Three more weeks to go and lots of fun experiences to live before then.

Today´s fun activity involves leading Bible Study at the Guest House tonight.  Elizabeth is going to help me and we are going to discuss suffering.  I really don´t want the discussion to be my opinion or her opinion but rather God´s truth, revealing His compassionate heart.  Please pray for our preparation time together and for the actual Bible-Study time.  I am excited to see what God has for us. 

Another good note, yesterday I got to sleep in, woohoo! and then had a really hot shower.  I worked over forty hours last week and was quite tired.  Not that I am complaining. It didn´t really seem like that much but I was trying to figure out why I was so wiped and then realized how often I had been at Casa "on duty."  But it is good to feel useful in my last few weeks here.  And actually the next three weeks I won´t be working that much again.  Plus it is good for me to get used to putting in forty hours a week, as that will be my life upon returning!

More exciting news is that some very cool archaeological evidence came out of the dig that I participated in two years ago and that some of my friends are still a part of.  The dig has brought to light that the kingdom of Edom actually did exist during the time of David and Solomon, as the Bible says but as some scholars have doubted.  The site that we were excavating was apparently a part of the early stages of the Edom empire and shows evidence of a complex society having developed before the time that other scholars have claimed.  Pretty niffty, eh?  Not many people can say that they have been part of an archaeological excavation that has helped to solidify the legitimacy of the Bible.

With such an accomplishment on my record, maybe one day I will be famous after all!  We´ll see.  Until then, you can all count me as your friend who looks forward to being home and seeing all your lovely faces!  

Does God answer prayer?

These past few weeks, the Bible study that we have at the guest house has been studying prayer.  So, I have been thinking about and discussing whether God answers prayer and how He does so.  This week I have had two experiences that have made me cry with relief, not so much because I have gotten what I prayed for (although I did and it made me very happy), but becuase God has answered my prayer, which means that He is there and does indeed want to give His children good gifts. Having experienced in my life and seen in others´ lives so much disspointment in terms of unanswered prayers, I had begun to doubt whether God really does have a plan to prosper and not to harm us.

I haven´t asked Elizabeth´s permission to write about specifics, but I think she would understand my excitement in telling you all that some of my prayers for her healing have been answered in that she has come to a realization that has brought a lot of healing to her heart.  She shared with me when we first met an instance when she cried out to God and felt that He did not answer her for years and years.  The circumstances were such that there would seem to be no reason why God would not give her the desire of her heart, if anything it seems cruel that He did not give her her desire.  Hearing her story and having continual conversations about prayer and God´s goodness has caused me a lot of discouragement.  I know what I have experienced about God but it would seem from her story that these things were not true about him for her.  Then yesterday she told me that suddenly things just made sense. Not that we understand why He didn´t answer for years and years but rather we see that in many ways He understands her suffering because He suffered himself and somehow this makes His seeming lack of response easier to swallow.  I would love to be able to post what she wrote about her experience, but I will have to wait to ask her, but to sum it up she suddenly realized that Jesus, God, Himself experienced what it meant to feel God-forsaken as He hung on the cross and God hid His face from Him.  She also realized that often God doesn´t answer prayers hands-on, as in a lightning bolts or bread from heaven, but rather has left His church as His ambassadors in answering the prayers of His creation, specifically in relation to suffering.  When someone is hungry, cold, lonely, being abused, or feeling abandoned and is crying out to God for help, often the answer doesn´t come because one of His followers has been equipped to answer but does not listen or does not obey and therefore does not answer.  Hearing all of this from Elizabeth brought me so much joy and has reminded me again of what God has taught me in the last year about His response to suffering.

The other experience that brought me joy is the prospect of being able to live with a very cool girl from church. When I read her e-mail, I almost cried from relief again. When I began to realize last week that I would need a place to live in seven weeks, I started to freak out because I really want a good living situation over the next few months. Life will be emotional enough with Michael very busy and us preparing for a wedding that I don´t want stress at home.  And although I know living with people is never perfect or a walk in the clouds, I feel as though God really has His hand on this situation and wants to use this time to minister to us both.

All that I could journal yesterday was, thank you, God, for this relief. I was very tired of being angry at You or doubting Your goodness.

Now the kicker is remembering all this when I feel discouraged once again.   

