Sitting at the Newark airport enjoying a glass of wine and warm olives, welcoming the New Year a bit early, as I wait for the next leg of my journey that will take me to Kolkata again for the next 4 months. I wait with hope and anticipation of what this next season will bring. I hope to be a bridge and activator for what’s next, a link to what was and what is becoming in 2019.

The last year has been so layered and complex. Still I will try and name a few of the steps that marked the way. I marked 2 years living full time back in the USA in May and what I think is the beginning of a new normal. I have continued to take steps to help Sari Bari “become” without me…to stand on it own feet with the responsibilities that come with a nearly 13 years of freedom and opportunity. I made several visits to India including one emergency visit and traveled to trade shows and the IJM Liberate event to build the brand (you will now finds us in more than 60 small boutiques around the country). My favorite was the work we did to re-brand Sari Bari and make it new once again, bring a fresh modern bohemian look to help us reach a larger market and tell the story of freedom in new places!

2018 was very much about the growing pains and struggles of the old becoming new. This has always been the theme of Sari Bari and it runs through everything. Always. There have been the sorrows of deaths and pruning that makes the soil rich and the plants ready for growth again. This is theme that I feel I have lived over and over and over again. Life. Death. Life. Death. Life. I remind myself that it is like the seasons, there is a season for new life and there is a season for death and both are essential. Still I find myself shocked by the deaths and surprised by the new life that comes afterwards.

This year Sari Bari lost a founding staff member, Upendra and Kyle Scott moved on in November (Sari Bari USA first and only Executive Director). We also lost a beloved sister who took her own life and husbands and friends along the way. We lost women who went back to the sex trade. It was a hard year of losses.

We lost the amazing Laure and Danelle who have done fulfillment for Sari Bari for the last 4 plus years so we could make a move to Fort Wayne. We lost our wholesale coordinator, Alison. The losses felt hard and they also felt like they were creating space for something new. We were being pruned in 2018 so we could grow again.

So in 2018, I have given myself in service of the change, in service of the losses, in service of the empty spaces. I spent the summer building out SBUSA with new staff and literally building out the new Sari Bari USA office in Fort Wayne which now features our first ever storefront retail space. I have been cleaner, painter and stylist. I was Human Resources as I interviewed numerous candidates for project manager and Executive Director and in partnership with the SBUSA board hired both; along with new fulfillment and marketing staff. I traveled to India in June on demand to be there Tuesday (it was Friday) and acted as an anchor in a season of chaos and loss. And I spent the last 6 weeks in Kolkata still acting as that bridge to whatever is next including a new partnership with Polished Pearl, developing wedding veil manufacture. I feel like 2018 has been a year of filling the empty spaces and stepping in where ever needed a hand. I am thankful I could and I am thankful that behind me comes a team to step into those spaces in 2019!

This past summer the Sari Bari team in India began a new journey with the next generation really taking leadership. The team in India is finding its feet with not single leader over 30 and the SBUSA team has welcomed a Executive director, new fulfillment, sales and marketing staff. We are once again becoming new and there is fresh vision and energy pressing us into 2019.

As I prepare for 2019, I have named my year “making room”. Instead of stepping into spaces, I hope to step out, and make room for the next generation, the new leaders who will do it different and maybe even better (I sure do hope they do!!). “Making room” extends beyond the professional to the personal , though i am not exactly sure what it will mean, I will wait for it, look for it and live as one who creates spaces instead of one who fills them. I hope to “make room” to finish “the book” and “be” and “create” and take a hot second to dream big dreams again. I hope to make room even as I prepare to be bridge in India for the next 4 months—it’s a “both/and all” the way.

I am thankful that God is the god who “makes room” for us and makes room for the those who have no room at the inn. I am thankful that we continue to see lives being made new at Sari Bari and I look forward to seeing 40 more women find freedom this year through Sari Bari. If you made it this far in the email, thank you for making room for me! Send me an email (sarah@saribari.com) or a What’s App (574-306-6829) and may your 2019 be full of the space and graciousness of the God who see’s you!

For Freedom,

Sarah

My belly is full of love. Love made up of rice and chicken and abundant genorosity. We sat around in a circle, everyone sharing what they have brought…I am invited into this circle of hospitality…today and many days past. It is a perfect communion, bread broken and given, shared around everyone pressing the others to take more.  

A light breeze is blowing ticking the heavy handstitched curtains and bringing a little refreshment for those sleeping off the rice coma after lunch. This is sacred space. This is our Sari Bari, we work and then we rest side by side until we must rise to work again.

