i read an encouraging article in the Metro last week. It was about the Homeless World Cup -- a street soccer tournament created three years ago in South Africa to combat poverty and homelessness. the creators of the tournament hoped that the pride and discipline grown through the practice of soccer would help the homeless and the poor to overcome whatever difficult situations they are in. So far, 77% of those who have partcipated have gone on to make positive changes in their lives -- their stories are reassuring. a great program, a great model. It took place last week, 48 nations in Capetown. next year, Copenhagen.
the tournament reminded me of the program I was beginning around this time last year and have since completed -- "Risk & Prevention." I was telling Jenna and Eric in the car last Sunday that i always choose majors with obscure names -- "risk and prevention", "international letters and visual studies." I don't know why I choose these things because it certainly isn't beneficial, like many of the choices i've made or make. it could explain my current state of unemployment -- no one knows what the heck i studied! or, maybe, i'm the one who can't quite put the pieces together and would rather blame a name that's not my own. could be, maybe.
I have to admit that in these past few months where I have been jobless and oftentimes hopeless, I've wondered why the Lord planned for me to study film and Japanese and english, and then brought me to a place where I felt out of place: during orientation everyone went around and talked about the wonderful and interesting things they were doing to better the world prior to starting graduate school, how it motivated them to come to the program, to learn more... When it was my turn, I told them how I had been working in corporate america and had just come back from spending time in Japan. I tried to make it sound good and as charitable as possible but it was quiet and i sat down quickly. it was good to be there though -- to be with people who want to change the world in ways that will stick through programs like the one above as well as others involving social awareness and literacy, street children and brazilian martial arts, immigration and emotional development... I still wonder where this and all the other pieces fall or fit.
I was talking to Heidi in my room two Saturdays ago, after the race. Heidi is this petitepetite person with a big heart for community development, children and people and their stories, social justice. she only responds and speaks after thinking deeply about things; my words seem to just spill out, messy. hers are always sincere. She severely understands the importance of being emotionally aware and emotionally healthy, how important it is to process the large and small things that we experience on a daily basis or maybe just once. Heidi now lives on the second floor in Shinae's old room but she has made that place her own, comfortable and warm.
We spoke about many things -- it started with her night and then her day: how she went to a conference on North Korea, how she went out afterwards and felt different from the others -- how she sometimes wished she wasn't different. and then we spoke about faith and vision and the Lord being able, but also the necessity of approaching things strategically and systematically, open-minded and with wisdom if hope was for something more than surface level acceptance. I told her I liked how she was different and that it was important that she was; She told me that I had it in me too, that she saw it. I responded "yeah, maybe..." maybe something was there, but it had yet to take form -- it's a mushy little thing, like a blub or a blob. I tried to form it with the air in my hands to show her and explained something that has frustrated me more recently than it has in the past: it wants to become something but it doesn't know how or where to go, the shape of things.
jenny, in her email, suggested that its about obedience. "obedience belongs to us and everything else belongs to God. so all we have to do, is do the next thing that needs to be done. there are things we can control and things we can't control so don't dwell on things we can't control and the things of the past (mistakes, regrets) -- that's for God to deal with. all we can do is live each day obediently and do the next thing." thinking about it, what she wrote, reminds me of what I shared at the end of my testimony on my last Sunday at Nissin Church -- "...in my distress I searched the Word to try and understand how great men of faith in the Bible were able to live such lives for the Lord. The Lord showed me that the answer was very simple -- they walked with Him, every day..." every day.
i'm not sure if that is what I've been doing, but whereas before that thing or mass (blub or blob) that I tried to explain to Heidi was sort of flat and pretty docile (maybe sleeping?), now it's lumpy and active and sometimes agressive, kind of like my sister sleeping beneath the covers after watching too many xfiles. Things that helped it grow: largely, my roommates. The Lord has blessed me immensely through them; it's rare to find people you trust very much. And I guess on the grander scheme of things it's because even though I can't say that I was walking with Him every day, He -- He was always walking with me. But, would i be okay if it never took form or if the blubblobthing was the right and final shape? I fear that all of this won't culminate into something big and terrific and what concerns me even more is that i'll never be able to understand or accept that this, this now, actually is the big and terrific plan: this is it, and there is nothing greater. i've been trying to pray that ultimately my hope and joy is in whatever the Lord has planned for me -- for faith -- but i get scared and disappointed when i think that some things may not work out.
Last Monday, I went to a reading with Liz. I think my favorite was Randi Triant, when she read her exerpt from her story "The Starfish." I wanted to ask her where her idea came from -- from the animal itself (its ability to regenerate a ray that has been cut off as long as its center is intact, that the severed ray can survive and regenerate without the center if it is a certain special species, the idea of cutting or separating oneself purposely in order to survive) or from a person or experience or from many different places... but instead i listened to her answer someone else's question about how to successfully execute a nonlinear narrative. Randi answered that she uses props. props help her to stay in place, she has a tangible something to go back to. the starfish was her prop, or, even more concretely, the jar that kept the single ray. I wonder what my prop is, the thing that keeps me centered and in place -- the thing I keep going back to --
i've thought and think that it is God, the Gospel: that God loves me and I know He does because He sent His son Jesus to die for me -- He made a way when there was none, He has a purpose a plan. Jeff reminded me of this a month or so when he debriefed me on Japan. (and since then the Lord has answered my prayer regarding my longstanding contention with missions -- that it's not a loss of culture or identity or diversity but the gain of peace and comfort that comes from knowing that you have a God who loves and cares for you, that this is something He will never compromise. there is no loss: all different but now with peace. i suspected that I wouldn't understand or share until i knew or believed these things. i wish i still remembered the moment when this all came to me it was either on my bed or on a run -- it was so clear, i think it was the run) Pastor Rojas' sermon today also did the same -- it was refreshing and good to hear a sermon that was loaded with the gospel, all about Jesus about God's love for us that He did it that He saved us and made us alive with Christ that He is the great initiator of all things that there is no salvation without grace that He loveloves us that we benefited from what Christ did for us that all we can say is "yes Sir!" -- it laid to rest a lot of the things that have been swimming in my head as of late: the things mentioned above as well as the things I keep my own.
in a smaller way, I guess it was that article, my prop. because what it did for me that day and what it has done for me since, each time i remember it, is remind me of the possibility of things. but not just the possibility of things, but faith that these things can and will happen. it keeps me focused and moving forward. in the months since i graduated, i began to, more and more, doubt the things I learned and studied, the things I believed in and thought were important the things that carried me. but the success of this program -- 48 nations, 77% changed -- renewed these things and helped me believe in the worth and victory of the programs we planned and of the people behind them, that they could do it and that their work would lead to a place good and excellent. it reminds me too that I can do it and the Lord can do it in my life -- i approached my job search with an added sense of gusto that day and right now there are some things that look promising, things that speak to God's faithfulness. i hope it all works out... but even if He doesn't do it, i'm okay. i think that i'm okay