I have been told that the rate at which I update my weblog does not satisfy the needs of my hi-tech audience back home who has the opportunity to check their e-mail and sign onto the internet everyday. But judging by the ammount of feedback that I received from my last two entries, I have posted too much information for you all to keep up with, so I won´t bother to add anything new today, other than to say, hello, I hope that you all are doing well and are thinking so deeply about what I had to say about love that you don´t have time to post comments. 

Hhhhhmmmm, may need to work on the sarcasm before I come back home...

PS Hello, Emily!

PPS An old school song from Cher has just come on the radio in the internet cafe...what a nice breath of home.

JUST LIKE JESSE JAMES!

Yes, I know, Mom, I am your wierd child.

Happy Day of Love

I realized after my last entry that I hadn´t been sugar-coating as much as I thought.  I have shared much of what I have seen and what thoughts these sights have sparked in my heart.  So, instead I have decided to write about what I have learned about love.

I know that broken families is not an element exclusive to Bolivia, however, working with an orphanage has brought to light that many problems that we are trying to fight stem from a man who was unwilling to commit, or a couple that was unwilling to wait.  All of our children and most who may come to us actually have parents, but for whatever reason they are either temporarily or permanently unable to care for their children.  I suppose, that these situations stem from both the man and woman searching for love, comfort, security and satisfaction in places where they will never find enough to fill the longing of their heart.  We have heard so many stories of men who have several women with whom they are intimate, resulting in several unwanted children.  Not to say that there are no men who commit to one woman and remain faithful to their families.  Eli´s Bolivian father is very committed to his wife and five daughters (now that´s faithfulness, five daughters!) and all of our believing friends seem to have strong marriages and families, but many of the people who come to the clinic have children from several different relationships and it´s not uncommon to find a mother of five who´s husband has "se fue" (gone off) or a mother of three kids who got pregnant very young and has gotten pregnant several times since then while looking for a father for her first child.  I know it´s a story that many of us have heard before, in the States just as often as here, but it has caused me to really sit down and think about family, about marriage.

Romance has always seemed like such a silly, fun, immature sort of thing.  That a relationship between a man and a woman is not very important to life and that the real work is done in the office, or on the ministry field, or in some meaningful endeavor.  But just imagine how unnecessary would be some of the most meanningful endeavors if the family functioned as it should...a support network that provides love, comfort, security, and physical needs (food, shelter, affection) to individuals.  Granted work is required to provide the food and shelter for the family, but a man wouldn´t have to draw his meaning and satisfaction from overworking himself if he would look to his family and his friends and find his purpose and meaning there.  My desire to be a social-worker would be moot because children would have families that could care for them, and less well-off families would have their better off families to care for them or their church family to care for them.  My desire to be a marriage counselor would be moot because husbands and wives would find their satisfaction with God and then each other and wouldn´t begin searching elsewhere for their satisfaction.  Homeless shelters, orphanages, therapy, insane assylums, old-folks homes wouldn´t be necessary because the family would be in a position to provide for the needs of all these people.  I understand that I am thinking very idealistically and that in this broken world this standard of perfection won´t ever be reached, however, what I have seen has given me a greater appreciation for the importance of nurturing family relationships, starting with the relationship between husband and wife.  And I think that this idea comes from God.  There is a really cheesy 7th Day Adventist sign on the freeway out to the clinic here that is supposed to be a message from God. It says, Family: that was my idea.  Take care of it!  As much as the sign annoys me, it´s true.  In Proverbs and in Ecclesiastes, the authors talk about a wise man being he who enjoys the wife of his youth while he is still alive to enjoy that relationship and he who works hard at whatever work in which he finds himself.  These verses seem to say that life and satisfaction come in large part from reveling in the intimacy of marriage and in the satisfaction of doing work well.  Now I understand that not everyone is meant to get married and that some people lose that first relationship either through death or a broken marriage. I am not saying that God does not or cannot provide life and satisfaction for those but rather that if he has given you marriage, he has given you a gift to enjoy, a place to find contentment and satisfaction in knowing and being known by another person in the most intimate way possible, even more intimate than a mother can know or be known by her children (see Gen. 1)!  And that´s pretty dang intimate, considering she gave life to the child. 

