Finding the God in your Tragedy

I was lost. But there were these clues creeping in, about fate and destiny.

He first showed up in a dream - one of those dreams that happens when you’re both sleeping and awake, between mundane daily life and that wider place, where you’re woven into the astral and joined with other people, who seem to randomly appear, for reasons you don’t understand.

But when I saw him in that awake-and-dreaming state, I did understand … I was having a premonition.

I watched the light bounce off his wide cheeks, and his head tilt from side-to-side. His coffee-colored face was adorned with a gigantic, white-toothed smile.

He played a drum, calling me … towards a possible future. A knowing filled me.

I was being sent a cosmic invitation to a foreign land that I knew nothing about, to the continent from which scientists say all humanity evolved. A home, of unfamiliar sorts.

A couple years later, my real life caught up with that dreamlike state when I found myself sitting next to him at a dinner table in the village of Mosesetjane in Limpopo, South Africa. As per the local custom, I was using my bare hands to push porridge around my plate, soaking up chicken broth, chatting up this brother from the indigenous family who was hosting me during my Peace Corps service.

And although I’d already seen this glimmer of the future, I didn’t know how life would organize around it.

I didn’t know that 14 months later, I would get diagnosed with adult-onset asthma after a scary encounter with a man on the street and be forced to end my Peace Corps contract early.

I didn’t know, that on the day I would tell the 70 kids that I’d been mentoring that I was leaving, they’d say the words, “We lost him… Awelani.”

He was the 8-year-old boy and youngest member of our youth group, whose birth name translated to English as “rest in peace.” As if his mother already knew…

Premonitions are not always pleasant- or wanted.

And although I’d seen parts of my future, I couldn’t predict that I’d end up heartbroken and suffering from a chronic health condition, when only a year prior, I believed that my aspirations were all coming to fruition.

The belief that my destiny was unraveling was fueled by nights like that one, in September 2013, when I sat up awake in my hotel room, channeling feelings into prayers as I journaled these words:

“Dear Universe, I’m ready for my new teachers. They will teach me about the connection between the mind and body and how to work cross-culturally for the healing and empowerment of communities. They will help me with my own evolution. I will know it when it when I meet them.”

The next morning, I sat in a conference hall and David Patient, a man I’d never seen before, noticed the book I was reading and said, “Hey, I know that author…”

Then, he walked to the front of the room, before a group of 48 Peace Corps trainees, and said, “AIDS has been my greatest teacher.”

I knew it then. The divine had answered my prayer from the night before. Hours later, David and his partner, a mind-body scientist, were inviting me into their leadership program.

Without question, I believed the stars were aligning to carve me into a helper, on a planet that seemed so disconnected from its loving source, and from the intelligence planted inside the earth, everywhere in nature, and in our own bodies.

Although I’d seen a sliver of my future in premonitions, I couldn’t see how the rest of life would organize around it. I suppose even destiny and fate must contain unknowns.

Because if we knew all the details of what was to come, we’d interfere. We’d try to rush it or control it, avoid it, or prevent it.

Like the sickness that becomes a “greatest teacher.”

Because several months into the leadership training, I had that scary encounter with a man on the street. And then I couldn’t breathe. For days and nights on end. The doctors said it was a chronic, even lifelong condition.

David encouraged me to go back to the U.S. to get well. “Amanda, the first rule of empowerment is to love yourself. You can’t help anyone if you’re suffering.”

I trusted my mentor. After all, before I was even born, 30 years prior to our conversation, he was told by doctors and world medical experts that he’d die in 6 months … that nothing could save him. He proved them wrong … so if anyone had appropriate advice for me, it was him.

But “loving myself” meant leaving behind the 70 kids that I’d grown attached to. And how ironic it was. Because a few years before I joined the Peace Corps, I was working in the mainstream healthcare industry in Chicago, and I’d drive passed these schools on my way to work in the morning, and I’d hear all these screaming kids outside, and I’d say,

“You couldn’t pay me enough to work there.”

A few years later I applied to the Peace Corps and was quickly accepted to work in the health sector. But just before my departure, I received a letter in the mail stating that they didn’t need health volunteers. Instead, they wanted education volunteers.

They told me that I’d either accept a position working at a primary school with kids ages 9-11, or I wouldn’t receive another invitation to serve.

I ended up accepting an offer to work a job “you couldn’t pay me enough to do,” and I accepted it as an unpaid volunteer.

They say, “we plan and God laughs.” This laughter must have shaken the Earth.

But it was in the innocent eyes and the loud enthusiasm of those children that I rediscovered myself, my own inner child, that had been left behind in a corner, holding the pain of my past and not having the tools to heal from it…

And wow, I felt so found, so focused, so sure of my path, so blessed by spirit, and then…

In one split second of having my boundaries crossed by a man on the street, my body flared up with a mis-diagnosed trauma response that sent me back to the United States, with my tail between my legs.

I was embarrassed, and ashamed, and most of all I felt like I was abandoning 70 kids that I’d made promises to…

How could this be the way it ended?

A story that began in a glorious premonition, the miracle of calling in my new mentors, the unexpected, ensouling adventure of teaching kids from the Venda tribe in Africa… how could it all plummet into a debilitating sickness?

Where was God in this tragic downfall?

Over the next year, life beat the shit out of me.

I’d be struck with sudden heartbreak when the man I’d spent years pining for proposed to another woman.

I’d relive childhood trauma that I’d buried deep in my closet, hoping to never confront.

I’d be emotionally wronged by a narcissistic “spiritual leader” with whom I was having an intimate relationship.

And I’d try to cope with it all while struggling with my misdiagnosis of “adult-onset asthma.”

I kept remembering David’s words, “AIDS has been my greatest teacher.”

Then it dawned on me.

The experience that I’d asked God for the most was, “lead me to the people, places, and situations that are best for my evolution.”

Evolution shakes up our lives, takes the good and the bad, and stirs them together, like porridge and broth, until we can’t tell them apart.

It is with our bare hands that we lift this sustenance to our mouths and choose to taste, and break it down, and digest what life is serving us.

An evolution of sorts.

Some may feel it as a sickness, or a break-up, or through the challenges of parenthood, or simply as a feeling of lost-ness.

We are recognizing that the person we have been up until now is not the person we’re becoming.

Just like me, who you “couldn’t pay enough” to spend time with “screaming kids…”

Instead, I was reclaimed, on the deepest levels of my soul, by an experience that I would have avoided, at all costs, if the Universe didn’t push me into it.

And just like David who was told, “get your affairs in order, you’ll be dead in 6 months,” lived another 34 years and became an award winning United Nations consultant in the process.

And just like you, who feels so lost right now because the past no longer fits who you are. And you’re viewing yourself and all of life through a completely new lens, but the answers and premonitions about your future haven’t revealed themselves yet.

All of my heartaches and sicknesses and letdowns and plans gone awry, every single one of them, were lessons in authenticity.

Showing me where I was living life by other people’s expectations, or for the approval of the outside world, or where I was repressing emotions and trauma that needed to be dealt with so I could finally live less from fear and more from desire and intentionality.

May you be open to finding the God in the tragedy of your own life.

May you be open to your challenge becoming your greatest teacher.

I’m always here for support.

With love, from Guatemala.

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