These women taught me everything there is to know about generosity and grace. They embody it without even maybe knowing how profoundly their lives and the way they love with them have changed my own.

Many years ago, I read Isaiah 58 and clung for life to the “if…then” promises it holds. If you pour yourselves out for the hungry, satisfy the needs of the oppressed…then…then you will be like a well watered garden…the your light will rise and the night will become like noonday. If…then.

If you set the prisoner we free, if you feed the hungry…then…

“If…then” is very common in the Bengali language. Bengali is fraught with relative-correlatives. A thing of frustration for a straight talking girl like me. And yet the poetry and song of the language is because of the “if…then.” I don’t know it’s origins. I wonder if there is some foundation in karma. “If…then.”

Still it’s not unfamiliar to find these “if…then” statements in scripture. If you give water..then you will never be thirsty. If you give all you have to the poor…then. If you welcome the stranger….then. If you pour yourself out…then…you will receive 100 fold.

All these “if’s” are an invitation to the grace that comes with the “then.” The receiving of the most abundant grace. It’s easy to count the cost of the “if’s” and impossible to count the gifts that come with the “then.”

I made few tiny steps towards the “if’s” many years ago, hoping and believing in the “then….” Undoubtedly, a stumbling forward toward those impossible “then’s.”

And today here I sit amongst these women, these generous givers of good food and abundant grace. If your pour your self out for the oppressed,  then….you will be like a well watered garden. Belly and heart full today, I feel like a well watered garden. Just a little taste of “then” from seeking to pursue that impossible “if” such a long long time ago.

To the glorious then…

In this shiny fragile messy place…
I am most at home. I got off the plane in Kolkata and felt the most at home I have felt in 5 months. I got to sleep in my own bed and receive the generous and hospitality of my sisters and community in Kolkata. There is just no place like it the entire world. It is as many have commented, a place of peace in one of the of the most chaotic and difficult places is the world. The Sari Bari community is not perfect, it is fact very messy. As my friend and colleague Sera said it is very messy and very beautiful at once. The transition for the Sari Bari community has been difficult and boundlessly fruitful, for those who continue the work in Kolkata and for me as I step into something new on the USA side.
I returned to Kolkata mostly emotionally unprepared.  
I had a to do list but had not really sorted any feelings. 
What I felt when emerged from the plane was peace and an emotional capacity for both withholding when needed and giving abundantly when needed. This place was and is my home but I’m also trying to make home in am new place. The new place is not home yet and my brain, my body and my souls remember better life in Kolkata than it does life in the USA. I am very messy right now, at home in too many places, and not home yet.
Before I arrived in Kolkata, I had simply set the intention of deferring to the leadership team and creating listening spaces without actually solving any problems. This proved very challenging at times. There were problems I wanted to solve and peace I wanted to bring and it is no longer my role, I had to leave to those whose role it had become. I have a new role and different responsibilities that hopefully will continue to bring about growth and transformation in a different way. My role is to empower and support those on the ground as they make the hard messy decisions of daily life. And to tell the stories and sell the products so the work can continue to grow. So that freedom may continue to abound.
I got my to-do list done, the spring styles were completed and some higher level company management issues were sorted out along with a strategic plan, where we began to dream again for the impossible to become possible, to dream again for a reality that we may never see. Something that feels more true to me now since I have departed Kolkata. I may never see it, I may not be the one to implement it. I am stilll just a sewer of seeds as I always was…the ongoing harvest lies in the hands of others, others who can take Sari Bari to a place I could maybe never take it. And I feel peace about that too. I am just a jar of clay after all, only a vessel that holds the goodness of God.
I have been thinking a lot of Jars of clay in the last couple months. Not the band, but the actual pots, the little clay cups that hold tea and then are tossed to the ground to once again become the dust they were formed out of…its a bit humbling to be likened to that clay cup and profound to consider that this is where God puts the treasure. The freeing gift of being a jar of clay is that it was and is never about me in my fragile disposable state, it is that God considers it a worthy place to work and pour in life, our posture is to receive the gift and then pour it out again in never ending cycles.
I am currently in Omaha, NE getting ready a very full week with Creighton University as they host the Opus Prize event. As you may know I am one of three finalists for the award. I am honored and was a little embarrassed until I got my mind and heart around the fact that I’m just a jar of clay– it was never about me, was always about what God does inspite and in me and my fragile fierce occasionally submitted self. I am nominated with two amazing people, an Aussie nun who has given 30 years of her life to vulnerable people and a Priest who has dedicated his life to providing education and opportunity to refugees. What God has worked in and through these two has changed the world and it changes me and inspires me just to hear about them. Jars of clay all.
Still shiny fragile and messy all at once in my jar of clay. Thankful to have had time Kolkata and thankful to be here now. And thankful for for all the shiny fragile messy people who I have had the gift journey with along the way.  

