Last week, my team fasted from all of our electronics. We were left with initial excitement which turned quickly to brutal boredom. The mornings without headphones became days of staring out the window for the hour long bus ride to the school everyday. Day after we began the process, our team began to get sick. Some of us were physically sick, fighting the pain in our bodies. Others of us were emotionally sick, fighting the pain in our hearts, being forced to press on without the option of distraction our phones and music offered. Before I go on, I need to write that I am indeed on a team of warriors.
The long hours of staring at the wall until I could fall asleep at night left me with endless places for my mind to wander. It traveled to the past and the future alike. My dreams haunted me and it wasn’t long before I was overcome with anxiety. Why couldn’t I live in the moment? Where was my passion for being here in this place?
How grateful I am for grace in these times.
The next two weeks, one of our team leaders is staying with us. She’s reading a devotional about being grateful and I’ve been borrowing it in the mornings. It’s so easy to have big prayers of big thanks for just everything, but it isn’t until we live in a state of constant awareness of what we’ve been given that gratefulness becomes altering of everyday life. Gratefulness for what we can and can’t see. Gratefulness for what’s to come and how we’ve been prepared for it by what had already come.
Grateful that my small portion of basic Spanish and I get to spend an hour and a half everyday tutoring the kids of the junior class that speak no English at all. Grateful that I am learning new ways to teach them every day and that I can be of help to their teachers. Grateful that I come out of that hour and a half everyday exhausted and drained of trying to communicate with them because it leaves me knowing that I served the best way that I could.
I learned to be grateful as I sat in a country thousands of miles from my family surrounded by 25 of the most wonderful people in this life sharing a Thanksgiving meal. Grateful as we did an altar call at our school on that holiday and 50 hands were raised.
Grateful that my life was written before I was born and He always knew I would sit on a bus in the pouring rain in Ecuador and write to you about the beauty of giving thanks.
