This past week we reached a very pivital date. June 12th marked 5 months since we left home and officially less than 3 weeks until we get to be back! This trip has been great and I definitely wouldn't trade my experience for anything but being away from home for so long really makes you miss it a lot. Especially because it seems the closer we get, the more we dream about being home. Maybe because we can actually deram about all the things we miss with the hope it will one day soon be our reality. Belize really isn't all that bad though. For instance, I am currently writing this blog from an air conditioned ice cream shop... Sometimes you just kind of need to spoil yourself a bit :)
The weekend was a very fun but very crazy one. Our sister had her quinceanera on Sunday which meant all this past week, we had various people coming in and out of our house helping our mom with cooking and preparing decorations. Saturday night, we had like 20 people come over to our house to help make tamales. Like several hundred tamales. And since Bekah an I are unexperienced tamale makers, we were given the glamorous job of cleaning leaves (which if you have never made tamales before, it acutally is an important part of the process). Oh and if you read my last blog post, I said we were going to try to get fun party dresses. Well, we kept going in and out of stores confused why none of the stuff was fitting us properly until someone finally told us that all of the clothes are in petite sizes. And considering I am 5'8" and my roommate is 5'10", it's no wonder none of this stuff fit us. We didn't need to start weight watchers when we got home, we just are a lot bigger than the people that live here are. So even though we had to wear the same church apparel that we have been wearing for the past 5 months, we still had a good time at the party... Until a rain storm decided to come through and make an appearance. Picture experiencing a small hurricane in a building with no windows and a tin roof. It makes it sound and feel a lot more dramatic than it probably was but it definitely sent everyone in a panic. But hey, at least it wasn't hot anymore.
So as you may or may not know, our team is the first immersion team to come to Belize which is cool because it's new to not just us but also to our organization but also hard because we don't really have any of the solid connections we have had in the other places. Which leaves your team with two options: either be bored and frustrated or go out and find stuff to do! So some people on our team have started making connections for us to get involved with some preschools and apparently Thursday we are going to go paint a mural that will be put up on some public place. So we will be getting to make a visible mark on the community. Maybe it will be something other teams will get to see and know that we did that!
Recently, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of love. Love of family. Love of friends. Love of strangers. Love of people who maybe are difficult to love. In God's mind, choosing to love people isn't an option. It's the only option. Jesus said the two greatest commandments are to love God with all we got and love our neighbors as ourselves. There doesn't need to be any more instructions than that because if we are so focused on loving others and loving God, we won't want to commit sin that would hurt them. Everything else just kind of falls into place when we put the needs of ourselves aside and love others with everything inside of us. And that's what I am going to keep doing for these last 16 days. Loving with all of my everything.
No comments:
Post a Comment