The Afterwards

It is the end of May and we are home from our long journey.  Starting out, it was a journey to Missouri and mission.  By the end, we had each, individually discovered that the journey wasn't so much to a physical place as to a spiritual place; to a place within our selves.

While we touched and were touched by many people in our mission experience, it was what we took away from the experience that was most valuable to us; it was with us for the rest of our travels and remains with us here, at home.

I feel a sense of openness, of patience, of calm awareness that is deeply expanded from what I felt prior to mission.  Mission improved these positives in my life.  Because of the deepened awareness, I also was forced to look at the things that I feared and was reluctant to get too close to.  There was a strong sense of shame attached to this feeling.  I was surprised at my reactions to poverty and not wanting, after all, to become intimately acquainted with it.  It shamed me.

I was also forced to face a particular fear/loathing that I've come to discover, is my primary battleground for battering down the barrier to God's command for us to give unconditional love and to expect and trust the good that is in all people.

Interior landscapes are as seasonal and changing as the world around us.  Sometimes, our seasons don't show us a great range of change but when one goes out of their comfort zone, oh how the landscape can change and become challenging, very, very challenging.

I live in a shifting interior landscape now and my winter is moving into a very hot summer.  It is here, in a time of reflection, examination, and most of all, prayer, that I can become clearer on the things I can change and accept that the good within me, has become, in all humility, better.  And the bad in me?  Expose it to the healing light and burn it away.