It was July 13, 2014. The day I turned 26. I was on a tiny island in the middle of lake Nicaragua called Ometepe. Ometepe basically consisted of two massive volcanoes, joined together by a small land bridge. I called it “boob island” cause from an aerial view, that is exactly what it looked like. I was leading a team of 20 college kids as they loved and served island children that had been rescued from abusive, violent situations. We all became very use to having our bodies climbed on and hung from like human jungle gyms by these sweet dark skinned babies.
We had been there five weeks and with my birthday around the corner I had a bold conversation with God:
“So God, what are you going to get me for my birthday?”
“What do you want?”
“Surprise me.”
So the afternoon of my birthday came and His gift was given in the form of a sweet 70 year old man named Bud. The times Bud had been to Nicaragua were more numerous than the whiskers on his chin. He had snuck in during the war and smuggled supplies across boarders. He had had his life threatened by Sandanista rebels. And he had fallen in love with a hard-hearted little girl that gave him so much sass he just could not help but to keep returning over and over to visit her. He and his wife eventually adopted her and raised her in the States as their own.
Bud and I drank coke and ate pizza and told stories over the roar of the “futbol” match for three hours. He told me war stories that broke my heart and filled me with courage at the same time. He told me about old friends that had been involved in epic moments
that shaped the course of history. He shared wounds that still ached like shrapnel scars after decades. I soaked up his stories and wisdom like he was my own granddad. Then he sat back and smiled almost all-knowingly and asked me to tell him a story. So I did. For what felt like hours I shared about my travels and what God had taught me.
Once both of our verbal waterfalls had subsided, and our bellies were full with hot Hawaiian pizza, he looked at me and gave me a charge that rocked me like the voice of The Almighty.
“Young lady, you’ve got stories to tell. You’ve got stories God has entrusted you with. And it’s your job to tell them.”
So… this is the beginning of the things Unwritten.
(That is the name of my new blog! Click the hyperlink and follow me 🙂
This is a place for stories. Told not in any particular order of time or significance. This is a place of opening the mouth and letting all the jumbled pieces fall out till they are sitting like scrambled puzzle pieces on a coffee table. And this is a place of putting the pieces together bit by bit until something new and beautiful is formed.
Feel free to add your pieces to the table, and to put mine together too if you have eyes to see where they meet. Like life, connecting the smooth edges and corners is easy, but it’s the middle bits that get messy and make you cuss.
So here I go! Retracing my footsteps. I think sometimes you need to go back in order to move forward. To glance over your shoulder and get a new perspective on the things you never noticed the first time. And to see how far you have come.
(Ometepe Island, July 13, 2014)
“God is telling a story. His story. He is intimately involved in the passing minutes in every one of my days and every one of yours. Faith increases to the degree we are aware of, caught up in, enthralled by, and participating in His and our story.”–Dr. Dan Allender
