Tag: Canada

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Stress

I recently had some troubles with my car. One of the tires had developed a bulge, (which I didn’t realise at the time) and the whole car would wobble a little and tend to one side. It stressed me out. I had only recently got back from Pakistan and I was jet-lagged and tired. On top of this, I had just begun classes, which is always overwhelming, as students get bombarded with outlines of our assignments for the semester. On days like these I find myself going back to my room after class, lying on the bed and staring up at the ceiling wondering, how am I ever going to get through this?

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Of course, it’s not actually as huge a mountain as it seems — it’s just a bit of an information overload. I think that’s often why God tends to keep us hanging in life, never revealing too much of the future. He knows we wouldn’t be able to handle the whole picture. Instead He gives us enough of a glimpse ahead to know where to put our foot next, but other than that, we’re left in the dark. I don’t always mind the dark, because I know if I could see everything ahead of me, I’d probably go lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling forever. In fact, I might decide it’s just not worth getting out of bed at all.

Life can often be overwhelming, even in the little things. As I went through my first week, trying to muster up the energy to make a simply call, find a mechanic, and get my car looked at, I felt a little anxious. It was just a lot for me to handle, along with everything else that was going on. Tiny things in my day seemed like massive hurdles, as if anything on top of what I already had to go through would be the final straw for me. Sometimes I felt like a pressure cooker, ready to blow. Parents experience this stress a lot. I can remember times when I was little when, after one tiny issue, one of my parents would reach their limit. All the stresses that had been building up over time would burst. Suddenly a torrent of emotions would come gushing out, with a long list of all the tensions that had all been piling up within. I feel like it happens more often for moms. But I can sympathise. I don’t even have kids and I have days when I feel like I’m at the end of my rope. The smallest most unrelated event can often be the pin for the grenade that’s been slowly forming itself inside.

Thankfully it doesn’t always have to explode. I did finally get my car looked at. And two days later I had new tires on, and my heart was a thousand times lighter. I had been worrying that it would be something bigger in the suspension or steering, but thankfully it wasn’t. Tires are easy to replace. Not cheap, but easy. My long list of things that were going wrong in my life were suddenly all forgotten — because most of it really came down to the car. It’s interesting how that happens. Layer upon layer of stresses add themselves onto each other, all piled on one central problem. And once that single stress is removed, suddenly you realise the simple cause for all this turmoil, making everything else feel unbearable.

I may feel like a real idiot at times, but I’m glad things worked out the way they did. I’m glad I needed to learn to just go and get things dealt with. I wish I would have done it earlier. Now I know. Hopefully next time I have a problem, I’ll just deal with it before it gets to the point where it becomes overwhelming. I’m glad I’m learning, even though sometimes I would give anything to just have my problems solve themselves in my sleep. But God knows that I wouldn’t learn anything that way. He knows that I have growing to do, and though He doesn’t often make it painless, He is always faithful to walk with me through it. On top of this, I’m glad I have friends and family that are there for me too. Sometimes I just need people who are willing to talk to me and listen to me, while I unload the things that feel I can’t carry, only for me to pick them back up again after and get them dealt with. I’m so thankful for the listeners in my life.

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Fitted Bed Sheets

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I had the opportunity to go on a youth retreat this past weekend with my church youth group. After sitting on the noise-filled bus for nearly three hours, we finally arrived at the camp where we would be staying. That evening, after more noise and activity, the three boys in my room got their beds ready to sleep on. “What’s this?” one of the boys asked, as he started to unfold a fitted bed sheet he had pulled from his bag, holding it from his fingers as if it was a banana peel he had picked up off the ground. Another boy, obviously well schooled in his sheet classification, knew a fitted sheet from a t-shirt and was proceeding to pull it over his bed. Putting one corner just over the mattress, he would move to the other side, pulling the sheet off of where he had just put it in the process. Another, on the top bunk, was having the same trouble. Barely laying the sheet over the corner of the bed, he would then expect it to stay there as he pulled the remainder of the sheet over the far side of the mattress. Apparently, putting fitted bed sheets on a bed isn’t common junior-high-boy knowledge.Thankfully, a couple tips and a helpful hand later, I did manage to show them how putting the corner of the bed sheet under the corner of the mattress would stop the sheet from popping off the bed again and again.

I moved into a boarding school in sixth grade. Fitted sheets? No problem. I did start struggle later on in my years, as my sheets began to shrink with years of washes. This only got harder as my boarding school mattresses were eventually replaced by the larger, thicker mattresses I experienced once I got to Canada. Fitted sheets were quite normal, and I quickly got used to making up my bed, again and again. I’m thankful for my years in boarding. It’s experiences like these, watching anxious boys crawl into foreign beds that make me realise what a blessing it was. I understand. I understand what it’s like to be in a strange room. I forget sometimes, that not every junior high boy moves into a new room, with a new room mate, and has to try to fall asleep on a new bed each year. In boarding, life would hit the reset button again every few months, as my siblings and I would readjust to our beds at home for a couple weeks over break. Then we would be back to school again. The strange beds became familiar — the familiar became strange. And I would find myself lying awake in the dark, trying to drown out the silence of the fan that wasn’t turning above my head. Silence is one of the hardest sounds to ignore.

