At a loss for profoundness

The funny thing about coming home after being away on a 10 month adventure is you feel a lot of pressure to have a really fantastic coming home post... haha, I've got nothing.

For me, it's been what's it's been.  A crazy first day of seeing all the familiar things again, trying to remember that the 10 1/2 months I spent away was not just a really long dream.  It's not as weird as I thought it would be because 10 months is not long enough to have forgotten all that you've known so well all your life... but it is strange that it isn't more strange coming back.

I didn't post much about the last week mostly for lack of time, but it was sweet.  Lots of good-byes.  Lots of well-wishing.  Lots of trying-not-to-think-too-hard-about-it moments.  It was sad to leave.  I think the hardest thing to process is having all of those memories so vividly on my mind all the while looking around me and being in a very different world again.

God has been so good to me this year.  If I were to try to recount it all I would need volumes and I'm sure that I can't even remember or understand all the ways he has guided, led, corrected, and taught me this past year.  What can I say?  Other than this is not the end of the adventure.  Like I told the teachers at Maranatha: I'm home again but I'm not really home until I reach my dwelling place with Christ.  Now there is a place that seems really far away sometimes.  But we're moving closer and on to the next phase of the journey.  Further up and further in as Christ leads.  How great his grace must continue to be to allow me to continue in this journey after so much failure!  To his name be the glory forever.

"I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind and therefore, I have hope:
Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.  They are new every morning; 
Great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, 'The Lord is my portion; therefore, I will wait for him.'"

You just NEVER know...

We have an on-going joke here about never, never, NEVER assuming that you know what is going to happen any given day when you get up in the morning.  For example, last day of exam week for all the students (so essentially their last day of school for the year), I assumed I would be sitting in the teacher room most of the day working on grades and writing recuperation tests for the kids who failed the normal year.  Wrong.  Instead...

I'm at a pool by 10:00 am watching 34 fifth graders, trying to make sure none of them drown.  Haha!  Thankfully, yes they all made it out alive despite there being a deep end, a diving board, no life guard, and only two teachers monitoring the chaos.

By yesterday (Saturday) I was very much ready for a relaxing day at home which was more or less accomplished, but got a little melancholy when my house mate started moving out (to the new apartment she'll be in next fall).

There's the lovely desk the boys at the farm made for me and have thoroughly enjoyed these last 11 months!  It's going to her new apartment so she can enjoy it another year.  With the desk gone and all the packing begun, my room is just looking sad...

Nothing like bare walls and empty space to remind you you're leaving soon.  Not that I could forget :-)  Oh, how I'm going to miss these precious little children!

God, may it be in remembrance of these, and the countless others like them who are in need of your loving-kindness that I move forward into the next phase of training in my life and for their sake, finish the education I started to serve them better.  Help them to always be in the forefront of my mind and heart as they are in yours.  Amen.

El Roi

This is just too beautiful... if only I were a better writer, but I will do my best to communicate the beauty with which this series of thoughts struck me.


As it is my last week and a half here, a few days ago I had been contemplating writing a devo for the young mothers at the Buen Pastor project.  My thoughts had been something about being known by God and assured that even in the darkest moments we are not truly in the middle of the obscurity our hearts feel.  Which tonight led me to read a little about the name of God El Roi only found once in scripture: the story of Hagar, the Egyptian slave, running away from Sarai, her mistress in Genesis 16.


Just before this small inquiry, I had been preoccupied and praying about my desperate lack of self-discipline especially concerning the "spiritual disciplines" (prayer, Scripture study, etc.)  My prayers were quite frustrated and desperate as I struggled through just wanting to read something for fun and go to sleep (isn't this the daily, obnoxious, and surprisingly difficult battle we all fight with everyday?  whether it is the TV, our own agenda, our habits, we always seem to have something else more desirable to do then focus on our Lord).  But my spirit, my conscious, the Spirit of the Lord--however you want to call it--just wouldn't leave me alone.  I had to sit down, I had to read my Bible, I had to pray.  My flesh did NOT want to, but it surrendered to the hunger of my spirit and after a little study and prayer is when I found myself looking up this name of God...


My initial thoughts on the "God who sees" had to do with not feeling like you are just one in a million, lost in a crowd, obscure, and unconsidered by anyone.  Especially as chicas, I think it is easy to feel this way and we have quite the job trying to convince ourselves that God really does care about us individually and profoundly.  But then I found this commentary about the above mentioned passage:

Whither wilt thou go? Thou art running into sin; if Hagar return to Egypt, she will return to idol gods, and into danger in the wilderness through which she must travel. Recollecting who we are, would often teach us our duty. Inquiring whence we came, would show us our sin and folly. Considering whither we shall go, discovers our danger and misery... Hagar could not but admire the Lord's mercy, and feel, Have I, who am so unworthy, been favoured with a gracious visit from the Lord? She was brought to a better temper, returned, and by her behaviour softened Sarai, and received more gentle treatment. Would that we were always suitably impressed with this thought, Thou God seest me!

God is El Roi to me tonight.  Because in my lack of self-discipline, in my frustration with myself, and my desire to give up the fight of the flesh and turn to what is easiest, He sends his Spirit to me to lead me back to where I belong.  He is El Roi not just because he removes me from obscurity, but because he cares enough for me and the little moments in my life to intervene in my weakness, rescue me, turn me around, and set me back on the path on which my passage was paid for in blood.

I must stop thinking that the little moments and decisions and wastes and foolish uses of time or money are meaningless to the God who sees me.  The little things make up our lives and if it is important enough for the God of Heaven and Earth to intervene with me tonight on how a spend an hour or two before bed, then how can I ever neglect the importance of even the smallest task, opportunity, moment, decision, etc.?

God sees us.  God fights for us.  God cares about the little things and how they will effect eternally.  We accuse him of not caring, when in actuality, I'm beginning to think he cares infinitely more than we do.