Why, hello there. I seem to have forgotten I have viewers/readers. Life has gotten, I must say, rather mundane again. It has a tendency of doing that. But I guess I still do have some observations and anecdotes to share with the general public.
One of them is that I forgot how much I enjoy summertime. I usually do not like for school to be over--partly academically, partly socially--but then I get to stay up late with my best friends watching multiple Paul Newman films (mmm), or blow bubbles and draw with sidewalk chalk with a group of friends mid-afternoon just because we can, or staying up all night, sleeping in, and doing lots of bike riding and yoga-ing. That is when it is nice to be back in Wheaton.
I have also been lately wondering why this summer I do not have a job. I had a job lined up for this summer last fall, before I started traveling, but things at the office changed and that was not an option when I got back. But, it was also too late to plausibly pursue other options. There was also the fact that my summer schedule will not really put me in good standing to get hired; two weeks here, two weeks away, etc. My mom started commenting, "You should really get a job for the summer." Oh boy. Now, finding work had become an actually important stress.
I wanted to protest, maybe more to explain the whole thing to myself than to my mother: "But I've
been working all year--I just haven't been paid. I have been learning and thinking and growing and stretching and observing and listening and waiting and trying
SO
HARD.
This is not the beginning of an era of laziness--not even Latin America could truly cause that 180-degree change in my personality. Don't worry. I have no designs of mooching all my life. I have just taken this time to put the learning and the discovery before materialism, just as I set out to last fall. I am healing, growing more, changing, reacting, putting-into-place, preparing, and processing life this summer. That's the job ahead of me. Its only salary comes in non-monetary goodness: peace (putting things to rest), joy (in new things I now know I love), and maturity."
After making known those things to myself, and explaining them to Mom (whose core concerns, it turns out, were more against my very possible summer boredom than about the laziness of it all), we both realized that I am
"redefin[ing my]self, not by all [I] do, but how [I] choose to serve and grow....[that I am] lying fallow for a purpose right now".
My dad's comment on the same conversation was this:
"[S]sometimes the purpose may be realized not in what you do, accomplish, or change, but just as much with how God is molding you amidst the relative quiet."
So, several things came out of this. A new, peaceful state of mind when approaching this seemingly lazy and slobbishly unemployed summer. The re-realization that I have amazing parents that really do mean the best. And that God holds every moment, shapes every moment; not that I have to look for his reasoning or try to make out the story from his omniscient point of view. After all, the best novels and fables and stories unravel in a way that the characters cannot predict but the Author can appreciate. No, I'll leave to him the omniscience; for now, I will accept the fact that he is here in Wheaton with me, too, just as he was in Argentina and Colombia, and that now--as then--he is teaching me, and my work is to be receptive.
xox