I find myself within warm and welcoming walls of my parents house this Christmas season, looking forward to the family of my blood gathering around the table to remember, laugh and celebrate. I guess I’ll be home for Christmas in more than my dreams this year. Home is what we all long for isn’t it? Someone or somewhere to be home, to welcome us home, to embrace us as home, as much as we embrace them as home.

You are home. These are the words that we all long to hear. YOU ARE HOME. We long to call out, I AM HOME. We may find our home in a place and among a people who are not actually our blood. They may be chosen family, they may be kind strangers and people of peace who remind us of home. It seems that so many are simply seeking a place to call “home” for today, for a night so they can rest before they continue the journey.

Having lived in all sorts of places and among all sorts of people, I have learned that “home” truly is less about a place and more about a people.   My family is all over the world, certainly in Kolkata, India, in small little North Webster, Indiana and you will also find them in London, Kathmandu and Bangkok, and in the USA in Pasadena, Portland, Omaha, Kokomo, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Jacksonville, Florida. In these places there are people who welcome me in, people who inspire “peace”, people who make space for me when it seems there is no other place to go, people who tenderly embraces my scary parts and celebrate my awesome parts. What a privilege to be home among so many people, who teach me and point me to the truth that “home” that can also be found beyond people or place.

The thing that always moves me deeply about the nature of God is that God sought to make a home among us. Emmanuel, God with us. God came and dwelt among us so we would know what to look for when we are seeking a “home”. Home is where you find welcome, LOVE, patience, kindness, forgiveness; home is where you find HOPE. Who better to show us than a homeless and refugee family, who better to teach us about home and how it moves with us….home is where your people are, “home” is where you find Emmanuel.

My prayer is that we would all find ourselves at “home” this Christmas. Though I know many in the world will find themselves knocking on doors that will not open and asking for rest where they will not find it. I pray that we will be a people who open doors and welcome the stranger. I hold on to the HOPE of Emmanuel and a God who made home amongst us and dwells amongst us still. As we approach Christmas let us pray for peace, remembering the proclamation of the angels calling for “peace on earth”, a blessing for this larger home we co-habit-ate.

 

I am always in awe of the moments that criss cross my days.

Waiting for a taxi in front of the red light area, I smiled a woman standing nearby who was waiting for a customer to come along.  She smiled back and we chatted a bit. I asked her where she lived and she told me she lives on the same lane as Sari Bari.  I asked if she knew about the business and if she would every be interested in working with us. She said she had thought about it. (yes!) She asked if we only hire women from the line (sex trade), the bad women, or if we hired good women (women from outside the area) too. I responded that we hire women from the area who want freedom from the trade or who live in the area who might be vulnerable.  A few moments later two more women came over (who also live on the same lane as Sari Bari).  They began to grill me about a job and what the salary was and what training was like etc.  They kept repeating over and over that Sari Bari only hires “bad women”…they saw this as a good thing, a place just for women like them.  So eventually I interrupted them to say that we don’t consider any women “bad” or “ruined”, we hire women from the area who are seeking something different for themselves. I said in fact, at Sari Bari, we think all woman are “valuable” and created by God. They got that, smiled and agreed with me. (Win!)  Maybe they will show up for an interview, maybe not.  But I am thankful that a smile always opens the door and that I had the privilege to say to these beautiful women in a very subtle way that they are “beloved”. I hope it sunk in and that they remember that their lives are valuable regardless of the circumstances in which they find themselves.  Fingers crossed they find their way to our door and not only experience a glimpse of their identity as women but a full blown reality of being the Beloved!

I had to go to court today.  I was summoned as a witness for the prosecution of a man who sexually assaulted my friend.  Two years later the court was finally convened to prosecute the offender and maybe bring justice to the victimized.  The friend victimized is no longer even here.  But better late than never right?

The Kolkata court buildings are a mess.  I could not help but metaphorize my walk along the broken path, littered with trash, filled with seemingly aimless people standing in groups.    After asking no less than 5 people how to find the actual courtroom, weaving through filth, a trash filled stairwell and an even more trash and refuse filled area I found the courtroom.  This was the path to justice, treacherous and messy and unlikely to result in much of any actual justice.

