"Courage, dear heart" Aslan to Lucy.
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
It’s been a good 3/4 of a year since returning from Argentina. My, how this life does fly. It feels so good, so right, to be leaving the States again. I’m almost trying to prepare myself for similar circumstances as South America, and have to remember it’s Central. I apologize in advance for this scatter-brained mental processing that is to follow, and hope you can follow along.
Tomorrow, I leave for a week to Huehuetenango, Guatemala with Pepperdine’s Project Serve. Just the chance to leave the country again gets my feet tingling. God has provided so much and really I’ve been able to be a witness financially. Without Him, I would never have raised $950 in two months. Even the utmost generosity of people has been such a testimony to the adage “ask and ye shall receive.”
This coming week presents a wonderful opportunity: we are staying at an orphanage for the week, doing VBS and minor construction. And loving on the kids. Some of us on the (wonderful) team have pen pals who we exchange letters with as often as possible. My friend is named Bryan, 6 years old. I’ll be able to meet him in merely less than 48 hours, and my heart races just to think of the meeting we’ll have.
But my heart is also so fickle in this life. One moment I find myself excitedly awaiting the week, and the next I realize that things will not necessarily go exactly as planned. While we may not know what that looks like right now, I know God’s going to do something different. Wonderful, exciting, refreshing, and mostly different from how I’ve experienced Him before. And because of that, my expectations are slowly crumbling. I have to laugh at myself a few weeks ago: anticipating the week having known so many friends who have traveled there before, having a few friends living there now, and experiencing Adulam in Argentina, I thought it was down pat. That I could mentally package up this experience and put it into the Latin American box in my mind, potentially move there after college and be content to serve in that capacity for however many years. But after having coffee with such a beautiful, encouraging and courageous soul today and talking about being unprepared and sweetly broken upon entering a mission trip, I find comfort in the fact that it will never look the same. It’s reassuring to know that God will continue bringing freshness and renewal to His children, and never wants His love to be pre-packaged, laminated, programmed, and manufactured. He specifically loves relationship, and will always be teaching us that His love, His grace, is enough. And he desires for that love to be shared genuinely, through relationship. Which is hard. It requires constant self-denial. It requires the willingness to be flexible and have a listening year, and the gut to stick to your guns to be accountable for someone. It takes a lot of things we like to ignore, or try to mass-produce. Either one is ineffective.
Romans 12:2 says “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Relationship is a continual transformation. In order to better know our loving creator. And if we think we’ve got it pre-packaged and down pat, we’ve got it wrong. The point is we can’t—the point is grace.
So whoever you are who has read this far, God bless you and your patient reading skills. I’ll just ask that you would pray for real vulnerability and honesty would arise out of this trip—honesty with the group, with oneself, and most importantly with God—and that this would truly mark a transformational experience for all people involved.
May today be the first day of the rest of your life.
