Weekends
So i was feeling sorry for myself recently.
I do this from time to time. This time, i was wondering how long we'd be stuck in this city where we still don't know anyone well enough to make it feel like home. I was missing life with Mercy Ships, as i often do - especially missing the mix of cultures in the crew. Mainly, even more than usual, i was missing my friends.
And as so often happens, when i'm missing things, i got mad, and i started using descriptors such as "redneck" and "thug" in the same sentence as the name of our city. This also happens occasionally. But that was before the last month or two.
It was before i met the Haitian pastor who's devoting his life to feeding street orphans as hungry and homeless as he'd been. It was before i played beach volleyball with the cello student from New York and the flight instructor and physician assistant who plan (as do so many people we've met here) to serve the poor in a foreign country. It was before i got my latest fix of the wonderful welcome i find every week in my cell group.
It was before we flew in a Cessna 172 to attend the birthday party of a two-year-old we'd never met, to a grass strip marked by old tires, from a twelve-thousand foot alternate runway for the space shuttle that's marked by blazing streams of lights so bright you can see them from twenty miles away in the night.
It was before we ate crab cakes with the Tobagonian track star turned occupational therapist who did her valiant best to diagram for us, on a restaurant napkin, the ecstatic intricacies of the game of cricket.
I wasn't getting it, but the jet mechanic and the world-traveling professional Hawaiian hula dancer sitting across from me seemed to understand.
I guess the bright spots are there if you look.
I do this from time to time. This time, i was wondering how long we'd be stuck in this city where we still don't know anyone well enough to make it feel like home. I was missing life with Mercy Ships, as i often do - especially missing the mix of cultures in the crew. Mainly, even more than usual, i was missing my friends.
And as so often happens, when i'm missing things, i got mad, and i started using descriptors such as "redneck" and "thug" in the same sentence as the name of our city. This also happens occasionally. But that was before the last month or two.
It was before i met the Haitian pastor who's devoting his life to feeding street orphans as hungry and homeless as he'd been. It was before i played beach volleyball with the cello student from New York and the flight instructor and physician assistant who plan (as do so many people we've met here) to serve the poor in a foreign country. It was before i got my latest fix of the wonderful welcome i find every week in my cell group.
It was before we flew in a Cessna 172 to attend the birthday party of a two-year-old we'd never met, to a grass strip marked by old tires, from a twelve-thousand foot alternate runway for the space shuttle that's marked by blazing streams of lights so bright you can see them from twenty miles away in the night.
It was before we ate crab cakes with the Tobagonian track star turned occupational therapist who did her valiant best to diagram for us, on a restaurant napkin, the ecstatic intricacies of the game of cricket.
I wasn't getting it, but the jet mechanic and the world-traveling professional Hawaiian hula dancer sitting across from me seemed to understand.
I guess the bright spots are there if you look.
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