Ghosts

Well, a bunch of folks are leaving. Carrasco is like a cemetery, and the number of ghosts that dwell here is impresionante. Okay, these people aren’t really dead, but our memories sometimes lie a little too thick across the landscape. The lady with the airedale terrier that lives around the block from Randy and Bird. The Cochran’s old house (they lived there just barely a year and I call it “the Cochran’s house”) has been painted three times. I still use the same doctor they introduced us too, and now his kids are even coming to church with us every now and again.

And now, like 762 families are moving away (okay, maybe only about 10). September will find me, a U.S. citizen, standing at the Carrasco International Airport, weeping and hugging on some real close Uruguayan friends. Why? Because I am leaving and moving to the United States? No. Because THEY are!

Buddha says it only hurts so bad because I don’t want them to leave. My desires are the problem. Hah. Stop loving them then, and it won’t hurt so bad. Yeah. THAT’S what I’ll do.

Jesus said, “In my Father’s house are many rooms, and I go there to prepare a place for you. If it were not true, I would have told you so.”

That’s what I am talking about. That place is real. And I want to be there. With John, Jamy, Bird, Randy, Mom, Dad, Mom, Marcelo, Luciana, their daughters, and her brother and sisters and all of us, and so many more, just wrapped up in intimacy, the campfire warmth of God’s presence and a whole lot of, “Guess what? I’m not going anywhere. At all.”

Paper, Scissors, Glue

Jung maintains that our lives are driven by the unfulfilled dreams of our ancestors. My dad always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher. My grandmother always wanted to be a missionary. I am a missionary teaching kindergarten children. Jung. Who’d a thunk it?

Snapshots

Here is a story I wrote. It is purely fictional. There is nothing in it that is true whatsoever. Even the names are made up.Snapshots

Dragging myself to Jesus Kicking and Screaming

Okay, I don’t think I suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I do have little pieces of me that hesitate to trust this great gift God has given humanity in his son Jesus. Today I lay on my office floor variously staring at the ceiling and the inside of my eyelids trying to listen and see just what was going on in the deeper regions of me.

I had this picture of a little kid chained to an angry teenager (no joke) and the kid was beckoning to the adolescent.

“Come on, you gotta meet him”

“Forget him, let me go!”

The kid couldn’t make any progress with the teenager, but at least the teenager couldn’t pull the kid away.