Maybe more thought out...

So I realize that the past few posts may have been a bit rushed. I was trying to cut my time down here at the cyber and live simply with my community. Today we are all here updating blogs and talking with friends, so I feel less fevered to finish. I´m gonna try and relate all that I´ve been feeling the past few days, so I´m not really sure how long this will go for. We´ll just see. I´m a better extemporaneous writer than planned out writer, so this should be pretty easy for me. Let´s just hope it´s easy to ready for you.

So the past few days have been a little difficult for me. I opened my photo album of pictures and saw all of my friends and Christine. I began to miss home a lot. Then, on top of that, I started to feel a little out of place among our community mates. It was weird. I felt like I was trying to make a great comment or trying to do something so people would know who I am and nobody was really paying attention. That´s all fine, though, after the fact. But during last week I was feeling a little bit out of place. It was hard going to Diana´s father´s wake because it reminded me of my mom´s, which exacerbated my feelings, and I sort of hit a low around monday or sunday? I´m not really sure, time has a funny way of slipping past you down here. Well, either way I hit a low.

And then I started journaling one afternoon at Arbolito. Why was I feeling like this? Was I really out of place down here or was I just feeling this way for no reason at all? Am I cut out for this stuff? And I struggled a bit relating to people up till that point. I don´t know what happened after that journal entry, but writing out my feelings helped me and so I got up and began talking with people. I felt a ton better about it and felt like I was becoming a part of the community again. We had prayer that night and the communtiy seemed to really come together. After we returned to AJS I finally had a huge realization.

What I was doing was being a little proud. I came down here with all of these thoughts about myself. I thought I was really awesome at relating to people, really awesome at music, really confident, and all this stuff. And I still believe that I am all of those things. I just express it differently than others, and on top of that, there are people who are a little better socially than I am. This doesn´t mean i´m awful at meeting people or relating to them, and it doesn´t mean that I am an awful person as I felt. I just have to be humble about it. I´m not the best thing to happen to Ecuador since sliced bread. I´m not going to come down here and make a huge difference. I´m not going to make best friends who I will always count on for the rest of my life.

What I realized was that I am valuable to Ecuador. I am going to make some difference, somewhere here. And I am going to build community using everybody´s best and worst parts, even mine. And I have to accept that people will have to get used to the way I am, and I have to get used to the way people are here. That´s what building community´s all about. We must be humble and decrease so others can increase. As John the Baptist said, ¨He must increase, I must decrease.¨In the same way, when we build community, we all must decrease, and Christ must increase so that we base our community around Christ and not our own desires.

Other than that, we had an earthquake today that was only minor. I wouldn´t worry about it too much because we just had a slight tremor. That was really cool to wake up to. I haven´t had any ghiardias or parasites yet, but I can´t wait to eat my neighbor´s food when they invite me to eat! I will update more as soon as I can. I wish all of you a happy week and a great weekend.