Leaving for Christmas...

Today most of my friends from the Windrush house are leaving for Christmas. (I'm not leaving until tomorrow.) I will get to have one last day packing, cleaning, babysitting (for Noah and Asher), and finishing the last little details that need to be done before I leave.

I will be flying to Honduras on Saturday. Yesterday, I was talking to someone about what we will do when we first get "home" this Christmas. If life will go on as usual or if we'll sit down to talk or something else. I started talking about one important lesson I've learned about returning home after being gone for a long time. When you have been gone and have a lot to tell you need to start explaining from the present.

The best way to tell everything that has happened to you "since you've been gone" is by starting with how you feel at that moment, what happened to you yesterday, and slowly work backwards. If you try to start at the "beginning" that is very hard because you have to conjure up those emotions that you don't feel anymore and "the beginning" is a very nebulous concept anyway.

So, "right now" I feel very content. I'm glad that I have one more day here at Osprey Point to finish those last details. The past week was full of Christmas celebrations. On Tuesday we had a Christmas party with the staff at the Lodge which was fun! On Wednesday was my birthday and I had a wonderful day. It started with a birthday breakfast with Amy, happy birthday's from everyone, class, lunch with David Scudder, David Norman, and Will, a round of frisbee golf, note writing, dinner (rice and beans for me!), and then the culminating birthday party fun: storytime! We read fun stories to each other and opened up our house stockings. Yesterday, we had a good day and in the evening we went and had a Christmas party with our friends who live on a Yacht. Such a funny life!

The week before last was a great week we got back into routine and such, it was a busy week with work and class and house life. On Thursday evening I got to go to a benefit dinner for the International Justice Mission. It was excellent. I would love to be a part of an organization like that. They talked about things that they've been able to accomplish and gave a message of hope in the midst of violence. I got to be there with my mentor for the year, I saw a lot of pretty influential people, I said hi to Os, and had the fun of having a guy sit next to me that I had met the weekend before (we did not expect to see each other there!). That was a special event. On the way back to the Eastern shore the next day I stopped and spent the morning walking around Annapolis. It was so beautiful and it was a lovely sunny day. I walked around the historic district, got a tour of the capitol building, and walked around the Naval Academy (it is an amazing campus).

I've had a good first half of the year. I have been blessed with a place and experience like this. I think that the community has been challenging yet comforting, class has been stimulating, work has been good, and the extended contacts and guests have been enriching. I am glad for the break and look forward to spending Christmas in Honduras.

love is improvising

Last week someone was talking about the importance of "getting into the messiness of each other's lives". I'm not sure I know what that means. How do we know when to pry a little more than usual, when to ask "how are you" in that truly interested way? If there isn't any conflict do we need to go out of our way to find some?

This week I've been thinking about the uniqueness and the individuality of each one of my relationships. There is very little room for blanket statements like "they all think this about me" or "this group perceives me as such and such" because in reality each individual has a different perception of me due to the uniqueness of the relationships. I think that maybe loving one another and understanding messiness means responding to individuals.

I think that living in the present is really the response to "how" to love people well. If I'm stressing out about how I'm going to "get into people's messiness" and "how I'm going to love the community" I'm going to loose sight of the spontaneous and improvised nature of life and relationships. We don't know and that's the beauty of it. We study Christ to learn how he did it, we study others to learn how they feel loved and then we improvise in our present "here and now" experience.