i carry your hearts with me (i am carry them in

This post is for my friends, my family, my church family at Coast Vineyard, my former coworkers at Plant With Purpose, and my friends who have become my family. *Warning: this post contains major doses of sap. 

After an intense I-miss-my-old-life-in-San-Diego mope fest earlier this week, I realized something.

I am not alone. 

In one of my favorite poems, ee cummings writes,

"i carry your heart with me(i carry it in 

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)"

I am not alone because you are all with me. You are with me wherever I go. 

My room here is splattered with cards and notes and pictures you all gave to me before I left the States. So, literally, I carry your words--and the heart behind the words--with me wherever I go. 

But I also carry the moments. 

I carry the encouragement.

I carry the laughter.

I carry the hours spent tanning (and in my case, freckling)  on the cool San Diego sand.

I carry the barbecues and sushi nights and happy hours and fro yo and chips and guac and California burritos.

I carry the moments spent crying in the stairwell, hugging in the parking lot, jumping into the frigid ocean in a fit of "whimsy."

I carry the Sundays worshiping and taking communion together, holding hands at the end of the sermon as one Body. 

I carry the happy lunches and AGMs, scheming fundraising endeavors, battling cynicism, filling out ridiculous government grant forms til 2am. 

I carry the phone the calls and family vacations and Christmas mornings hiding from Dad's video camera. 

Today marks one month of being back in Guatemala, of eating tortillas and speaking Spanish, and trying to build a life for myself here. 

And though I'm here, what feels like so far away--miles and cultures and languages and paces of life apart--you are actually as close as my very heart. You are in my thoughts and words and conversations and prayers. You have made me who I am today. 

I carry your hearts; I carry them in my heart.
I carry it all with me. And no distance can take that away.

Thank you for your love and cards and skype dates and Heytells and Instagram convos and blog comments and prayers that have FILLED my heart this week. But most of all, thank you for who you have been in my life for so long, face to face and heart to heart. 

***

Here are some pics from my room: 

All Is Well

I came across this quote awhile back, and yesterday as I sat reading in the park in the center of Antigua, catching bits of Spanish conversation buzzing around me and reflecting on my life, I was reminded of it:  

"The time is ripe for looking back over the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are, and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We turn on the television maybe. We pick up a newspaper or book. We find some chore to do that could easily wait for the next day. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. We cling to the surface out of fear for what lies beneath the surface. 

But there is a deeper need yet, I believe, and that is the need - not all of the time, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us where the past lives on as part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive to ourselves, to the long journeys of our lives with all their twistings and turnings and to where our journeys have brought us.

There we will find, beyond any feelings of joy or regret, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that in some unfathomable way, all is well." -Frederick Buechner

The time feels right for looking back. I am starting new, starting fresh, moving forward. My mind tells me I should be sifting, analyzing, searching for things done and undone. But even in the park alone with my thoughts, in my room alone with my journal, I can't get myself to muster up any evaluations, to come to any conclusions. 

My mind usually reels; it's my modus operandus. The silence is what unnerves me.  

These last few days, however, my first days in this new place, I've encountered a friendly silence, a peaceful cessation of thoughts and worries and concerns. 

When I look back, I don't feel either joy or regret. When I think about the last year and how heartbroken I was when I learned I couldn't keep my job and live in Guatemala, when I think about the bewilderment of burnout and the weight of decision making that anchored me to the ground, when I think about the dream job I now possess in my dream location, I am overwhelmed with a sense a peace. 

I still can't believe my journey with all its twistings and turnings has brought me here, to Guatemala. That I type these words from my new room in Antigua, the place I have dreamed of living, is in itself a miracle. 

Here in this place I have found, "beyond any feelings of joy or regret, a profound and undergirding peace, a sense that in some unfathomable way, all is well." 

And that is a gift a thousand times over. 

My Prayer for Moving Abroad

I sit at home, my parents’ home, at the kitchen table. The coffee pot clicks and gurgles, sputtering out liquid focus. The dryer tumbles clumps of damp clothes in a heartbeat melody—bum bump, bum bump, bum bump—then switches gears to a low, steady, wind tunnel rumble, the zippers and buttons clanging against the dryer wall.

I look out the kitchen window past the back porch to the needly pine branches and gnarled, mossy trunks.

My belongings are strewn about the house, awaiting the verdict: will they go with me on the plane to Guatemala or will they be bundled up and forgotten for a life-changing year?

How can I possibly know what I will want to wear for an entire year? Will my new favorite striped v-neck make me cringe just three months in to my adventure in downsizing?

Yesterday I read a raw, honest post by Ann Voskamp about her return from visiting Haiti with Compassion International. In her post, she is angry about poverty, mostly at herself. I remember my return from Central America six years ago. I remember that anger. I remember seething, lashing out. I remember vowing to never let the poor out of my thoughts, my life, my dreaming.

But I sit here six years later and the anger has subsided. The fight, while not totally gone, lies dormant within me.

I think of the plane that will take me to Guatemala in less than two weeks and I wonder if I have what it takes to go through it all again. To be angry again. To be passionate again. I wonder  if I have what it takes to feel with and suffer with not just my friends and family but with people who have endured genocide, lost brothers, fathers, uncles, who haven’t finished the third grade.

I believe I am called to be a voice for voiceless, to speak on behalf of the marginalized and forgotten. But that is only part of my calling. In order to speak kindly and wisely and compassionately, in order to do no harm with my words and my advocacy, I must first listen.

How can you love someone if you don’t know him?

And so I am moving away from the life I know toward the life God has called me to. Not so that I can speak on behalf of these new people I will meet, but so that I learn from them, share life with them in all its complexities.

I used to be scared that I would develop a white savior complex with the poor. If I had moved to Guatemala four years ago, bright eyed and seething with righteous indignation, I’m sure my God-complex would have reared its serpentine head.

But today as I pack my things-stuff underwear into my suitcase side pocket with no help from the cat, cull my clothing down to the must-haves, and agonize over which precious books to bring “in the flesh” and which to purchase on my Nook—I am painfully aware of my own brokenness. My own frailty. Today I’m under no illusions of poverty fighting grandeur.

I am going to Guatemala not to fix the broken systems and broken people, but to experience healing myself. If I do any good, offer any help, shape any lives, speak on behalf of the voiceless, it will not be of my own doing, but will be the work of God, of Love, in me.

And so, God, I say to you, I know you have good things planned for me. I ask for the courage to be open to your will. I ask for an open heart and open ears to hear the stories of those you will place in my life. I pray for the courage to be honest with myself about my feelings—whether I’m trapped in apathy, overcome with fear, or trembling in anger. I ask for the courage to be angry, to be passionate. I ask for eyes to see the hurting, and with the same eyes to see your transformative, your good and holy, work in me. I pray for empathy, for outward focus. To rejoice with those who rejoice and to mourn with those who mourn—in San Diego, in Guatemala, and wherever my tush has happened to plant itself.

Father, you know what I need. Allow me to rest in that truth. To really rest and trust and release my anxieties to you. To trust that you will use me, that you will grow me, that you will never leave me. 

I thank you for the opportunity you have given me to go back to the country where I first learned to yearn for justice, where I first sought your compassionate face. I thank you for the opportunity you have given me, a broken person, to live with and learn from other broken people. I pray that we would see your justice, your mercy, and your compassion peak through the pain and that we may experience and share your love together.

Amen.