Wow, month 1 is officially over. Our time in Quiche, Guatemala really went quite quickly. And now we’re into month 2 in Nicaragua. Although at the moment, we’re in a bit of an interim with a 5-day debrief in Granada—a quaint, lakeside, backpacking town in south-western Nicaragua. It has been a blessed break in schedule, with lots of time for rest, reading, and spending time with friends.
To be perfectly honest, the past month has been a tough one for me. In some ways, it felt like a month of incredible demands, distractions, and pressures. With the entire squad together in a small space—living with 54+ people in one place; sleeping in a tent city with our tents just inches apart from each other; attempting to function as an individual team while sharing living quarters with 7 other teams—I felt constantly torn between the needs of my squad, team, friends, marriage, and myself. I also found myself to be frequently and easily frustrated with little logistical or household things that resulted from being in such close proximity with this volume of people.
This month really showed me up.
After mulling over what seemed to be everyone else’s problems, I finally began to realize in a new way that I was in this situation for a specific purpose. Thus began a long series of self-reflection.
Two weeks into the trip, I started to see how incredibly selfish I was: critical, impatient, self-absorbed, proud, fake even. Simultaneously, I was feeling super discouraged, exhausted, emotionless, worn out, with constant fatigue/exhaustion, and frequent headaches. (It didn’t help that half the squad was sick and, along with the other nurse, I was functioning at times as nurse, doctor, lab tech, and pharmacist, [and mom?] for 20-30 people—assessing, diagnosing, consulting, advising, giving instructions, answering questions, making tough calls, buying drugs, starting IV’s, following-up, etc.)
Throughout this month, I was reading Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozer. Amazing. I’d never read it before, but it addressed so much of what I was feeling and what I wanted in my life. In this context of squad month and what I was reading, I realized some things in a new way:
- I need a lot of love and grace, and don’t have these characteristics (or what it takes for life in general) in and of myself—without a supernatural power [of God] in me. To have more of this power, this wild abundant life [John 10:10], there has to be less of me. There’s a giving up of myself that needs to happen—letting go of my own agenda in lieu of a greater plan, stopping this cycle of protecting myself—in order to create space for Him to come through in crazy ways.
- I’d always thought about love as the opposite of hate, and generosity as the opposite of selfishness. Yet in the truest sense of the words, love and selfishness are completely opposing realities. Hmmmm. Interesting then that the motive behind every sin and evil (selfishness) and the first and greatest commandment (“love the Lord your God…and your neighbor”) are mutually exclusive.
- I also re-identified some longings: to be genuine, honest, and real, not fake or shallow; to live directly from my heart; to love well; to have compassion; even to hurt deeply.
- It seems like I’d caved to pressures—both internal and external pressures: to be perfect; to please people; to keep it together; to be a good example; to not disappoint; to not pull back from the group (even when needed to be healthy); to perform.
My goal? To stop striving to prove myself to be something I’m not. To have courage to be me. To break outside of what’s known, safe, and comfortable, and to instead accept the invitation to live life abundantly—unexplainable, unnatural, but fully free and alive, present and engaged in each moment. To know God and be known by Him, and to realize that encompasses so much more than I’ve ever known or experienced.
