couches LOOM in my near future

I'm sitting on a green couch in Southern Village listening to the clock tick. . . not just literally, but there seems to be a loud echo in my head as well. I feel like at any moment my surroundings will begin to swirl and twirl and I will be sucked into a strange time machine that will transport me back to reality. I drove 18.5 hours by myself, without stopping to sleep or nap, to get here. It's a new personal record. Maybe I'll break it someday. Only a year has passed and I already feel like I am staring into a distant past I was never a part of. I hear friends talking about finals and selling back books, graduating, job searching. . . Where am I? I remember those painful goodbyes and nostalgic last classes, yet I'm a living testimony that life goes on after graduation. I didn't think it would. I've hung out with many different friends. I like the familiarity of good friends. The kind you might not write for an extended period of time [a year], but they don't harbor grudges, and seeing them again is like sinking into a down bed of feathery bliss. There are so many things I need to do, but I'm just soaking up these moments. Soon the last few threads of my happy college memories will unravel. . . friends leave, time passes, life moves on. I'm weaving a new tune. It's full of optimism. God's sitting at the loom with me, and for possibly the first time in my life, I'm letting him weave. He picked the pattern, but he's letting me choose the colors. I want this endeavour to be a colorful masterpiece. Honduras taught me quite a few lessons. I just hope I can apply them here.

So here's to curiosity: I'll investigate.
Here's to patience: I'll wait.
Here's to independence: I'll live it.
Here's to love: I'll give it.
Here's to courage: I'll find it.
Here's to life.

God promises us that He will never leave us nor forsake us and that He has special plans for us. I understand that now. He's faithful if we are faithful. I'm learning to be faithful and to trust His timing instead of my own. Things work out better that way.




P.S. If anyone has a couch for sale. . . maybe I'll be needing furniture soon. . . you know, to furnish my apartment. Or a loom, because then I could do some actual weaving.

Home again, home again, jiggity jog

White. A sterile sky of pure flakes. Where am I?
Silence. I hear the clock ticking on the wall and the clacking of the keyboard.
I woke up this morning without an alarm, without the breakfast bell, without the sound of tiny fists pounding on my door. I feel numb. My heart feels like a ball of cold snow. Where am I? The quiet consumes me. My thoughts bounce off the bleak walls in the empty rooms of my mind. Is this home? I feel like a zombie. Words leave my lips and dissapate into the chilly air like fragile snowflakes. I have no tears left. I think back to my last night in Honduras. I hold Elias close as his salty tears mix with mine. He sobs. I sob. Our hearts break together as he cries softly, "Mami." Oh cruel world. Why do you bring people together only to rip them apart? I think back to yesterday as I say my last goodbyes, holding kids close as tears rack their frames. It's all too much to take in. I feel lonely. I want to go back. Can life go on? Have I changed too much? I used to dream and hope for this day, and now that it's here, I desperately want it to go away. I've left my heart in Honduras. This hurts more than a breakup. I miss my boys, my friends, my family.

Another chapter of my life ends and another one begins. I will go back one day soon, and while it will never be the same, it will still be amazing. Nine months went so quickly. Am I really home?

[Snap]shot to the heart

My eyes are tiny cameras, constantly clicking, flashing, storing. My heart’s a memory chip with unlimited space.

Is it possible to love and despise at the same time? Is it possible to yearn for home with a weary desperation, yet cling to a place I don’t belong?

Yellowy palm branches sashay to the cadence of a windy beat. Majestic mountains look down their leafy noses at poor occupants. A mother and her three children struggle along a steep road, a burden balanced on the mother’s head. Emaciated dogs roam trash-littered side streets. Welcome to Honduras, a country with immeasurable splendor yet tainted with poverty and despair. It seems typical, but that’s just the book cover. Inside there is a story, a personal story to each wrinkled man and shabby child. I’ve only read a few torn pages. I’ve pieced together scraps and scrawled letters, desperately trying to assess souls protected by barbed wire and concrete walls topped with scraps of glass bottles.

How do I leave, yet how can I stay?

It will never be the same. I will never be the same.

10 days.