Friday, August 17, 2007

September 2, 2006

September 2, 2006
I need to be honest, I did not want to come home and in fact, I almost did not, at least for now. I just was not ready to return. Time slipped away from me, and three and a half months was just not enough time to soak everything in. There was still so much that I wanted to learn, that I did not have the opportunity to do. Leaving Guatemala, was forcible, everything in me needed and longed to stay, I had to talk to myself all day and consciously walk myself through the airport and on to the plane when everything in me yearned to just turn around and walk right out. To find a bus and go back; one of the hardest things that I have ever had to do, and now there is a complete void in my heart.

Among many things that I loved about my host culture, three in particular stood out to me: the lifestyle, the relationship and family. The lifestyle is beautiful, it is something that I will continue to hold very dear in my heart as I am allowed to ‘just be,’ and everything that it entails. My lifestyle and priorities have been radically challenged and flipped upside down with the idea of leaving my agenda, that had my whole day planned to the ‘T,’ and to leave it to ‘just be.’ Yet through this remarkable challenge, I have come to prioritize my life, around what is truly important in life and that is right relationship with people and God and not just a checklist of meaningless stuff. Through this transformation and the shedding of years of toil to put my life in ‘right’ order, the Guatemalan value for relationship with both God and family has grabbed hold of me.

Yet, there are many aspects of my host culture that I continue to understand and struggle with seeing as true, good and beautiful. The Church continues to weigh upon my heart; I am still processing many questions that surround my struggle with the Latin American Church. It is a conscious battle for me, one that I feel like I need someone just to sit with me, listen and bounce different ideas back and forth with me, as I sort out the mess of ideas within my head that need mere straightening up. I have made a conscious decision to go seek help in the Counseling Center here at school where I can talk without end and sort out the mess inside my head. Yet, within my struggle with legalism in the church, is also the idea of gossip both in the church and in small communities such as Machaquilá. The pure idea of ceaselessly talking about one another behind their backs eludes me as I still do not see beauty in such a way that this act is glorifying to God or their tightly knit forms of community. I only see it as the Devil out to destroy.

There have however, been things that I do miss about home. But the fact that this takes me awhile to come up with them, shows that these are not really things that I consciously think about. Three of the things that I have missed the most are a hot shower, to converse in depth lengths in English, not to mention praising God through worship in English and in the American Church. A hot shower is self-explanatory, but just like the rest of these ideas, I have learned to deal without. To be able to speak with someone in English and to not have to constantly be challenged for how to rephrase my question or answer to fit into words and phrases that I do know. To be able to sit and talk, without having to always be thinking, would be amazing. However, most of all, being in the American Christian church is one thing that I have greatly missed. I want to shout and scream at the top of my lungs, to go and praise God through dance and song and in other ways of just ‘being’ with God, to be able to do that freely in the Church setting would be absolutely amazing and something I have been dreaming about.

However, within the ideas of what I have missed the least about home culture are an assortment of topics and themes. I know myself, and the fast-paced American lifestyle has always had a tight grip on my life, I often have been known to get addicted to the very idea of stress in my life. I add things on until there is not looking back, there could be some very deep ideas and problems lying in these statements, but I will get to unpacking them later. This is why that as apparently I was supposed to return, I feel God telling me to quite my job, withdraw out of every form of leadership on Campus and ‘just be,’ for one semester. ‘Be’ in the presence of God and ‘be’ with people, with friends and family and rekindle what right relationship should look like. I feel called to just be silent, to sit and listen, something of which, within my whole life I have never taken the time out to do. However, this time I will listen, before God takes all of my ‘extracurricular’ busyness away from me. However, when I thought about going home, nothing inside me gave me the urge to do so. All I could think about was how I was not going to be okay when I returned, I pictured myself clinging to items from Guatemala and sleeping with them and holding them tightly throughout the day. No matter how hard I tried to change this viewpoint, the thought of me being there, only reminded me that I was not going to be here.

All in all, as I look back at all that has been done and said, the transformation that has been brought upon in my life. I see someone different in the mirror. I see someone who has been stripped away of the pure selfishness that had once engulfed me. My hardened heart has been ripped to shreds and somehow God has graced me with the ability to again empathize and to feel. I have encountered so much struggle, hurt and injustice that I had become immune and numb to how they should affect me. I have built relationship both with God and man a priority in my life. I will no longer let myself constantly drown out ‘real life’ if you will. It is a new season, and I will have to accept going home only to continue being ‘pruned’ by God, in hopes of returning ‘home’ soon.

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