did I tell you? I'm learning to see.

So, I had a very long post that I had written in my room at Shiloh but I had written it without internet and am currently at an internet cafe, so you are going to get the abbreviated version and hopefully will have the longer version later.

The biggest thing is that right now I feel like God is teaching me to see. Rainer Maria Rilke once said, "Did I tell you? I'm learning to see." That quote feels like it epitomizees my life right now. I'm learning what it means to live with oepn eyes--whether that means becoming aware that church is bigger than a building, or the paradox that rich live across the river from poor. So many times I struggle with how to resolve these things within myself and I haven't found an answer yet. However, I also think that I am learning what it means to live without the answers....

I'm reading this book by Henri Nouwen, one of my favoirte authors, called Drink this Cup. in it he discusses so many important and thought provoking ideas, dealing with how we need to drink the cup of life to its fullest. Before we drink we need to hold-we need to reflect, understand, and know what we are living. And there are times where it is hard because we feel that the cup is just a cup of sorrows-yet Nouwen's fundamental idea is that it is also a cup of joy. He says, "The cup of life is the cup of you as much as it is the cup of sorrows. It is the cup in which sorrows and joys, sadness and gladness, mourning and dancing are never seperated. If joys could not be wehre the worros are, the cup of life would never be drinkable. That is why we have to hold the cup in our hands and look carefully to see the joys hidden in our sorrows" (46-47). I think it so easy to block my mind to the joy and only see the pain. Sometimes I wonder with how to be oepn to seeing the joy when the pain is felt so acutely. Yet, I have a sense that all along through this process God is teaching me what it means to have joy and what it means to have compassion. I feel as though I am learning what it means to live those words at perhaps a deeper level.

Nouwen goes on to say, "Life is full of gains and losses, joys and sorrows, ups and downs-but we do not have to live it alone. We want to drink our cup together and thus celbrate the truth that the wounds of our individual lives, which seem intolerable when lived alone, become sources of healing when we live them as part of a fellowships of mutual care." (57). I'm starting to understand in a deeper way what it also means to live in community-whether that is growing in my friendships with the team here or continuing friendships/familyships in the States. Community is a big word and I wonder if just as church is outside a building, so a community is also outside of a box....