I suppose it’s inevitable when you get to the end of a season of life not to look back and notice all the things you wish you’d done differently. We go through life learning, making mistakes, becoming better people because of those mistakes, but that doesn’t help relieve the pain those mistakes caused. Such is life. As I finish this season of living overseas I can’t help but to take a mental catalogue of my two years and see the mistakes I made, choices and attitudes, successes and failures. I wonder how many wasted opportunities to make friends, practice my Spanish, or simply love someone well are part of these two years. Why is it that when we find ourselves in a situation where we can chose the comfortable route or the needed route, we so often chose what is comfortable?
I celebrated my 25th birthday this past Sunday, and since it was also my last day in Tarma, my birthday was paired with my despedida (going-away party). It was a lovely evening of seeing friends and contacts one last time, laughing and enjoying food together. I was humbled by the number of people who showed up to tell me goodbye. People that I’ve spent these past years trying to encourage to read the Bible, learn to love Jesus, and participate in our ministry. People whom I taught English to, and who have taught me Spanish, people with whom I lived my life in Tarma. I was humbled because as all these people took their turn telling me goodbye I realized how I had failed to love them well. I can justify my overall attitude and behavior in Peru by the circumstances that brought me here and the circumstances that divided my attention between my life here and my life at home, but in the end, aren’t the strong of heart expected to go above and beyond their circumstances? I wonder if I just accepted them and managed to live as best I could with them. I said goodbye to Tarma thinking about my list of things I would have done differently. On the top of that list would be to have invested myself and loved these people more. I’m sure I loved them fine, and sufficiently, but I could have loved them better, dying to self and loving them in a way that no one else has loved them.
So what do you do when you end a season of life with a long list of regrets? I suppose you tack that list to your mental bulletin board and vow to learn from your mistakes and make your future better because of them. I suppose at this point, 5 days away from returning to my own home and own culture, that is all that I can do.
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3 comments:
Another feature which the Gods offer as a clue is very foreboading and ominous. Mt. Zion is a mountain to the north of Diablo (the eye of The Beast) and one which has a working quarry at its base. Consistant with the decay we experience in society, Mt. Zion is being eaten away, slowly stripped of its resources, until one day paradise will be gone forever.
7 billion in 2011. Only 1 billion in 1800 and 2 billion in 1900.
Population explosion is a clue::::The gods are sending everyone back for The End.
There must be some purgatory-like place. Or individual. Like an animal.
Now the gods have sent everyone back to try for one final time to fix their problems and ascend into heaven. Avoiding an animal would have been a big positive because those thrust into this decayed enviornment have less of a chance than those who enjoyed the god's generosity of a slowly decaying enviornment with frightening clues, like the Depression, World at War, the Holocaust, etc.
Anything that can get the poeple frightened and praying is a good. thing. Contentment never motivated anyone.
As we approach the Apocalypse the gods are removing "wrath of god" material from xtian dogma.
As we see wickedness spread throughout the country, like preditory behavior, godlessness, social changes, etc, using cable TV and the spread of "Californication" as justification, they changed xtianity, appropriatly with Catholicism first.
xtianity has changed radically in the 20th century, and everyone should be mindful of the way it was, because the people are in a process of slipping out of god's favor into a state of Damnation, from which the vast majority will never survive.
They used to scare people and make them too afraid to make mistakes. Now people aren't afraid of anything and don't think twice about doing something wicked and evil which will hurt their chances.
If people only understood the importance of good parents. You won't be going anywhere without them. And it won't happen unless you are one first.
Whimsical management=Unstable pathology:::
*Tuscon-waffles
*2006 Hawaii-Jewelry
*Ivan/Wilma-SCUBA
*Haiti-slaves
*Chile-crappy fruit
I'm sure you got some excuse. Just like Mustang Ranch.
You've compromised your integrity so hard you no longer deserve the label "gods".
The gods used the Italians to ruin life in the 20th century.
The gods used the Italians to ruin life in A.D..
"The West Bank, where the end of the world will begin."
And they were reincarnated into the ghetto to be punished as crack babies and in drive-by shootings, ironically poetic justice for inflicting these horrors on their hated enemies.
On their brothers.
We saw it with Mustang Ranch as well:::The gods just manufactured the tactic of the Holocaust to accomplish the goals they planned.
I am of the opinion the gods would have interviened in its absence, illustrating their claims of being good, and established "old world" dictatorship control at the dawn of mankind's mass moral deterioration. Purely speculation, I conceed, and a total waste of time which distracts from important work we are all responsible for, but even without the Holocaust the gods would have manufactured something that would allow them to manage their culpability and justify their lack of divine intervention. After all, we all abide by their chronology.
very well said.
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