I don’t mean to make my experiences sound all rosy. Boarding had it’s downsides too. There aren’t many better ways to learn how much you dislike about people than having to live with them year after year. However, before long, the rough edges of my own selfishness did start to wear down. They had to — since they were constantly scraping into someone else and their selfishness corners. Thankfully God works in these years of friction, ensuring the little pieces that are chipped away simply smooth the edges, rather than leave gaping holes of trauma and bitterness. I’m thankful. I’m thankful that my parents were willing to let go when I asked. I’m thankful that I had friends who cared about me, and who made my experience a valuable one. I’m thankful God orchestrated good things out of what could have so easily become a mess. On top of all this, I’m thankful I know what a fitted sheet is and how to put it on a bed. I still may not know how to fold one, but not everyone is perfect. I’ll save that magical skill for the mothers of us silly boys.

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Snow

Snow. Too much snow. I had my second snow day of my life a little while ago, when the roads around Red Deer were decided to be too dangerous to travel on. As a result, my Monday turned into a lovely Saturday, leaving us only two days of classes in the final week of the semester.

Canada is cold. No, it’s not frozen over all year round, and we don’t live in igloos, but when winter comes, no one can deny that it really is cold. Walking back from my car the other night I could feel the temperature quickly taking it’s toll on my body, despite my winter coat, and gloves. Looking into the dark woods beside the the road, I wondered how long someone would last in this weather without shelter. If they kept walking, maybe a day? I’m not sure if someone would make it through the night unless they did jumping jacks all evening. If they didn’t keep moving I doubt they would last more than several hours. I imagined myself huddled under some tree in those woods, trying to keep warm. I’ve often thought that drowning would be one of the worst ways to die, or burning to death, but dying of cold is certainly up there. Even the thought of being out all night made me hurry even faster to get inside.

Winter in Canada is no walk in the park. It would be much easier if people never had to get anywhere. However, for anyone driving, Winter makes sure you don’t avoid it. Between scraping fiercely at the windows and shivering in the seats, waiting for the heat to kick in, driving is a blessing you pay for dearly. Yesterday, while driving out my grandparent’s house I heard on the radio that the temperature that morning was -29, apparently feeling like -41 with wind chill. The day before that I had worried about my car as its engine sputtered to a start, ice on both sides of all the windows. Roads around town are lined with small walls of snow that the snow plows have left after they have gone through. Recently I’ve seen dump trucks and trailers around Red Deer, hauling huge loads of snow out of town. I’m sure at the other end of all those trips is the perfect place for someone to build a giant igloo!

Memories of driving in Pakistan are so different. I can remember my dad trying to park our car under the shade of a tree, if possible, in an effort to keep some of the midday sun off the car. When we would get into the car the metal buckles on the seat belts would almost burn our hands if we touched them as we shuffled our bottoms into the seats. For a brief moment there would be a frantic fight, as my siblings and I would whip the windows down as fast as we could and stick our heads out, trying to catch even the faintest breeze of air. That was Hyderabad.

But here I am, in Red Deer, in December. I joke with my friends, telling them that every winter my calling to go overseas becomes louder and clearer. I dream, but, for today, this is where I’m supposed to be – avoiding every opportunity to go anywhere other than my flat. Every country comes with its own set of trials. There’s not a lot of sense in wishing I was somewhere else, going through the pains that come with another place. Just like Jenna and the Troublemaker, I would probably end up coming back to my own ‘bag of troubles’ realising I’d rather not have anyone else’s.

Last night it was -38 in Red Deer. It’s amazing what such a small line before the temperature does. If it wasn’t for that silly little ‘minus’, I could be out in shorts and flip flops, probably complaining that it was a little too warm for my liking.

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Leaves

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My sister sent me a leaf from Germany. The little splotches of green in it are slowly giving way to the orange and brown of the rest of the leaf. On a small pink sticky note, she wrote “Here’s a tiny bit of Germany for you, Josh!” I have another leaf on my desk from earlier in the semester. I can’t even remember why I brought it in. I just remember bringing it up to the house and putting it on the table, saying to one of my flatmates, “here, have some nature.” When it was doomed for the garbage, I laid it amidst all my little reminders and notes scattered on my desk – almost like small white leaves themselves.

There’s a leaf in my room at my Grandparents’ house – they framed it after I sent it to them several years ago from Pakistan, in a letter, as a last minute addition to the envelope. The strangest part is that the words I wrote to my Grandparents were almost identical to my sister’s. “Here’s a little bit of Murree,” I wrote. So as I opened up my sister’s envelope to find this leaf, I felt a strange sense of happy déjà vu. I guess there’s no doubt that we are definitely siblings, and that, for some reason, we see a leaf as a valuable and meaningful token of our love and care, and a representation of a place we enjoy. Perhaps we’re just strange.

