A Fresh Perspective 1

We were blessed to have Shelley Gorin join us for a few days during our trip to Pine Ridge. Here’s a little something she wrote about what she saw, and how it affected her:

Some of the most beautiful moments of my life have been painted in the ugliest colors.

Somewhere around the 1970’s, Tupperware managed to capture nearly all of my least favorite colors at once. Remember the starburst-top, harvest-themed containers that everyone and their grandmother had in their kitchen? Those. I always hated those exact shades of yellow, green, orange, and brown. The “terrible colors” list is rounded out by a particular shade of pink that our local JC Penney store used for its bathroom stalls in the late 70’s (funny the things you remember). Yuck.

As much as I despised each of those colors, though, when I think back to the warmest, happiest times of my life – back before pain set in for what seemed to be the long haul – everything is painted in those shades. I was born in the 70’s and that color scheme seemed to be in and on everything when I was young… homes, schools, decorations, clothes. Some of my best memories took place in a world painted with them. So, I find it funny that the colors I hated most accentuated, maybe even represented, everything warm and joyful in my life. I could even say the same of autumn, my favorite time of year, when the world is positively saturated in what at any other time I’d claim to be my least favorite colors… yet I am utterly ravished by them.

I share this because God seems to paint my world in colors I’d never pick, and in that seeming ugliness, fills my life with beauty.

All of this came to mind last night as I was driving home and found the sunset chock full of 1970’s Tupperware yellow and orange, with a smattering of 1970’s JC Penney pink. The sight took my breath away before I realized I didn’t even like those shades. And maybe that’s how God works… He takes our breath away with the beauty in what we thought was only ugliness.

Recently, I spent several days tagging along with Nape Na Si’s annual trip to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Though it was my first time going, I’d wanted to for many years, partly because it had been stirring in me from the moment I heard about it, partly because I have a thing for the forgotten and downtrodden, and partly because I think deep down I needed to do so to heal from my own ugliness. I’ve been through a lot that’s ugly the past few years and have admittedly grown rather numb.

Nearly twenty years ago, I had plans to move to Arizona to try to help do something epically “ministry-ish” on the Navajo rez. I’d lived out west when I was young and had many native friends; word of how difficult a life it could be out there hadn’t escaped me as I got older. And so, I sure thought I’d have something grand I could do to help, because I was young and thought I could change the world.

Blissfully ignorant, I went out to my friend’s mission home and found myself surrounded by these amazing, beautiful, inspirational, and horrifically-brutalized-by-life children. But the ugliness of the pain they had already seen in their young lives was too much for me; the sheer weight of heartbreak and my inability to change it was too much. I tucked my tail and ran. I ran from what I couldn’t handle seeing, and hated myself for it for the next almost-twenty years.

Those children still haunt me. Every. Single. Day. I could tell you each of their names and personalities, even now. I knew even then that they were forever in my heart and under my skin, even as I felt I had failed them. And so when I first heard of the annual trip to Pine Ridge, I wanted to go as much for them as for God, and as for myself. But this time, I didn’t go to try to sweep in and change the world for anyone. I went out in the middle of nowhere and the middle of brokenness to LISTEN. To take off my metaphorical shoes in that remote place and stand before whatever burning bush might appear.

I don’t know what I was expecting to hear, and I will honestly tell you that I don’t think I heard “it.” I don’t think there even was an “it” to be heard at all. But in that vast and broken place, I found myself again saturated in that juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness.

I listened to the chatter of children, the rushing of the wind, and the singing of the elders and young men carrying on their dignity and identity amidst the ugly, shattered pieces of what my own people did through lies and broken treaties. I heard the song of generations of people denied hope, but fighting for it nonetheless. I was moved to tears by their beauty, hidden in a place where a life’s outcome could be as shattered as the shards of broken glass and trash that littered the playground where we fed and shared stories with the children.

I think that there is great dignity given to someone in the listening, rather than the fixing. In going away to listen, I think that something in my own heart was fixed as well. People have practical needs that, when met, far outweigh an inspiring sermon. But anyone can throw some money at a need. I think the trip is about much more than just being helpful. It’s about listening to the heart of a people.

Beauty and ugliness, joy and pain are inextricably woven in the human experience, but we miss the beauty and the joy by averting our eyes from the ugly truth and the shared experience of pain. I think that this is what truly breaks us… the avoidance of what we are too uncomfortable with to face. We think we spare ourselves, when we doom ourselves instead. We need to take trips like these to awaken our spirits.

Someone asked me why I’d go out in the middle of South Dakota and help folks who might not want my help. My answer was somewhere between going where the Spirit nudges, and simply because, why not? If even only one out of twenty children realizes that someone gives a shit about their existence, then why NOT go? I knew I needed some beauty and ugliness to shake my heart awake again, and now there are a new handful of Oglala Lakota children who have settled into my soul and under my skin just as the Navajo and Hopi kids did almost two decades ago.

I pray that I always have someone beautifully and painfully under my skin like that, to remind me of my humanity, of our shared humanity, and to keep me attuned to the beauty of the redemption story that plays out for you, for me, for all; written on every rock, tree, and hill, in every bruise, every face, and every song. It’s a story our lives were born to hear and to tell. I hope to go back next year with Nape Na Si to learn it again.

Folks at Pine Ridge need me to sweep in and fix things far less than I need what they have to show me; maybe taking the time to let them do just that, to tell their story, is what can help them know just how vital they are. Maybe. Maybe God heals us all by allowing us to heal each other.