger refund) was resolved.

     + I found Hanoi International Fellowship, where the Lord personally made sure that I met people immediately to disciple me, pray for and with me, baptize me, and establish me in Christ-centered, Christ-loving, Christ-worshiping fellowship. He introduced me to my local family, which is my forever family.

     + Our second cat, Miles, became ill and needed to be put down. Without His comfort and strength, I would have sunk into a deeper depression and grief.

     + The Lord put it on my heart to hire Nga full time as a nanny, and she left 5 other employers (she worked 6 days a week from 7-5) to come care for Ernesto, which makes both of them happy. I started substitute teaching at the school to make her income, and our finances began to stabilize. Of course, once the quarantines hit, classes moved online and I am not able to substitute for those.

     + We did a 180 on Vietnam. We had been on a 2 year contract and had been not planning to renew, which would have had us leaving Vietnam in 2.5 months (from today 4.6.20). Now armed with the wisdom and planning power of my Lord, I was able to see above our discomforts and loneliness, and I became convinced that we needed to stay on another year at least. Our school has indicated that we are in no danger of losing our income, so we have time to ride out the pandemic.

*As of right now, Vietnam is one of the few countries in which the coronavirus is being contained. There have, to my knowledge, been no deaths here, and over the last day or so, there have been no new cases. The government has been testing rigorously, acted quickly to implement safety measures for everyone to follow, and has delivered goods to people in quarantine. As a result, panic has been at a minimum*.

     + God put a ministry on my heart shortly before we became aware of the virus (see my comic, Indwelling Sword, and my post on why I gave up writing). Having a full time nanny, even though I am not teaching, gives me time to read and pray and worship and seek His will and His glory. This lockdown has allowed me to focus on Jesus, on letting the Spirit teach me, bend me to His will. It hasn’t felt restrictive at all; rather it has been the most precious time, as I seek Him earnestly and ask Him to teach me His wisdom and His love. His revelations in His Word have been precious and surprising and timely.

I could go on and on. Right now, the US is calling citizens back because travel will be uncertain. We won’t be able to go “home”. For us at the moment, Vietnam is the safest, financially sound place for our family, and the Lord is doing good work here. I am learning, like my older brother Paul, to be content regardless of the circumstance.

I am going to write a separate post about the concept of HOME, but suffice to say that I no longer see anyplace on Earth as home, so this thought no longer bothers me (beyond the fact that we obviously miss our family and friends in the US). The Lord Jesus is my home, and He will make certain that I get there eventually, no matter what the governments of the world say about air travel. He’s coming to get me in person. The timing is of no concern to me; for now, I am here to love and serve Him, in whatever ways He sees fit to use me.