Let me try to get to the point.  My focus has been marriage (I´ll give the person who can guess why...a not very exciting prize because anyone can figure out why), but the principle that I am getting to is the same in any love relationship: parenting, friendship, brother/sister, relatives.  That love is not the emotion or feeling that you have for another person, but rather love is the actions of selflessness and sacrifice that those feelings make one willing to do.  For example, let´s go back to the broken families I discussed earlier.  The men who loved and left, didn´t really love at all. They desired and satisfied that desire without considering the consequences that their actions had for the other person, for the object of their "love."  Their love didn´t lead them to a place where they were willing to forget their own desires and sacrifice their "freedom" in order to give the woman security, faithfullness, or provision.  And even some of the mothers that we have encountered.  When they sought love and affection from some man, they didn´t love any children that could come out of that relationship.  Some of them even got pregnant on purpose in order to have power to weild over the man that they wanted around. They thought more of their desire for the man than of the good of the children that they would bring into the world. 

All of this pondering makes me so grateful to have a man who is willing, who longs to really forsake all other women and enter into a relationship where ours will be an intimacy that we share with no one else, who wants to have children and a family together, who doesn´t just want me for the physicl satisfaction that I can give him, but rather because we have hope that God is giving us to each other in order to make our lives more fulfilling.  It´s probably rather suprising, but the final thing that drove this home was watching a pirated copy of the 2nd Bridget Jone´s diary. If you want to watch it without knowing what happens, skip the next few lines.

Bridget ends up in a Thai jail with about 40 or 50 young Thai women.  After a while she get´s to talking about her boyfriend, Mr. Darcy, and what a jerk he has been.  The other girls chime in with their sympathy, saying how badly they have been treated by their boyfreinds, naming abuse and being forced to prostitute themselves as examples.  Bridget hears this and then tries to list what Darcy has done, but feels so silly sharing his little shortcomings compared to what the girls have said that she finally realizes what a silly-sausage she has been and how ungrateful she has been for the great guy she has got. 

Now, I had problems with this depiction because it hints that most Thai men treat their women this way, but assuming we´re all inteligent enough not to belive that, let´s continue with what the scene made me realize.  Oftentimes it is so much easier for me, and I think most women, to see the flaws and shortcomings of my significant other and forget all the qualities that attract me to him.  Being here has made me so grateful and really think about the committment that he wants to make, to forsake all others--not just in deed but in thought as well, to work to provide for me and for our family, and to be a family together, to share responsibility for children and for nuturing our relationship. Not because I am the most gorgeous girl in the world physically but because he finds the combination of who I am intellectually, physically, in character and in personality to be the most attractive in the world.  

All this pondering also made me realize that being a mother will require this kind of love and that no woman is "just" a mother, even if she has no other formal occupation.  There is no shame in being a woman dedicated to raising children who will be well-balanced, intelligent, kind, godly, patient, responsible, etc.  Imagine how heartbreaking would my work with at-risk children be if my own children became at-risk (due to any miriad of things that could come up...addictions, greed, selfishness, etc.).  After being with children consistently over the past two months, I realize how difficult it is to be a mother who really loves her children.  There are moments when they are just so cute you could eat them and then there are moments when they are driving you so crazy you could slap them into the middle of next week.  To really love my children I will have to sacrifice much of my freedom, much of my identity and all of my desire to throw things when I am angry.  Just two months of caring for the little loves/monsters has made me realize just how easy it can be to resort to violence, to downright abuse in order to get them just to be quiet, to stop crying, to stop whining!  Thankfully, I have other workers whom I can call on to come in and take over when I am at my whit´s end, but what do mothers do, especially single mothers or mothers with lazy or unwilling husbands, when it´s just them and they are at their whits end?  They either act on their desires to lash out or they sacrifice them and show true love.  But I am beginning to realize that the second option must only come to the saintliest of women.  This also makes me so grateful to have a man who wants to have children together and who will be there to do the raising together, at least as far as it is his decision to be there.  It also makes me realize that it is our responsibility as not only fellow believers but as fellow humans to take care of the widows (or divorcees, or single-mothers as the case may be) because no one can blame them for needing that help!

I guess that is the end of my love pondering for today.  I know it´s all pretty jumbled and that much of it will be revised as I get older and have more experience and more wisdom.  Just thought I would share what has been on my mind this love season. 

I also just want to tell you all that I love you and that I hope to put that feeling into action as often as I can by sacrificing my desires so that I can put your needs first.

