Going Coconuts

I love coconuts. I always have. From the time I was a middle school girl meandering through Bath & Body Works stores armed with my allowance, I would always buy the coconutiest scent available, with vanilla or other fruity overtones.

My favorite salad growing up: ambrosia with coconut flakes. After playing in the sun all day, I go for my cocoa butter, lotion of choice. I recently needed some hair oil product, and bought the coconut kind. One Halloween, I dressed in Hawaiian garb, complete with a coconut bra (actually my mother dressed me, but she understood my affinity for these tropical treats even as a toddler.)

So it only seems logical that when choosing where to go in my life post- (formal) education, I would go to Thailand, the land where coconuts abound, with curries made from coconut milk, coconut trees growing wild (as opposed to our landscaped ones here in SoCal) and fresh coconuts cracked open with a straw at open air markets and sidewalk vendors.

If you like, or even love, something enough, you will first find that thing and then follow it back to wherever it grows most pure and wild—or at least that is what you do if you want to remain passionate and alive throughout your life.

So that is what I did, and for the next seven months, I will follow what I love to this country of palms bursting with the fruit of my heart.

Oh, that, and God walked me here.

OK, so coconuts really have been just an ironic twist in the grand symphony of my life thus far. In fact, they have nothing to do with it. Actually, God had everything to do with it.

I didn’t even think I wanted to go to Thailand. I wanted to travel in Australia. And then Africa. And then Europe, where I would meet someone and continue on with him through life. Maybe we would re-visit Asia after cinching lucrative careers with loads of vacation time and I could write some novel while hobnobbing with the natives.

Upon evaluation, God replied, ’Sweetheart, those are nice ideas, but your heart is meant for another path, little Christian’ (loosely paraphrased). And this is how He made my way…

My friend Lauren wanted to start an online magazine (this one, actually,) and she compiled a seminal team of two for her first journalism trip to Thailand, scheduled for just the same time I was to be in Australia. Having previously resolved to ‘write more’ in my graduated life, this trip aligned too well with my pursuits to go unnoticed. He stirred an uneasiness within me, and when finances made it too difficult to make for a meaningful time down under, I quickly switched plans and proceeded to Thailand for a month in February.

There I met Kay Fox: first at a refugee camp (just happenstance that both our groups visited here the same day), and again later that night (randomly) in Mae Sot, when our quest for vegetarian cuisine was disappointed and we had to settle for another restaurant, the same one Kay and her group had chosen not five minutes prior. So we dined with them, fell in love with them and promised to visit one another back on American soil. We parted and finished out our trip, and though I enjoyed Thailand, I felt no particular love for the land calling me back (though I did feel our romp through her did not do her justice, and we missed out on some key places.)

In May, my travel mate Sarah and I fulfilled our promise to pay our friends a sleepover visit. On the drive over to Visalia, I thought, God, if Kay invites me to go back with her and Don (her husband) to Thailand, I don’t think I could say no.

Why, you ask? Because this woman exuded love, and living alongside her for any amount of time surely has to contain transformational properties. We did not even get to dinner before our conversation turned to Sarah’s and my directionless lives in search of ourselves — and our displaced passion to love others in need. So Kay inquired of my talents, and amidst my feelings of uselessness she found that I can sew a bit and am willing to teach/speak English. Therefore she extended a volunteer position at Handclasp, the center where she and Don work (I say ‘therefore’ only because in God’s logic it makes absolute sense — why wouldn’t she ask me to come just at the peak of my existential funk — but to me it came as a quite pleasant surprise).

On our way home, I stopped by my coffee shop job and gave my two weeks notice. A week later, I emailed Kay to say ‘Yes, I will go.’ Ever since, a peace passing all understanding has kept me committed to this quest, and I still cannot wait to go.

I am really nervous. I do not like running errands by myself, let alone living in a village somewhere north of Chiang Mai with a barely familiar couple in their sixties, teaching a language I still struggle grasping most days. But somehow this makes it just ridiculous enough to be perfect, wild and pure.

Did I mention that the Karen people group compose the majority of those living in Museekee (the village)? Insignificant to the untrained eye, but this group relocated years ago from their native Burma due to ongoing persecution, and has quite a story to tell. I first read about them in Don Richardson’s book, Eternity In Their Hearts, and frankly it remains the only excerpt (amidst tons of miraculous accounts of redemption) that stuck with me after setting the paperback down. Something about the Karen really captivated my heart and cultivated a distant affection for them.

When I read this book a year ago, I resolved to learn more about the Karen. I didn’t, so they loitered in my memory bank, and somewhere in the left ventricle of my heart.

God brought them back to the surface upon our visit to their refugee camp — the very spot I first met Kay.

I do believe in irony, but not the naturalistic, unfeeling sort. No, I am into the kind that serves as a tool for Jesus to construct a life story glorifying the Godhead and the kind that made Sara laugh out a baby well into her nineties. The type that moves a girl to Thailand by way of foxes, restlessness, refugee camps and theology/missions authors, sprouting a growing speck of faith that continues to discover His love step-by-step.

I will spare you the rest of the pages detailing the majorly minor details of this year’s falling ever-the-more in love with my God, but do know that this is just the head of a very dark and tasty pitcher of beer poured straight from the tap Himself: the Holy Spirit.

It gives me a good buzz to think of just how fast He makes my heart pump.

Plus coconuts, when clomped together, sound like hoof beats…

Betsi Clark is serving as a missionary in northern Thailand for the next six months. You can keep with her adventures on her blog Going Somewhere.