This is an interesting feeling.
I walked into the cyber late morning and checked my email. I read a few from someone I care about, one that engenders me to keep praying harder and harder. I looked on my facebook and saw pictures from an event I wish I could have been at...marking the second big thing in this person´s life I´ve missed out on by choice. I am missing a lot at home with shows and so many other things I could be doing there that it makes my eyes well up a little and my throat get tight.
Yet, I´m here, living with one paved road and people I don´t know. I have to pay for my internet usage and learn a new language. Every day I take a bus to a place that I am still learning to love, and when I come back home I´m too exhausted to think about all of these things. Now that I´m thinking about them it makes me wonder: How do I feel about what I´ve sacraficed? The sacrafice of comfort, the sacrafice of presence, the sacrafice of language, the sacrafice of all I´ve known for twenty-two years. And I´m here, writing on this blog about it, not knowing how to feel.
My heart breaks and soars when things bad and good happen among the one I hold dear and my friends. Today has been a rush of those emotions, and I can´t talk to anyone about it at the moment because I have trouble expressing myself in Spanish. No one around can talk to me either because I have trouble understanding it. It´s all some sort of emotional roller coaster because I´m apart from the only four other people around who can understand me.
Yet I need to be self sufficient and begin to start dealing with these things alone. I´m not going to be able to have people constantly around me all of my life, no matter how much I desire that. The reality of human life comes from the fact that we will all end up alone at some point in our lives, and I suppose at this moment, at this computer, I kind of feel like that. I miss being able to console my loved ones and cherish the joys that they feel on a daily basis. I miss giving them a call to hang out and shoot the breeze with me. And now I´m living with the choice I´ve made to go without that for the next year.
It´s been three months now and I think I´ve just begun to hit the point of this experience: through sacrafice comes discomfort. Through discomfort comes growth. Through growth comes destruction. Through destruction comes creation. I am constantly desmantled by God, and it looks like God´s doing it again. Slowly, but surely. And when I am desmantled, I hope to understand where God is taking me and what God is doing with me.
Beautifully written, Jeff.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I was chatting with an American friend also here in Mexico, and she said that she read somewhere that "homesickness" is a very real, scientifically proven stage that people go through. It usually sets in 3 months after you've left home. Sounds like it's your turn for that feeling. Stay strong! In the end, your year of volunteering will be worth a few momentary longings for home. Also, this feeling is surely just a little obstacle in your road. Once you "saltarlo," you'll find yourself even more resilient and independent than before.
Un abrazo,
Molly