I let myself get caught up in home from time to time. With a little less than 2 months of the race left, home runs through my mind more than usual. I’m excited for familiar surroundings, and familiar smells, and familiar faces. I’m looking forward to it so much that I even catch myself looking at pictures of high school, of life before I left for the race for hours in my free time, especially before bed. It’s unhealthy. I make myself miss home even more instead of enjoying my time in Nicaragua, enjoying such a time as this, I’m moping.
I wish to be back in those moments because I wasn’t thinking about being anywhere else. I had both feet at home and in every moment all of those pictures captured. Now I have one foot at home and one foot in my new home.
God has been teaching me the beauty of being present, of living raw and tangible. Of stopping to ‘smell the roses’ instead of waiting for next springs roses to bloom. Because when I live in the present, with what I can actually feel instead of seeing through a screen on my broken iphone or cracked lap top screen (thanks a lot travel days) my heart grows for this beautiful place.
Yes, I called it beautiful. Managua, Nicaragua. A third world country where about 80% percent of the population lives on less than $2 dollars a day. Where all I see around is dirt roads and broken down tin houses. Where all I consume is beans, and rice, and plantains for every meal every single day. Where I’m always covered in a layer of sweat because of the humid heat and another layer of dirt from the little breeze that blows dust around and sticks to my body. Where I sleep in a house and little ants, lizards, and spiders crawl across my floor, my walls, and even my mattress like they own the place. Now, don’t mistake this for complaining because it’s the exact opposite.
God has fixed my vision to see the beauty in everything.
This has become my new normal, my new familiar, and my heart is content with it.
It’s beautiful to me. And yes, even the spiders because they make up hilarious memories of a house of 6 girls who all hate spiders and we’re all screaming and running around trying to figure out how to kill it, and how to build of the courage to do so.
What makes this place beautiful is the simplicity, and the people I get to meet and call my new family. What makes it beautiful is the way God allows my heart to be open, the way He has renewed my spirit from being selfish, negative, closed off and unmotivated to a spirit of contentment, willingness, love, and joy. What’s beautiful is being stripped of everything, even air conditioning.
It’s beautiful because one day when the race is over, I’m going to be at home, sitting in my room probably looking at pictures through my screen of ‘such a time as this’ and wishing to be back. To be able to walk down the dirt road one last time and have children from the church or from the English class I teach run up to me by surprise and give me a hug or hold my hand to where ever I’m going. To be able to play with stray mutts and care for them instead of just using them for a guard, to show them love and mercy. To live with these perfectly God picked team of girls and call them my sisters. To live in raw community with not just my house, not just my church, but the whole barrio. I’m going to miss the humble love I so willingly get offered from these beautiful people that I just can’t receive anywhere else. I’m going to miss such a time as this, and if I don’t start living in the present, in the tangible, I’m also going to miss the moments that make this place so beautiful.
“Forget the former things;
do not dwell on the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland.”
Isaiah 43:18-19
