Far Above Me

I have not fallen off the face of the earth somewhere around Guatemala. I have only fallen off the face of the wireless earth. 

It has been a very bumpy month. Highs and lows come in such rapid succession that sometimes it feels like I have been driving over a cattle guard that just won’t stop jostling my insides.

The mountains and sky here are so beautiful. Surrounding the city is a mountainous rim of deep green that calls my name every time I remember to notice it. The sky seems bigger than normal. More convex as though the paradoxes of this land bulge the heavens as they defy description. 

The stories we have learned through books, across the table, and through the speaker of watchfulness have been inspiring and Good. People struggling to find God in and out of churches steeped in different cultural strains that both sustain and stunt their divine identity. People who prefer to be with their family more than anyone else. People who consciously avoid dishonest parts of progress and people who feel alien to traditions that have lied to them. 

As for me, so small in this big and foreign place, I have noticed, sometimes with fear or pain, that here has reminded me to trust. That there, home, I can let that muscle atrophy, and that leaves me ill-prepared for community and crisis. We have had this beautiful and challenging time in which we have no choice but to exercise trust, camaraderie and grace with and to strangers. And we receive them too. This time is a reminder of our own limitations, size, and interconnectedness. 

Things here are allowed to be much more wild. Unkempt. Rested. Lenient. Even in more touristy places. More than any country I have been before. My sharp eye immediately sees the gaps, the overhang, the bumps and drips. 

And I wonder, can I acquire grace through osmosis?

Could I take that as my lasting souvenir? Would observations lend themselves to Kindness when I see the gaps, the overhang, the bumps and drips in others. In my self. 

Please, yes. Here is, here I am, hoping. Shaken. Trusting

 

“Yet God, my King, is from of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth…Yours is the day, yours also the night; You have established the heavenly lights and the sun. You have fixed the boundaries of the earth; you have made summer and winter.” From Psalms 74.

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