Two weekends ago I experinced the thrill and jubliee of another reminder that I am not yet part of the real world. Retreat at the beach. Driving 2 hours over cuvry green landscape, into a purple orange sky, bopping along bumpy roads with snacks and music and friends, I was brought into the joy and freedom that sometimes I forget to be thankful for; what a rare gift this life is. What a rare gift Ecuador is.
We got to spend 3 full days enjoying a gorgeous beach house that the founders of our partner school own. This includes hammocks on the roof terrance, a winding staircase, spare rooms galore, huge kitchen space for cooking, outside grill, and of course a marvelous view of that huge ocean horizon. It was glorious, sparkled all by the magical presence of one of our orientation leaders, John Ropar, who flew in from Ohio. He guided our retreat experience and brought us to a better understanding of where we are at.
The reatreat was unique in that it came upon our fast approaching 6th month marker. Yes. We are now half way through this year, and the other half is still yet to come. So much reflection and thought is dedicated to this point in time, in reviewing where we have been to adjust where we are going. I had a lot of time to introspect and search out what the past 6 months have shaped me into and and how they have challanged my life; its a lot of ground to cover.
One of the biggest realizations I came to on this retreat is where I have placed God in this experience. I have put forth so much dedication into understanding where I am at in this cultural exchange, how I am struggling and failing, where I am seeing my world view fold and expand, that I have forgotten along the way the entire purpose of this year: to see the face of Christ. I have certainly looked for it, and more clearly than ever seen it, but I have somewhere along the way misaligned that mission with other things, other motives, other plans. As my excitement and nervousness about next year has started to climb into the possiblity of what next year will bring, I began to look at my end goal in this process, and there burried on the back shelf was the reason that I came down here in the first place; to seek God.
We did a reflection on community and what it means to live as a cohesive unit, exploring myths and detecting lies of the things that we come in thinking and assuming. Above all those lies and romanticized ideas of what community living is, I realized that I was viewing community as an end in itself. I kept waiting for us to be full together, for everything to click, for all of us to one day be on the same page and suddenly without problems and holes. And while some of that may be a part of why we choose to live in community, it is not the primary goal. We live in community as a means to find God. Through each other we come more and more to see different aspects of who He is, and we help each other to live out the call to love in all our brokeness. Our call to live with our brothers and sisters is not to reach some qualitative form of life, some functitioning being that is self-sustaining or all serving, but to live out the kinks and pains and sorrows of the world in order to move closer into the reality of God in everything.
Everything is a means to God.
That thought stung me like the angry bee that bit me in the bottom of my foot last summer in Santa Monica, with the initial realization being so overwhelming that I cried. This new idea flipped my perspetive a lot, and while I wish I could say that 2 weeks later everything is different and makes sense and is so clear, that isn´t the case at all. This stark realization only led to a deeper shade of gray in understanding how I am supposed to act and live out the call of love. But it pulled me into the process, into the tension that comes in our lives when we don´t quite know the way or how to get where we are going.
So here I am, still so unsure of what I am doing here and if I am doing anything right at all, struggling with my purpose and my mission along with all the others on some common level. And I´m seeing that its okay. That if I stretch to remember that God is in everything, and is the end that I seek in everything, it makes the whole world open up a little bit more, and it makes me see that there is meaning behind everything we do, even if we don´t see it or feel it.
On another note, the beach was so hot that I actually peeled. That never has happened to me. My skin fell off in all different kind of patches on my face, and you could see how white my skin underneath was in contrast with the brown it had turned into. Kids at the hospital kept asking what was wrong with me. They didn´t really get it.
But that´s okay. I don´t always either.
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