Retreat Group

I find it hard, as the days pass here, to find the time and space to write out my feelings and thought processes. For those of you who know me and what a journaler I am, you will appreciate the fact that I am on my fifth journal (thanks Dawnie for #5!) and the entries keep getting longer and longer as more and more of my life spills out into the open cracks of this country. I will try to relay a few of the larger incidents of the past week.

This past week I had my first retreat group and God was there. It was awsome to spend an entire week with Manhattan College, and I was surprised by the sadness that I felt when I had to take them to the airport to say goodbye. One night for dinner they asked everyone to think of one word that described where they were at in the week, and instantly the word REVIVED came to mind. The group was freshing, they reminded me of all the reasons I first came down here, and lent me the energy to be passionate again at the challenges that overtime had become more and more cloudy. They reawoke my passion for sharing reflections and more importantly, sharing deep thoughts about God and His role in our world and lives. They were truly a blessing to me and they reminded me of all the good people that exist in the world and who are fighting to make it better. They were a little slice of America to me, and they truly left an impact on me that they will likely never know.

One of the conversations that we had during our nightime reflection was a discussion about simplicity and what it means in our lives. I want to share one of the thoughts I had during the day as I prayed about what direction to take the group in.

As I thought about simplicty immediatley materialism came to mind and I imagined myself cleaning my closet at home. But one of the things that I have learned in being here is that everything external, or materialistic, is really only a symton of something much deeper within ourselves. Simplicity is the cleaning of our hearts, to make room for the things that really matter. It requires that we take inventory of whats in there, and take everything out that doesn´t align with our purpose or beliefs. Simplicty means making space for God to dwell in us, to clear out all the garbage that we believe and try to follow. The bible verse, ¨You cannot serve both God and money¨ came to mind while I was processing this, and for myself I decided that my greatest struggle is not with money, but with seeing myself as number one. I cannot serve both God and Colie, and perphaps that is where the most complexity has come for me in trying to have a lifestyle of simplicty. This means dumping out all of my desires, letting go of all control in my life, emptying out vain wishes and goals and consciously placing Christ in the center of my life. Simplicty is, above all things, a state of being, and the best place to start is in the heart.

With this mindset I have been trying to discern the will of God for my next step in life, how I can keep Him in the center of my life. Please pray for me as I move into the second half of the year. as I discern and pray about where He will call me to next. Being with the retreat group has opened up my heart to the possiblity of doing campus ministry, so I would ask that you would pray for me in that, to trust that God has a plan if that is where I am called.

Pray for the kids here, the hospital, the neighbors as we enter rainy season, and all the retreatants who are going home to live out all the things that they found here; namely love.

I pray that your days are finding you well, and that the spirit of love in dwelling rich within you.

Enjoy the snow for me, it is the one thing I have not found worthy of missing.

Death

As haunting as it may appear to seem, this has been the theme of my past few weeks. Not only in the physical sense, but also in the metaphyscial, the emotional self that I carry here, and the ideas that I hold tightly. Let me explain.

Christmas here was a wonderful time, we crammed into a small church to witness the birth of Jesus with families with babies brimming over the church pews in happiness and eagerness of the season. I felt full in a way I didn´t expect, since being so far away from family I thought it would be a tough day to pass, however the simplicity of it brought me into a new understanding of Christ´s coming into the world. It made me full. One word stung me more than others in the myriad of phrases that swing out and about around the holiday. Emmanuel. God is with us. That message was evident in the collectivity of the holiday, and stripped away from everything the season has come to represent in the states, it brought me back to the light I need to carry in my days here: God is with us.

After the 25th my community was given some precious time for traveling and I can say that I drank in the beauty of the Andes mountains and the exotic Amazon rain forest with a fevor I had long forgotten since back-packing through Chile and Peru. I will hopefully regale those tales of the mountainside another time, but for now I want to explore a more pertenant subject.

Upon returning from vacation to normal life, Andrew and I had a horrible awakening awaiting us at the hospital. one that blindsided us and scooted us right out of vacation mode and into the darker reality of Duran. Our first patient, the only one to see us through the entire first five months, unexpectedly passed away on Christmas Eve. We had not been notified of it earlier because we were on vacation, but returning to the hospital and finding her empty room shook both of us up. I had a gut moment where in the loss of her I started to question why we are here, what we are actually doing, and if in anyway we had done what we were called to with her. I tried to remember the last thing I said to her, probably have a great Christmas and we´ll see you when we get back. She was a joyous child, patient in suffering and always fighting through whatever her tiny body recieved in silence. Pray for her poor family, this is the 3rd child they have lost to TB.

Her death brought out a theme in my days that had I not been observant, I easily would have passed. Death had become one of the central symbols of being here for me, and by that I mean this year has been about dying to myself and my life in ways I didn´t know were possible. In leaving the states to set out for this adventure I had a fuzzy feeling that when I got down here I would grow and learn to love and be happy. Everything sounded easy, and sure a little painful, but surely I would get through without too many marks. I have had to let this realization go, or let the ambiguity and ignorance of it leave me. So far this year has been hard, because unlike what I thought of love before, a fluffy warm glow, it is a hard decision that you make every minute and it requires us to place others before ourselves constantly. My heart has ached here at feeling so powerless, at feelings of hopelessness inside myself when I recognize what little I give or offer these people. Most days it seems too much to put the needs of others before myself, I am much too concerned and focused on curing my own wounds.

God calls us to die to ourselves, to pick up our cross and follow him. I thought this would be easy when I got down here, once I had left my life behind in the states, but the hardest part of dying to ourselves exists within us, not on the exterior. Its been a struggle that I am slowly going through, with the end no where in sight. The more I try to let go of myself, who I am, my selfish desires, my need to see reults, the harder it gets to see where I am going, and the more self confidence I lose. Death ultimatley renders us powerless and empty, a most painful and undesirable experience, and yet we must chose it with our free will. God cannot do it for us.

I have seen hope come in the examples of others who have died to their ego and pride and weaknesses and allowed themselves to be perfectly flawed and human and wrapped in grace and love. I think we will all need to pass through our own deaths in order to really love people like we are called to do.

If you will pray, pray for the family of our patients in the hospital. pray for the women who suffer in ways unmentionable and unseen by society´s eyes, pray for the hearts of our kids, pray for the inner deaths of us all, so that we may hang them on the cross with Christ and live in the freedom of a love we are called to.

May each of you be able to experience a death in yourself that gives way to new life. The old is gone, the new has come. Let us rejoice.