But what is it that is so special about a leaf? Why do I find them so meaningful? Perhaps it’s just an attempt to bring the world into my room, and to try get nature to be where it can’t be. Perhaps a part of it is the fact that it was once living, attached to a strong and rooted tree – permanent, connected, and growing. It bears memories of something far larger and far more sedentary. But, disconnected and detached from its place, it’s suddenly transient and momentary, holding its last hues of green only until they drain from its patterned veins. Leaves are marked by change. From the fresh brightness of their first growth to the burlap brown of their death, they fill the branches above with ever changing colour and vibrance – nature’s mural, hung above our heads. And yet when winter arrives, the trees simply shake their beauty to the ground in a sea of orange and brown, soon to be covered by a thick blanket of snow.

There’s something magical about a leaf. There’s something amazingly beautiful about it’s humble and simple colours. And it’s comforting to know that I have a sister just as crazy as me, who sends leaves with her mail as a symbol of her love for people and places.

Thanks, Liz.

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What I Will Remember

With Remembrance Day tomorrow, I find myself faced with a mixture of emotions and feelings again, as a part of what seems to be a yearly mess of thoughts. It’s with a certain amount of timidity that I even write about my feelings at all, since I know that at times the ideas I entertain would perhaps disappoint and hurt people who are close to me – people who have been a part of these wars in the past, and who are personally invested in Remembrance Day. With so many emotions felt on all sides, as my American friends observe Veterans Day, or others Armistice Day, or Poppy Day, I honestly begin with some fear. These feelings run deep in people’s hearts, and I write not meaning to hurt or make light of the loss that people have suffered.

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I hate war. Justifying bloodshed and killing has been a complex, messy, and emotional debate that has gone on for centuries, and I think will continue to do so. Very rarely has there been a just war. Not only that, but even in wars that are deemed ‘just’ by society and history books, there is no shortage of sorrow and death. Try to explain to the woman who lost her child that it was for a just cause that a foreigner took away her child’s life. Or explain to a wife that her husband died holding up the unjust end of the fight, and that the man operating the machine gun who killed him, was doing so out of just sense of duty. War is loss. It is filled with grief, regardless of whether it was deemed just by the people that wrote the history books after.

One of the core purposes of Remembrance Day is to honour and respect those who have died in the conflicts that my country has been involved in. However, along with this, there seems to come an underlying sense that I need to somehow honour the wars in which these people were killed. I know this may not be the case for everyone, and many might disagree; But in honouring someones death for a cause, I do in some way, honour the cause for which he died – something that I really, in right conscience, cannot do. I don’t think that every war Canada has fought in has been an honourable one. Most were far from our soil, and most resulted in the deaths of all kinds of people – both for its own men, those on the other side of the conflict and even those caught in the middle as well. Do I honour these wars? I grieve over them.

Another clause, if you might call it that, of Remembrance Day is the reason we honour these people who died. Time and time again the phrase is repeated, “for giving their lives to preserve the freedom of this country.” Again, I just don’t feel that I can be a part of that statement. I realise that even as I write this, I enjoy freedoms that were given to me as a result of events in the past. I don’t want to cheapen the lives that were lost, but I just don’t feel right about it either. Was the freedom of this country worth the lives of people from another nation? Was my freedom more important than theirs? Even the freedom of this country can be debated as well, seeing as the vast majority of Canadians essentially sit as invaders in a land that we have claimed as our own, from people who enjoyed freedom in this area before its colonisation and occupation. Yes, we have freedom, but we have it while we sit on someone else’s.

At these times I ask myself the question: how would I observe Remembrance Day if I spent it with my German friends, or anyone from the other side of the war? I have lots of friends from Germany. We’re not enemies, yet somehow we are called to honour the lives that were lost while killing people from the opposite side of the conflict. How would I observe Remembrance Day if I spent it with those who had lost family members and had been Canada’s “enemies” in the past? Would I talk about how glad I am to have my freedom and that their ancestors didn’t occupy ‘my’ land? I think I would simply grieve. And I suppose that’s where I have come with regards to Remembrance Day.

I will remember. I will remember the lives that were lost on all sides, in all our wars. I will remember that life is not cheap, and that victory is often simply a label placed over countless heartbeats that have been silenced and broken-hearted people who have lost those they love. I will remember the thousands of stones that stand in countries, marking where humans like me were buried – both those who were fighting and those who weren’t. I will remember the grief. But more than anything, I will remember the true sacrifice that was made, and the singular life that was laid down that “whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life”(Jn. 3:16). Because this was the ultimate act of love, shedding Christ’s own blood rather than our own, though we made ourselves enemies to Him. This is what I will remember.

For me, Remembrance Day is grief; for lives lost on all sides, for humans in any uniform. This is what I will remember.