New Underwear for Elliot

Little boys grow bigger. It’s the one thing they do without complaining. Their clothing doesn’t grow so eventually you have to buy more, unless they’re the younger one in the family. Then you can give them the hand-me-downs. It seems underwear doesn’t usually make it that far. That’s because being underwear isn’t a glamorous job and that’s especially true if you belong to a little boy.

If you’re a pair of underwear belonging to a little boy, you’ll find you’re asked to do far more than promote modesty and preserve dignity.

One time Oliver ran around with coins from Adi’s piggy bank in his underpants for a good hour. He jingled so much it sounded like Santa’s sleigh was bouncing down our hallway. It took us a few moments to figure out what was going on.

“Janice, do you hear bells or am I going crazy?”

“Is that your phone?”

“Where is that coming from?”

“Wait, I can hear it again.”

But it’s not just loose change. Underpants can be a depository for globs of mud, thorns, seashells, toy cars, marbles, chewed up wad of bubble gum, a stick that looks like a gun, or anything else you probably wouldn’t expect. Your child’s underwear may even be found posing as a flag during an intense game of “Capture the Flag.”

“Wait, if the underwear is the flag, then what is the child wearing?” you may be asking. Well, if little boys are really playing hard and the house is just too far away when nature calls, a patch of high grass will work as a fine place to answer that call. Actually, the grass doesn’t even have to be high. In fact, the little boy may be be a cheetah or a gorilla at that very moment and so using the wilderness as a toilet may be very intentional, and not just pure convenience. Anyone in their right mind knows that animals don’t use toilets, or wear underwear for that matter, and so it’s possible the underwear was left outside earlier in the day and now has found a new job as a flag. Besides, using a flag that your opposing team doesn’t want to touch is kind of genius.

Underwear are the Marines of the garment world; first into the battle and the last out. So it’s no surprise that Elliot’s underwear wore out. Janice, however, was anticipating this and had brought along shiny new underwear with Paw Patrol puppies printed on it. The underwear companies use Paw Patrol as an incentive for people to buy their underwear. We use Paw Patrol as an incentive for our child to keep his underwear on.

Elliot was very excited about his new underwear. So naturally the first thing he did was run outside and find his friend Maverick playing on the sidewalk in the middle of the compound. Elliot excitedly dropped his pants so he could display his new underwear and then proudly performed a slow roll with his hips so he could share detailed analysis about each character. Maverick didn’t see this as strange at all, and did, in fact, seem to share Elliot’s excitement. Still, at least Elliot was wearing underwear.

But there’s more going on than just Elliot’s underwear.

Curse the World or Mourn It?

I read a devotional book the other day. I’m not bragging about it, I’m just making conversation.

A guy named Paul Tripp wrote a devotional book called “New Morning Mercies.” It was recommended by several people whom I respect. Even a certain Mr. Rex “Tex” O’Keefe recommended it, although his recommendation made me question the book’s effectiveness. Now, usually if something is popular I stay away from it. This is why I didn’t buy an iPhone until I was almost thirty years old.

Also, I feel like devotionals tend to be filled with wordy essays about things I already know. But I give the author some grace because that’s the thing; if you have a quota to fill, your genius won’t always cooperate with the deadlines. Even my favorite cartoonist Gary Larson (who created “The Far Side”) had plenty of strips that made me go, “Meh” and flip to the next page without as much as a smirk. Patrick F. McManus, one of the best humor writers to ever deprecate himself, occasionally wrote a story that I found repetitive and predictable. It’s hard to be a genius every time you do something.

But that’s the thing, the discipline of doing something, even if your effort doesn’t produce a masterpiece every single time, helps prepare your environment for one to happen. It’s like scattering banana peels and ball bearings around a zoo for weeks until finally one day, a zookeeper happens to slip while carrying a barrel of monkeys and comedy ensues.

In a similar fashion, this devotional book randomly surprises me with something I haven’t thought about. March 12 in particular stuck out to me.

If you mourn the fallenness of the world rather than curse its difficulties, you know that grace has visited you.

Paul David Tripp, “New Morning Mercies”

My brain read that and immediately flipped it into this:

If you curse the difficulties of this world rather than mourn it’s fallenness, you know that grace hasn’t visited you.

That hurt a little bit because I’ve been cursing the difficulties of the world lately, and admittedly caring less about its fate than I should.

Difficulties of this World

It feels like suffering is cyclical. This latest cycle started when Elliot injured his toe. The injury itself was forgettable but soon his toe began filling with fluid and ballooned out the bottom. It kept him up at night so Janice took a hypodermic needle and drained some of the milky syrup out. She wasn’t satisfied and so she went back for round two. As Janice lined up the needle, Elliot moved his toe with the speed and agility of a horsefly about to be smacked. Janice stuck the needle-full of biohazardous goo deep into her own thumb. She didn’t think much about it at the time, besides having a thumb that felt like it got poked by a needle.

