very worst

Bong Andy showed me a blog a couple of weeks ago; Jamie The Very Worst Missionary. I gotta admit, Jamie is hilarious. The reason the blog makes me smile is that I can see some very worst close to home.

Don't get me wrong... some days I'm awesome. Like a couple of days ago... I was gunning through the 'slum' on my moto in order to teach English and share the message of Jesus in comfortable fluency of the students' own native tongue. The road was sketchy as... I'm talking true 'training for a career in motor cross when I'm done with being a missionary' rated. I dodged small, nimble, semi-naked children. I navigated craters I swear were caused by meteorites colliding with the earth seconds before I hit the path. In all this legendary, pioneering service I even managed to remember to wear a sports bra.... So yeah, some days I'm pretty awesome.

But even in my awesomeness, I am prone to say and do inappropriate things. Like a couple of nights ago when I said to the new missionary guy in town, "omg- you're such a girl!" (which I really didn't mean because he's totally hetro and very manly... except when it comes to his passion for shopping...). Then there's the time I accidentally called one of our male staff "baby". Oops. There may have been times when I've been on holidays and returned to the guesthouse riding the borrowed bicycle with a little less dexterity and a little more laughter than when I set out... or nights when I maybe shouldn't have replied to that Cambodian boys' 2:30am text.

I had a moment this morning. There was a six-year-old boy at the gate about to go through the rubbish. This is normal. But he arrived about twenty seconds after I'd just put back the garbage that the other young boys had strewn over the front of my house while looking for stuff to recycle. I admit there wasn't compassion, mercy, generosity welling up within me. I called out, "Oi! You can open the garbage bag but don't chuck the rubbish everywhere so it's messy.. got it?" The kid just stared at me with big, dark, helpless eyes....making me feel so bad I literally ran inside to see if we had anything to recycle still left in the kitchen. I found one Coke can. I jogged back to the boy while he was scrounging through the banana peels and chicken bones and put the can directly in his scrap-collecting bag. He stared again. I felt like the biggest seven o'clock in the morning biatch ever.

So, yeah... pray for the missionaries. The best and the worst ones.