black hole

It's almost February. I haven't written since... September? I don't know. All I can say is life has a way of sucking you in, like a black hole. Now I'm sitting in a hammock, overlooking this city I have called my home for almost 2 years now. Am I the same person I was when my eyes first caught a glimpse of these mountains out the airplane window?

In five months I will look out the airplane window with a different perspective. I find myself needing to reflect on this time I have spent in Honduras, wanting to wrap it up into a neat package I can store in my attic of memories. I want to categorize the good and bad into slices of cake and then choose which ones to throw away and which to eat, to allow inside me. But I can't do that. It's not that neat or easy. It's more like the barbed wire down the street with the flowers that have stubbornly grown their way over the spikes... or the beautiful, enormous school that sits ten feet away from a garbage dump where bodies have been thrown.

I think one thing I have learned is that learning itself takes TIME. It takes time to know a place, a person, a subject, God. Some of which we will never fully know on this earth. And then, not everything you learn may be true or good, so you must hold it up to a TEST. This goes from matters of research to matters of the heart. So then, after time and testing, what do you do with it? In the end is TRUST. After my time in Honduras, I believe completely that God is in control of my life. I have to trust that He had a purpose for this time, that He used me to bless my students, that He strengthened me and refined me in ways I have yet to see, that He prepared me for the future in ways that no other place could.

Time. Test. Trust.
There's my first reflection. That's my first lesson from Honduras. There are many more to uncover.

Song: My friend Jenn sang this last week, and it has been in my head ever since.