Spirals

photo credit:  www.rachaelwisephotography.com

I tend to write about certain subjects, similar ones.

Time and its wisdom.

Surprises from sweaty, tropical places.

Gifts of love and hope across the globe.

My online life exists in gently-spiraled themes.   My real life exists in complicated, sometimes aggressive, twists.

The stories of our students often break me into a million pieces.   The pieces never, ever return to complete.

In the pieces of broken me, I find peace and a rare joy.    Peace that does not involve a happy day or a sad day;  instead, a day of life full-lived.     Joy, not a smiley easy happiness; instead, a hard-fought, hard-earned,  Jesus-given joy.

I sit this dusty, dusty afternoon in the school office;  an office that didn't exist just 2 years ago.   In years past, we had a small office at the back of a classroom.  

I remember today's early morning and a beautiful teacher prayer time in this same space that pauses me, every morning, to reset myself to God-speed.

I listen to an enormous marching band of 75 Miskito students practicing for a competition tomorrow. Their excitement and energy lifts me.

I share details with teachers about a Physics Olympics which now involves our school.    In a region of 15,000 students, only 4 passed to the National Physics Olympics.   Of those 4, 3 students are from Instituto Vida Abundante.     What surprises me about this?    Our students come from absolutely nothing on a material scale.  They were not read to at bedtime.  They have no books in their house.  Their parents often cannot read or write.    And yet, they are victors in many more ways than just academic.

I smell mowed grass on adjacent earth, my yard, my house.   So extraordinarily simple, yet, where love, in all of its disguises, lives.

Mysteries continue pressing in...     Why?  Why the horrible?  Why the beautiful?   Why the blessing and the perceived curse?   All mystery.

I often search.

More frequently than before, I find.    I find that mystery itself does not unsettle me.  Mystery frees me to search everywhere and to find myself where I started.     It frees me to let go, love others and
be surprised.