My blog has been more than curious of my whereabouts, so, in an attempt to alleviate my blog's feelings of abandonment, here's the update.
When I came home from the race, my head and my heart were spinning with questions. I looked to Him and waited. And I didn't have to wait long before He extended His hand to invite me to Guatemala, into deeper intimacy with Him. He gave confirmation through a dream I'd had while still on the race and through the donation and word of a faithful woman I hadn't seen or spoken to in years. I spun a bit more and said yes to Him. Now, that statement's somewhat misleading. My "yes" didn't stop the spinning. The only thing that stopped the spinning was looking into His fiery, faithful eyes.
When my feet hit Central American soil again, I received a warm welcome from the team and was given the guest room (prayer room) for a few days. I was temporarily released from the schedule, released to a room of my own, an introvert's dream. There were no meetings, chores, ministry, give-me-your-life-story's, tours, or anything else that might distract me from my reason for being here. Intimacy.
I think I spent the majority of those first few days staring at a wall. It was different from all the others… but only slightly so. If you paused, lingered, cared to notice, you would find that one of the walls in this set apart room was itself set apart, secretly remarkable. While the three walls facing it were staunch white, this wall was sweetly, subtly a whisper of blue with a textured pattern of running lines, so that it resembles a curtain of rain. And maybe it's my great affinity for the rain or the idiosyncratic or the overlooked being looked at over and over again, but I felt a lot of peace staring at the wall, a lot of His sweetness.
Time and time again in this season, I've been acutely aware of His sweetness. I find it in the rich colors of the fabrics and faces of Antigua, the rolling green of the mountains and volcanoes as they are encircled by some mysterious, traveling mist, the faithful afternoon rains. I hear it in the laughs of our Spanish teachers, taste it in the mangos, roll it through my fingers as I arrange flowers for the house.
Though I am smack dab in the middle of His sweetness, I still find myself spinning. There's a flashing, bobbling mobile of questions that follow me around with an inquisitive tune. I live with the tension of being tugged in fifteen different directions by the desires of my heart while striving to follow Him, to seek first His Kingdom. But His desire for me in the middle of my spinning, stirring, and striving is stillness, to seek first His face.
Maybe the sweetest thing I've known here Guatemala is that I'm not alone in this. I'm known, loved, and supported by a community of brothers and sisters who are themselves willing to brave the spinning and the tension, to take it captive to Christ, and to quiet themselves and look to Him. They push past emotion and circumstance to know His intimacy and to make it known.
His banner over this missions base is intimacy. Top to bottom, side to side, through and through, that's what this is all about. When we feel shaky about life plans or ministry or our resolve to continue to hold that extended hand, we feel secure in His intimacy. Everything good, everything that God calls good, flows from that place. It's the one answer we can rest in amidst our sea of questions.
So this is my update. This is a touch of what's happening in my heart, what I'm learning. And this is what I intend to do all my days, to choose to still myself mid spin cycle, to choose the intimacy of His trustworthy, unwavering gaze.
