The Game of Life

I happened to be on a retreat this weekend with InterVarsity. On Friday night during the first track session we were asked to make a board game... like the Game of Life... but we had to make it be our own lives. I was intrigued and excited about this, but I found out that once I started getting short strips of paper to make my little "stepping stone" pieces, I wasn't sure what to write.

Our instructions were to make sure we included milestones or events that had spiritually shaped us in one way or another. I wasn't sure where to begin, so I ended up writing, "Birth in Colombia." Now, at first glance, that doesn't seem terribly significant. But in the last year and a half, I've come to realize how extremely significant that small fact has been. It has shaped who I am and how my heart loves; my dreams and passions are deeply rooted in the experiences I've had growing up in Colombia. I continued writing and I scribbled out several places: "Cienaga," "Amazons," "Africa," and "Medeba." One word encompassed so much... so many memories were trapped in those simple letters. No other word could describe what those places meant. I wrote down experiences: "Creative Outreach," "SSLT," "furlough" and others... How to explain Creative Outreach and the profound impact it had on me and the way I viewed poverty, service and sacrifice? How do I explain SSLT and the critical influence it had in my life and the development of my spiritual disciplines?

But as I wrote and pasted these board game pieces on my piece of paper I, my thoughts drifted to how odd it was to reduce your life to a bunch of words on paper. Trying to pinpoint those critical moments and then figuring out what to write was so odd. One or two words could not possibly do justice to the change that "tile" was responsible for in me.

I sighed and wrote my final tile piece: "Hello, America."

Oh, hello America... hello.
Life in America for the last year and a half has deeply, deeply molded my heart. I've seen a new America that I had never known-- that I could not know from summer visits and a semester-long furlough. I've been immersed-- or submerged-- in American college culture. I've learned to swim through that... or at least how to keep afloat.

And though I wrote "hello," I often feel that I still have yet to fully... enter.

I have struggled to adapt to life in America, longed for home more than I thought possible and have never felt so out of place before. My heart has been deeply shaped by where I grew up and the people who surrounded me. My ears still perk up when I hear Spanish spoke around me and I can't stop laughing when I'm confronted with Latin humor. I love it and I miss it. And coming here has been harder than I could have ever anticipated. I've always thought I was pretty adaptable and flexible, but my inability to "adapt" to life here has caught me off guard and left me scrambling to figure out how to live here. I've had to cling to Jesus in ways I've never had to before, trusting in his goodness and faithfulness through every season. My heart has been broken time and time again for the pain, sin and brokenness that I see all around me. I've been stretched to step out of my comfort zone day in and day out. My eyes have been opened to the least and the lost.

Oh, yes... Hello, America.