Yet I still dare to hope...

A verse I have been clinging to this month is in Lamentations 3.

¹⁹ The thought of my suffering and homelessness

      is bitter beyond words.^[a]

 ²⁰ I will never forget this awful time,

      as I grieve over my loss.

 ²¹ Yet I still dare to hope
      when I remember this:

 ²² The faithful love of the Lord never ends!^[b]
      His mercies never cease.

 ²³ Great is his faithfulness;
      his mercies begin afresh each morning.

 ²⁴ I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance;
      therefore, I will hope in him!”

The writer of Lamentations, possibly the prophet Jeremiah, describes his bitterness and the awful circumstances that surrounded him during this particular season of his life. It's pretty heavy stuff. Feeling like God has turned on him- lead into darkness, besieged and surrounded by anguish and distress, buried in a dark place, walled in, bound in heavy chains, blocked his path, dragged him off and torn him to pieces, shot arrows into his heart, people mocking him, filled him with bitterness... Utterly and completely hopeless. Then...
 
"Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this..." 

He remembers the goodness of the Lord. His faithful love and unceasing mercies. That God is good to those who depend on him. That the Lord is good to those who trust in him and search for him. That no one is abandoned by the Lord forever. That though he brings grief, he also shows compassion and unfailing love. God allows these bad things to happen to us, but he doesn't want it to be that way forever. 

For me, this month has been a lot of realizing my own faults and struggles. And the consequences of those faults- feeling like I am just abandoned in this wilderness with no sign of refuge in sight, questioning why God would ever bring me to this place if I were just going to fail. Seeing the areas in which I initially rely on my own strength and skill to get by...  has been extremely humbling. 

But that is why I have been clinging to that verse, "yet I still dare to hope..." when I remember the Lord's greatness and his love for me. That these things, these faults of mine that are coming to light... need to be brought there. 

These sins and bad habits need to be brought to the light so I can get rid of them. 

So I can become the woman that God intends for me to be. 

So that my life can be a greater witness to the greatness of God and the redemption of the gospel. For this I will continue to say...

Yet I still dare to hope... 

"He's a hurting child..."

This has been a phrase I've had to repeat over and over in my head a lot this month. It's something that I knew, but never completely understood the ramifications of until the beginning of this month.

You see... my husband and I are helping out some friends who have been in an awful adoption process for about five years now. It should be over soon, but the kids are a lot older now and have been really hurt from this process. They may not even truly believe that it's going to happen. It's this thing that keeps getting talked about, but it's not real. That's why we are here. In Mexico. We are helping to start the transition, helping to show them that it is real and they will get to be with their parents soon.

But people who have only felt hurt or abandoned their whole lives are hard to connect with, hard to get close to, difficult to change and accept change. They fight those feelings the only way they know how: trying to control whatever makes them feel safe.

While I am not a perfect person, I didn't realize exactly how unprepared and inexperienced I was for this task until we started to have problems. I trusted God to provide the tools and skills I needed, but He needed to show me my inexperience and unpreparedness before He could equip me better. I thought too highly of myself. I was trusting myself more than I was trusting God.

That's why I was hurt and embarrassed by his cutting, insulting words. A child's words. A child who has been through more serious and damaging things than I have experienced in my 24 years of life. He's hurting in more ways than I will ever know or understand.

Only the hand of God can reach that, touch that, begin to change that.

How dare I to even think I could do it on my own?

I am an arrogant, selfish person sometimes. Only the grace of God can make me anything else.

Change.

Living in a foreign country for some reason brings out all of the areas in which I suck at life. All of my insecurities and faults seem like they're just highlighted on a large billboard for the whole world to see. I know that's not entirely true, but that's what it feels like.

Whenever those moments come where one of those things is blaring in my ears, I just want to crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head and hide. Or leave. Just pack up and get out of here and never come back. But running away or hiding never solves any of the problem. It only makes them worse and harder to get over later. And I know God's placed me where I am now, going through the things I am for a reason. To begin the work of surrendering these insecurities that have been hidden away.

The one that has been coming up over and over again since I've been here is the concern and security I have dwelt in from what people think of me. I don't want people to have any reason to think that I am a bad person. This also translates to me feeling like I need to be perfect and my desire to please people (or not let them down). I could sit here and go on and on about the reasons and circumstances that caused me to become this way. However, that does nothing to eradicate the problem.

Even now, as I sit with my anxious heart over situations that have occurred and may present me in an unpleasant light, I just want to pack up and leave this place. I'm crying out to God to take away the anxiousness in me and CHANGE me, because I need to be changed. I know that whatever I am going through needs to be dealt with. It's gone on too long and needs to be fixed, changed, removed, repented... And it is through being here, being in these situations that God wants to change me.

Being in this season of difficult molding and shaping is hard. I feel like Eustace Scrubb from The Chronicles of Narnia- the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Aslan changes him from a dragon to a human again. I can't scratch and tear off my own nasty flesh, only God can get rid of it and give me new flesh.

Change. New flesh. That's what I need.

Time flies...

Last week, we were hanging out with the jóvenes (the high school-age kids at the church we attend down here) and we mentioned that we will be here for 8 more months. Only 8. 8 x 30 = 240 days. Minus the 16 day trip we are making back to Michigan while we renew our visas and it's closer to 220. Sure, it's more days than we have been here, but it's not much. Not much at all.

Then Ian said, "Time flies!" This, being an idiomatic phrase, I wasn't sure if they would say it the same in Spanish. See, I had an entire class in college that talked about idiomatic phrases in Spanish and their rough equivalent translations to English. Because word-for-word translating phrases like, "don't count your eggs before they are hatched" it doesn't carry the same meaning. When I tried to describe the phrase to our friends in Spanish, one of them said, "¿Que tiempo vuela?" Vuela is third person of the verb volar, which means "to fly." It's exactly the same. Even though I've been studying and speaking this language for years, I still have so much to learn.

And only about 220 days to do it. (Okay, so that's not entirely true... BUT I won't be surrounded by an abundance of native speakers to help me learn...)

Sí, que tiempo vuela...