November was quite a month.
A month of joy, a month of fiestas, a month of endless cooking and too many
pies (jk- you can never have too many pies), a month of welcome and unwelcome
visitors (see: rats), a month of endless rain, a month of goodbyes, a month of
teaching and learning. A month of growing. Now as we transfer into Advent
season, it is a time for us to slow down and prepare for the birth of our Lord.
Every night after dinner,
my missionary community lights the candle(s) of our very homemade advent wreath
and we do an advent reflection/prayer. All of these reflections have been good,
but the reflection that we did last night has really stuck with me, and that is
what I want to write about today, so bear with me here for a second.
I want you to think about
this world from the point of view of God (to the best of your ability anyway
because obviously none of us actually know His point of view!) Start by looking
at the world from a very zoomed out view. You can see the entire world- all
your creation. Land, oceans, sun, moon, stars, animals, nature, humans, etc.
You created all of this, but because sin is also a part of your perfect world,
it is not so perfect anymore. Now you look at men and women, all of whom you
created, do you still recognize them? Well of course you do because you are
God, but they have definitely changed, they have sinned, all of them. You see
people praising you, people cursing your name, and people ignoring your
existence completely. You see lots of good, but to counter that there is also
bad, so much bad. What do you do? From a human perspective this is when I would
shut down and start over, let my pride get the better of me. But what did the
Lord do?
Before I answer that
question I want to compare this (on a much smaller scale) to my own life. As a
teacher teaching in a language that I am not yet fluent in, there are days when
I look at my class of kids and feel completely overwhelmed. They were all just
taught the same lesson and now they are all supposed to be doing the same
activity. These two children are doing the activity correctly, but then this
one is coloring in their notebook, this one over here refuses to pick up their
pencil, this one is running around trying to find paper to give to their
neighbor who was picking at a scab during the lesson and is now bleeding
everywhere, and a few others are trying to decode and make sense of my spanish.
Chaos. I look at my small handful of students and wonder how there can be so
many different reactions and behaviors in one moment. I want to get frustrated
and walk out, give up. I don’t of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that
my reactions are normal, human, sinful. But not the Lord’s. He knows that we
are sinners and because we live in a sinful world, we will sin again. His
reaction to the chaos of the world was not to get frustrated and walk out, His
reaction was to sacrifice His only son to die for our sins. Wow. We sin and sin
and sin, and His response is still love.
This Christmas season I
encourage you to look for reasons to love, whatever that looks like in your
life. For me that means that when I am reading a really good part of my book
and I am interrupted to last minute babysit the youngest boy’s house, instead
of getting frustrated and letting my negative attitude get the best of me,
letting that go and enjoying my time playing legos and reading stories with
them. Or when it’s 2:30 am and a rat falls out of the rafters of my room while I’m
sleeping, landing on my head and in my hair (yes, this really happened). I could
choose to get annoyed because now my roommate Kassidy and I just lost 3 hours
of sleep trying to catch and kill the rat that is now running around our room.
Or I can choose to laugh and the ridiculousness of the situation and put up my
mosquito net so that I no longer get hit in the head by falling rats.
I have so many reasons to
love. Whether it be the internet working long enough to facetime my family and actually
hear them clearly, or the youngest little girl running up behind me, yelling my
name and giving me the biggest soaking wet hug. I get to check out books from
the school library to kids who are super excited to read and find me frequently
so that I can take them to exchange their book for a new one because they
finished so quickly. I have had the privilege of watching the kids decorate their houses for Christmas and get excited for the holidays. According to the nativity set set up at the oldest boys house, in addition to Mary, Joseph, and the wise men, even pikachu, a robot, and various plastic animals showed up at Jesus' birth. I have an amazing community here in Honduras as well as
all of you who support me in various ways from various places.
Please continue to keep my and La Finca Del Niño in your prayers. Of course if you have any questions or prayer intentions of your own, feel free to contact me, my community and I would love to pray for you. Merry Christmas to all!
We will miss you Bobby! Bobby just finished serving 2 1/2 years at the Finca earlier this week. I am taking over all of his english classes as well as his job as the librarian.
A selfie from our day of making 27 pies as well as one giant pie (pictured here) for Thanksgiving with our entire Finca community
A slightly blurry photo of my community sin Bobby and Marie who is on vacation right now