Macchu Picchu or

Shannon and Elizabeth Thank the Germans

In true Bolivian fashion, we discovered toward the end of December that our visas could not be renewed for another three months and that our only option for remaining in the country was to either leave the country and come back again or upon our departure from the country, pay $1.25 a day for every day that we were over our visas (for me that would have ended up being $100 in fines).  So, we opted for leaving the country.  It was a good excuse to get to visit the Incan ruins in Peru called Macchu Picchu.  However, due to my mom and Michael visiting, we didnt get to go until a good three weeks after my visa had expired and a week after Elizabeths had expired.  But we decided that paying for that time and getting to go to Macchu Picchu would be better than paying $100 at the end. Then the day before we were set to go we discovered that if we had gone to the immigration office it would have been $1.25 a day, but since we would be paying at the airport it would be $4.38, which for my three weeks still worked out to $100.  I was so upset!  We had already bought the plane tickets and had to go or lose out on what we had paid for the tickets.  We went the next day, flying first to La Paz and going through immigration there.  As we looked around, we realized we had gotten in line in the middle of a German tour group, who apparently had been waiting in line for a half an hour.  One of the men began to make quite a scene about having to wait for so long and he got the employee in charge of keeping the line "in line" so flustered that he hurried the Germans through the line without making them go to the immigration line.  As we were in the midst of them, he must have supposed we were part of them and so when our turn came up and we asked him where we should go, he rushed us through as well without making us go to the window.  When we arrived in Peru, the lady at immigrations was perturbed but not very suprised that our passports had not been stamped (I suppose she is used to oversights such as that happening in Bolivian immigrations) and we got through with only having to pay a $20 resident airport tax, which was cheaper than the $1.25 I was expecting to have to pay.  Thank you to the Germans!

            On a more serious side of the story, when we discovered that we may have had to pay over $4 a day for being over our visas, Elizabeth told God that if we didnt have to pay that, she would give him another chance.  I hope she wouldnt mind my saying that to you guys but I could not help but think that God must have a sense of humor.

The Colliding of Two Worlds   

As to the rest of our trip, we spent two days in Cuzco, Peru, which used to be the capital of the Inca empire and two days in Macchu Picchu (well, one at the actual ruins and another at the hot springs in the little town at the bottom of Macchu Picchu).  Cuzco now stands as the Catholic church capital of South America.  Okay, I do not know if that is true or not, but the city is full of catholic churches.  The reason is that when the Spanish came, they leveled all of the Incan centers of government and religion and built churches and convents on the former Incan centers.  The churches there are...interesting.  Eery, dark, bloody and full of wood statues and gold alters.  There remains very few of the Incan ritual objects made of gold and silver and my theory is that they were all melted down for the Catholic churces.  After touring at least five Catholic sites (cathedral, churches, convent, home of the first archbishop, etc.), I wrote this in my journal.  "Father, I have seen enough of Catholicism meeting Incan culture to last me quite a while.  I realize that Peruvian Catholicism is not the same as all Catholicism, but what I have seen here is a religion of excess, power, opression, obligation, fear and lies."  By the end of the day, I felt ungrateful, but I was so sick of seeing depictions of Jesus bleeding and dying on the cross that I did not want to see another one again.  I confessed this to him and realized that in all of the death that I had seen, I had not seen one depiction of Him resurrected.  Elizabeth said that it is because seeing him resurrected would not elicit enough guilt and sense of obligation.  I realized that if I had been an indigenous woman at the time of the conquistadors and seen the churches in all of their massiveness, darkness and violence, I would have been scared into submission as well.  Needless to say, seeing these churches frusterated me.  Essentially the conquistidors used "Jesus" and "God" as tools of power for their own gain rather than engaging them as the God, Father and Creator of the people that they encountered.  I wanted to cry for all the damage that had been done and all the healing that God would need to do in the hearts of these people in order for them to see Him as He really is, loving, forgiving, full of grace and mercy, a friend to the poor and oppressed, just and the great Comforter and NOT the great accuser (we all know who he is).

The ruins themselves were pretty cool, but it was really all about the view.  The green hills and the way that some of them sort of seemed to have emerged from the ground in a fit of independence, reminded me of the awesomeness of creation.  The scenery (although I was in great company and we had tons of fun being silly) made me miss Michael, as I know that he would have loved it due to its similarity to the mountains in the Lord of the Rings.  Maybe one day we can go there together. 

All in all, it was a nice break and I thoroughly enjoyed my time.  Elizabeth and I had some fun encounters with people, but I will use discretion in sharing those stories with just anyone on the internet.  For these stories, you have to ask me in person...hehe.  Do not worry, I was not looking for myself, duh, I have what I want, but I had fun looking for her!

Until next time,

Shannon