Well friends, halfway. Okay, okay not exactly halfway. Halfway through my time away if I don't count the time my parents AND BROTHER will be here. A couple weeks back I found out Jeremy is hopping the Atlantic with my parents and I'm so, so excited! But that excitement leaves me thinking about the present a bit less and thinking about home a bit more.
So now my prayer has become: I'm at the plow, keep me from turning back.
Turning back doesn't really mean getting on a plane for me. (Although I will be doing that tomorrow, but instead to Germany and not the US) More than anything it means adopting an "I wish" or "what if" or "man, I'm missing out on so much" attitude. Turning back would be forgetting that he has made everything beautiful in its time and that right now, my time is Spain.
I started meeting with a woman who is wiser and has just experiences moralize than me (best advice I have to give: get together with someone older and wiser than you) and she encouraged me to ask good questions of myself and the Lord, for example:
"What is actually the hard thing is this?"
"Do I really believe You give good things?"
"What is the good thing You are giving me in _____ situation?"
So these days my question often becomes "what have I not given up for the sake of knowing You?" And, "what is the good thing you are giving me now?" A friend of mine made me the cutest little freehand drawing of the Alhambra with the verse Indeed, I count everything as los because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
Usually the answer to that last question is himself. He's giving me more of himself as sometimes I feel that all I have is him.
One of the things I have counted as loss is my family (though I really still have them, just a little ways away). I can't tell you how much I miss a good hug from my dad or this sweet little nephew of mine.
And yet I've also gained quite the family. My host mom told Hanna, "We are her family now. She's hundreds of kilometers from home so now when something happens she has to tell us and we defend her."
He's given me a host family that doesn't mind laughing at (with) me either. So I was telling them how we used to have cows and my host mom asked, "oh, for milk?" And I said no, they didn't bring milk.
"If they're cows, how did they not have milk?", she asked...to which I tried to respond "they were male".
Instead I said "they were men". She still cracks up occasionally and says she just remembered how I said my cows were men.
It is good to laugh, even about my own ignorance. I find it keeps me humble. That part about love not being prideful...sometimes it feels like the Lord is leading me from lesson to lesson through that passage in 1 Corinthians 13. Love is patient. Kind. Stop envying. Only boast in Christ, etc.
Anyway, back to the point at hand. Time is passing by quickly and sometimes so slowly. Really it blows my mind.
But as the Spaniards would say, ¡No pasa nada!
I don't really know how to translate that because literally it means nothing happens. The feeling you get from it though is something like 'don't worry' or 'it's okay'. After thinking about the phrase I realized I hear it quite a few times daily.
In fact, my host brother asked me why I was doing homework and said 'what's going to happen if you don't do it? (question form of no pasa nada) You're a foreigner and their just going to give you a 9 or 10 and be done with it.' Haha, I don't think he gets that the majority of my classes are with just foreigners and there is actually quite a bit of graded work. But it goes to show the attitude here.
Not that they are lazy, by any means. Just that if you don't get something done or are worried about something, you're sure to hear 'no pasa nada' and be able to take a deep breath. I've found that's really good for me.
In respect to time passing quickly, it's kind of like 'no actually, a lot pasa really quickly' or some sort of Spanglish like that. Yet it is good to just think of that phrase, no pasa nada. It's started to mean 'hey, in the long run this won't matter' and I like that quite a lot.
So tonight, while I could be doing work ahead of time so I wouldn't have as much to do upon return from spring break, I will actually be going to get gelato at apparently the best place in Granada. I'm sure it won't be quite like the Creamery, but no pasa nada. I'll be back there soon enough!
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