The Beginning and The End

I needed to get this out before I left AJS and got to a place where cyber access wasn´t as easy. Today we decidedon a day for us to return to the US. Now I have a date and a place that I´m going back to, and it is so bittersweet. This won´t be too long of a post, but it´s just to express that I´m now on a timeline for being here. It´s strange.

Perhaps it won´t bother me everyday. I´ll be able to focus on the coordinating position in Bastion Popular and I´ll able focus on Holy week ahead of me, being that us in sinai have such a big role in the parish there. I´ll be spending as much time as I can with the neighbors I´ve grown to know and love and continue being myself here in Ecuador. Yet, to be honest, I can feel it in the back of my mind already beginning to embed itself. I can hear the whispers saying, "You have this much time left and then it´ll be over." What type of undue pressure will I put on myself by doing this?

Yet it is a natural human tendency to do: we see the end and begin to allow it to happen to us. It creeps up like a wall that looks small from far away but grows as it gets closer. It´s a daunting thing to think about even with all of the support I know I will have when I go home. A year of my life that has challenged, formed, and made me into a better man and a stronger person is just going to end and I have to return to a life that I am no longer accustmed to.

but it isn´t going to be like that. i´m not giving up a new life for a new life or visa versa. I´m just living. I´m just becoming the person who God wants me to be and this is all part of the plan. It´s not a beginning or an end. It´s the beginning and the end. The Alpha and the Omega. God has known, knows, and will know where my next steps lie. I just have to put trust in that and be content with the fact that I am living in the cross of Christ, the One.