Retrospective Hope

As many of you know by now, I head back to Argentina tomorrow.

How long will you be there this time?

I don’t know (probably a couple of months)

What will you be doing?

I don’t really know that, either (teaching and helping out in some capacity or another).

Has the uncertainty got to you yet? It has certainly got to me a time or two.

Since I left Buenos Aires in December, there’s been a couple of game changers. The seminary building is getting sold/demolished. The graduates obviously won’t be coming back, but neither will my first-year English class students. Courses will be done online until a new building can be found. I will be living in the seminary, Thief Lord style and mostly alone, until it gets razed. I will be helping- not entirely sure with what, or how- during this transition time.

Doubts and questions crowd my mind tighter than an overflowing suitcase. Not only what I’m supposed to be doing, but why…and why not do something else entirely? Why not save up money in the months before I start a Master in Teaching (surprise- don’t know where that will be, either)? Why not stay home? Why not go off the grid for a while and hike? Why not avoid final farewells? Why not ignore that Voice that sometimes I hear with my ears but more often lately in the pit of my stomach?

Why not? When will I be home? Where is home? What will I be doing? And why?

I remember my fears roughly this time last year, too.

Will I be able to function 24/7 in my second language? Who will my roommate be? What about the guy I’m dating? How will I balance being a student, friend, and teacher?

They seem small now because I lived through them, and God walked with me every step of the way. I was able to function in Spanish from the start and quickly found a best friend in Lucy, who helped me get through the long distance and break-up blues. I found more than a community in the 20 people I shared the seminary with; I found family. In hindsight, I can see absolute provision, faithfulness, and goodness shining brightly in the mist of every uncertainty.

In the words of a dear friend, “hasn’t God been good to you so far? So what’s to stop Him from being good tomorrow as well?”

And those rhetorical questions I can answer with absolute certainty: yes and nothing!

Reading

If you looked under my bed, you would find boxes. There are a few photos in them, even fewer scraps of cloth and ribbon and paper, and dozens of journals. Dog-eared spirals, lavender-bound little tomes, folders of loose paper for special events. There are a few factual snatches- if I look hard sometimes I can find what I was up to on a certain day in 1998- but mostly imaginings: poems, fairy tales, beginnings of stories with no endings, cynical parodies, dictionary entries for some invented language, and sketches of characters that, no matter how hard I tried, always looked too much like me. 

When caught journaling, I've often responded that writing is my way of making sense of the world. It's how I order my thoughts and ideas line after line, how I process, how I remember. As I look back through my writings, though, I'm coming to realize that it's not the only way.  

More than any original thoughts (if there is such a thing), I discover that most of what I write- and think- is a product of what I read. My bookshelf is as much a way of processing the chaotic, the unexpected, and the loneliness as the boxes of journals that rest beside it. They are both ways of encoding and decoding life, and the most important bits I memorize and pull out when life seems particularly agnostic or dull or disappointing. 

   "There is a way to be good again..."

   "One foot on sea, and one on shore, to one thing constant never. 

     Then sigh not so, and let them go..."

   "Donde aprendimos a vivir sin lagrimas"

   "I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it"

   "Where else does a turtle crossing the road make all the difference in the world?"

You may not realize this, but if you've ever written me anything- particularly if it's anything meaningful- your words form their own (metaphorical) book. I think there's an entire volume of "I love you"s somewhere in my memory, and I pull it out whenever I need to know. I try to incinerate the unkind words (which unfortunately have the nasty habit of sticking longer otherwise), keep the kind ones, remember your stories and reference them. Some of them are under my bed, all of them are in my heart. 

There is another book, too, that reads me as much as I read it. The annotations don't quite outnumber the original words yet, but in more than one instance it looks like a hybrid of book and journal. It's an odd collection of stories and poetry, more alike and unlike my own writing than any other book on the shelf. It is a portal and a mirror, mysterious and terribly frank. Its were some of the first words I referenced in my own thoughts, and the more I read and study it, the more I realize I didn't quite understand it in the first place and don't entirely understand it now. It, more than any, is the one that shapes my thoughts and these letters. 

   "Who can truly be innocent?"

   "The kingdom is like the pinch of yeast that a woman mixed into her bread"

   "Now we see through a mirror dimly, then we will see face to face"

So here's to the books, and to that book, that make writing (and thinking, remembering, and hoping) possible. 

Selected quotes (memorized) from:

-The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)

-Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare)

-"En Paz", Defensa Propia (Mario Benedetti) 'where we learned to live without tears'

-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)

-All the Places to Love (Patricia MacLahan)

-Psalm 143:2

-Matthew 13:33

-1 Corinthians 13:12