The courtroom was quiet at first,  I had arrived at 10am as required but of course the judge, the lawyers and the police had not, so I thought maybe I’ll write a blog about that broken path into the halls of Kolkata’s center of justice, the iconic and rigorously bureaucratic system of law left by the British. An almost laughable, if not so heartbreaking, reminder of colonization and of the educated wealthy India, in many ways, taking on the mantle of oppressors from their former British ones.  The court paper work is in English, not Hindi or Bengali, somehow the language of the oppressor remains.  The system of law was inherited from the oppressor.  A system of law that lacks innovation and actual justice instead settling for a painfully slow something that is  even less than the the lowest status quo.  There are no computers, files are stacked to the ceilings, messy, apparently disorganized, though much cleaner than the hallways to be sure.  Undoubtedly the courts suffer from a lack of financial resources and a state government that is complicit in Injustice and even a perpetrator of it.  I am sitting here thinking how is justice even logistically possible here?   Two years later I am being called as witness and being advised by the prosecutor to lie.  I did not.

Then returns me to my own despair of the last few weeks as I see Kolkata again without the dark glasses of compassion fatigue after a break in May.  And I look for justice in my own heart and I find it just as messy, ineffective and paralyzed.

“Do justice love mercy and walk humbly with God” has been tattooed on my ankle for almost 20 years and yet doing justice is still so difficult to live, to embody.  My job is about justice, my whole life dedicated to seeing justice embodied in mercy for women, and yet I still struggle to reconcile my daily encounters with injustice.  I am talking about day laborers working for barely enough money feed their families, I am talking about children begging, I am talking about the people sleeping outside my home on the street, the drug users who run up and grab my trash so they can see if there is anything worth recycling for money in it, and the fresh faces arriving daily in the lanes of Sonagacchi.  I am talking about economic injustice, racial injustice, gender injustice, the injustice that people both passively and actively participate in toward one another.     I am talking about the wretchedness of my own heart.  I am complicit.   There is no us and them, there is only we.  There is only in what way am I complicit: with my silence, my messy paralyzed ineptitude at responding, at reaching out, speaking out to make difference.

Like I said I have a job seeking  Justice, and I tell myself the lie that it is enough.  I am like one of those lawyers I met today participating in system that seeks Justice but so rarely finds it within and rarely seeks it outside those walls. The injustice in my own heart broke me today, reminded once again as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said, “that I cannot be free until all men and women are free.”  So I begin again with God to seek out the injustice within my own heart as I press into seeking freedom and Justice around me as I walk this broken path, through this mess of broken heaving beautiful humanity .

Until we are all free.  May Justice reign down from the heavens as strong as a Kolkata monsoon thunderstorm.

There you go again, taking your leave,

Dreaming your big dreams for your big life

It’s good to dream, to live your dream, we wish you well

 

On the front end of yet another significant goodbye

Where I must be kind and patient, even when my heart is screaming NO

As I walk yet another one through the process of leaving,

Allowing them their feelings, affirming their need to know that time spent

Mattered here, it did, it does

Trying to hide my heart, my own hurt (though not very well)

 

So very hard to be left, and I think it must be hard to leave

This time here, a smallish but transformative mark on a personal history

 

I would rather be beaten with a stick then endure another goodbye

Especially this goodbye so close to the other leavers

This one is different, more intimate more painful than the others

You the gatekeeper of the hearts, abandoning your post

You said God leads you elsewhere

The sobbing one beside me say’s “I think God made a mistake.”

Did you God?

 

Probably you feel both bruised and blemished by this place

By these stories so dark they can drown the soul

And yet you must be indelibly marked with love from this sea of women

So deep and broad that you could swim in it

You take it with you when you when you go

 

You lost something

You gave something

We gave something

We lost something

 

The reciprocity of the leavers and the left

Someday I may too be a leaver but for now I am left, we are left

Another piece of the solidarity story that I want to give the finger

 

To watch her cry today, to watch her shake with pain, barely able to breath

I think, God take this cup and make it stop

I can’t watch this again, I must endure again

Like letting someone throw acid on my soul

 

You leavers, we will hear your names for years to come

Sought after, these women who know loss more intimately than most

Wonder where you are, what you are doing

If you are married yet

Why you don’t call

You made a mark, which fades eventually

The shadowed scar still present on the few who held you dearest

These beloved eternally hope for your return

 

I am not a fan of the leaving because I am the left behind

Among those left behind who may never have the luxury of leaving

Leave well or don’t, it hurts either way

Staying hurts.

 

It is at once hard to not run away myself and to not make the promise to stay forever

Or believe that I could never leave, be the cause of this much pain

I lament for the leavers and all that you miss because you are gone

And I lament for the left because of all that we lost with your departure

The memory of the left behind is long,  still we pick up and move on

With an ache in our heart where you were…

Where you are still

And will remain.