A few days later, Janice began feeling sick. It had nothing to do with her thumb because I was soon sick too. We took turns lying on the couch and then the bed because we were tired of lying down but too sick to feel like moving. For a week we were alive but not terribly excited to be so. What did we have? Nobody knows. I took several malaria tests but they were all negative. No one else on base got sick. Our children never got it. I feel like Papua New Guinea is a land of mystery and the diseases here are no exception. They say that half of the biology in Papua New Guinea isn’t yet scientifically named. Surely it’s harder to find and name little viruses than it is to find and name a vine growing on a tree, for example. I suspect that if we had our own personal staff of scientists running a full fledged laboratory under our house, they would work their whole lives and retire in shame because they couldn’t identify our illnesses.

About a week after Janice stabbed her thumb, we found ourselves slowly emerging from the fog of sickness. As Janice’s sickness faded, her thumb grew – literally. It swelled up like a sausage on a grill and looked remarkably similar. It became so bad that she slept only a few hours each night. She spent most of the night rocking back and forth, holding her thumb, and moaning like a mental patient. She was getting close to being one so obviously I was worried.

“It feels like my thumb is having a baby,” she said.

She was started on a dose of antibiotics. Then it was changed a few days later since it didn’t seem to be doing anything, and then again. Pain medication didn’t dull the pain much longer than an hour, and apparently you aren’t supposed to take it that often so Janice would moan the day away waiting for the next dose.

After a few days of this our Medical-And-Everything-Else Director, Chris, decided the case was severe enough to administer some morphine, and only then did a dopey, unusually agreeable Janice manage to sleep longer than an hour.

While this drama was proceeding, I found three itchy spots on the back of my head, which didn’t concern me much. But within two days the spots grew into painful, puss filled blisters. It felt like an insect laid larvae in my head. With any luck they would soon hatch and the pain would be over, but Chris looked at it and said it wasn’t larvae, but it could be a staph infection.

“Why can’t you guys get sick with normal things?” He asked.

Janice and I began passing around the bottle of antibiotics like two pre-schoolers sharing Tic-Tacs.

It’s been weeks later and, although it’s much better than it was, Janice still can’t fully use her thumb. My weird bumps are gone, leaving behind only little bald spots. Hopefully the baldness doesn’t spread.

Did you ever hear the quote that goes something like “humility isn’t thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.” So then it stands to reason that feeling sorry for yourself is actually prideful because you’re thinking of only yourself a whole lot. And while I like sympathy as much as the next guy, I gotta say it’s hard to feel like Job when we’re visiting the Haus Sik and seeing people who have much bigger problems.

I think the key to switching from cursing your problems to mourning the fallenness of the world is helping other people. It helps rip your focus off of yourself and onto others.

We’ve been visiting a three year old named Nathaniel who has cerebral meningitis. When we brought him in his eyes were rolled back in his head and he was unresponsive. It’s been a few weeks and he seems to be improving, though he’s still in a bad way. His parents sit by his bedside night and day.

As we walk down the ward to visit him we pass others who have feeding tubes in their noses. You can smell infections, blood, and whatever is coming out of that guy. There’s broken femurs, tuberculosis, stab wounds, tragedy everywhere. I wish I could pray for healing for everybody and send them all out of the front door as good as new, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. At least it hasn’t yet.

But then again, I think like an American. I pray that God removes suffering. Job prayed that God would give him the strength to go through the suffering.

I forget that God’s ultimate priority isn’t fixing physical ailments. In the grand scheme of it all, the spiritual issues are the most urgent. Because if we find a new life in Christ, then someday we’ll get a brand new body anyway.

But still, God’s heart breaks for those who are suffering and our’s should too. The Bible clearly instructs us to take care of the vulnerable so it’s hard not to curse things like the lack of stable electricity to refrigerate medicines, the broken crane at the dock that’s preventing a container full of malaria medicine from reaching the haus sik, or the corrupt government official who steals all the money allotted for a new aid post.

The other day Nick and I were discussing something in the flight office, which is a rather official sounding name for a room the size of a shoebox that has two desks shoved together in its center and a coffee maker sitting on a folding table along the other wall. At some point in our discussion I said something like, “But that’s so stupid!”

Nick just laughed and said, “Uh oh. It sounds like you’re getting salty! Don’t get salty on me, Josh.” Everything that comes to Papua New Guinea rusts and decays, either from salty ocean spray or the strong UV rays. Missionaries are no exception.

We start out thinking we’re going to make a difference. Yay! But the world doesn’t get out of the way that easily and before we know it, we’re cursing the problems in our way. We aren’t the saviors we thought we were going to be and it makes us mad. We point our fingers, throw our hands up to heaven, and march off.

But God keeps working at us and eventually – hopefully – we throw up our hands, repent, and march back to the task He’s given us, a little more humble than before and much more dependent on his miraculous interventions than we’d like to admit.