Beloved, God Still Feels

Perhaps one of the questions I ask God most frequently is, "Why?" I see the pain and suffering around me and in the world and my heart tightens. I feel nauseous and I don't understand how I can literally be curled up in a blanket as I write this, comforted by the the beautiful Christmas lights and know that millions are cold, hungry, sick and dying... knowing that women are being raped, men are being tortured, children are starving and all of creation is groaning. Do we exist in parallel universes? Sometimes I wonder... we might as well. How can it be so drastically different, yet confined to the same planet?

Last week I read an ethnography about slums in Brazil... and how mothers are literally put into situations where they have to choose which child to starve to death. The systems and structures that are in place force her to make these decisions; the death of hundreds of children can be traced to selective neglect. The anthropologist (Scheper-Hughes) wrote about her first encounter with a child who was wasting away. As a survival instinct, the mother chose to let him starve, lest he literally suck the life out of her withered body. Scheper-Hughes swooped in and took the child under her own wing. She nursed him back to life and watched his hair grow, his eyes gain life and skin look healthier. When she succeeded in convincing the mother that he was worth investing resources into, the mother finally took him back. He became her favorite son, only to die from gang violence as a teenager. The entire article was depressing. Class the next week was very similar. Our professor Tomi shared other stories from her own fieldwork in the slums of Brazil. She recalls a time when she was robbed at knifepoint and her aggressor apologized, "I'm sorry, but I need this money more than you do." She remembered when a mother begged Tomi to take her baby, recognizing that she'd never be able to give own daughter the kind of life Tomi would be capable of providing.

I struggled through that week of class. I breathed a sigh of relief when the week was over only to come into class the next week and watch a horrifying documentary about the violence against women in Ciudad de Juarez, Mexico. In a span of less than 20 years, over 400 women were abducted, abused, tortured, raped and murdered in Juarez. The families of the victims clamored for justice, but found none from the government. Instead, the government itself was often responsible for acts of violence as well. Family members would desperately pull together neighbors and friends as they went out into the desert looking for a corpse. Time after time, they'd come back empty handed only to have the authorities find a skeleton the next day. Mothers refused to believe that their daughters who had disappeared only weeks before would already be reduced to a bag of bones. Dozens of women later and by the end of the documentary, justice had still not come. My heart ached.

During these two weeks of depressing and painful anthropology classes, I found out about two neighborhoods in Colombia that are in need of your prayers. The first is Ciudad Bolivar, a barrio alto of Bogota. It lays to the south of Bogota, nestled in the mountains. Living conditions are less than acceptable and the poverty and violence statistics are through the roof! Our school has partnered with a beautiful ministry there, Forjadores de Aguilas, to help bring justice and healing to this neighborhood. I honestly have not been to Ciudad Bolivar since 10th grade, but have beautiful memories from the kids there :) However, recently a new wave of violence has swept through the city. Women are raped, men are senselessly killed and children are orphaned. I haven't been able to get much information about what exactly is going on or for how long it has been going because the press is silent. When I find out more information, I will certainly update you guys :).

The other neighborhood is Barrio Egipto. If you've been following my blog, then you certainly know plenty about it. If you haven't been, however, feel free to check out this post to get some background information. I must admit that much of the ministry going on with the Fundacion Buena Semilla inside the neighborhood had fallen into the background for me. I prayed for it occasionally and read the updates, but other than that, I kind of had forgotten about the situation to a great extent. However, my mom reminded me how I need to KEEP PRAYING for this neighborhood. One of the six gang members who was involved with robbing the GEBC team was stabbed to death a couple of weeks ago.  He appears in this video next to Elias. Please, watch that video! It tells you ways you can partner with this incredible ministry to continue bringing light into Barrio Egipto. Though much has happened in the last six months within that neighborhood, greater things are yet to come... I have to believe that.

During my devotions this week I was comforted by the fact that God feels. He hurts and is grieved when his creation suffers. It's easy for me to shake my fist at God and point to the suffering all around me and ask, "Where are you?" It's easy for me to judge his justice and question his goodness. It's easy to do that. It's hard to believe in God's compassion sometimes. So many times I cry out to God and ask why this is happening to "them"-- forgetting that he knows each one by name. One of my Beth Moore Bible studies concluded by saying, "Beloved, God still feels."

And that... that is overwhelming.

Beloved, God still feels.

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.

Study Abroad

I finally opened my study abroad application. I've been putting off for a while now because I was unsure of exactly what program I wanted to apply to! But I finally decided I just had to choose one and go with it :) I've been contemplating this program in Alexandria, Egypt for a while, so I finally settled on it. The school I'm applying to is called the Middlebury School of Languages. Apparently, this school has different branches around the world and is known for it's incredible language classes. You can read more about the program here. Upon arrival I'll have to sign a "Language Pledge" that commits me to only using Arabic for communication (except corresponding back home) for the duration of my time. CRAZY :) Well, I do want to learn Arabic!!

I'm applying for the Fall 2012 term and also hope to apply to a program in Kenya for Spring 2013 :) I cannot wait :)

It's crazy to think that a year from now, I could be finishing up a semester in ALEXANDRIA!!!