I’m going to share a struggle here. Don’t get too excited, it’s nothing horrible
or heart-stopping. But it took me a
couple weeks to get a post written for two reasons: My darn pride doesn’t like
it when I admit a struggle in an area that I have experience in (like travel),
and I didn’t want to sound like an ungrateful complainer (I still don’t). I decided this post needed to go up because
of the rebuttals of those reasons: Though I fly a lot and have even been out of
the country a few times, I am not the experienced world traveler that I’d like
to be and I’m still challenged when I venture to new places, and I hope that
hearing how Jesus helped me through will be encouraging to others, especially
if they’re experiencing the same feelings.
I love living in Guatemala.
My host family is wonderful, Spanish is enjoyable, the other students
are great, and it’s just one big adventure.
But most adventures come with some challenges, and late October held a
challenging week for me. I normally eat
very healthfully at home, and my diet here is very different, and much more processed. I’m a pretty messy person (my stuff seems to
be alive. I open a suitcase or drawer and a bomb goes off and all my clothes
run away and spread out all over the floor) but I like cleanliness. That sounds totally contradictory, but what I
mean is that I like my clothes to be spread out all over a clean floor, I don’t
keep rotting food or dirty dishes lying around, and I like counters and
surfaces to be sans crumbs, germs, and dust.
My room in Antigua always has dirt and fine gravel on the floor, mold
living on one of the tables, and plenty of dust and spiders in the
corners. Finally, the going joke is that
I have sangre dulce (sweet blood) because anytime I’m anywhere near any kind of
biting bugs, I’m covered in bites. Well,
that’s no different here.
Normally all of those things don’t bother me—they’re part of
the adventure. But I guess I had just
had too much. The food was not sitting
well with my body, I was covered in bug bites, and sneezing from the dust. I missed America.
I had to make a choice.
Either I let these frustrations take over my attitude and complain to my
friends, or I gave them to God. I chose
the latter, because this semester I’ve really been focusing on depending on Him
one hundred percent—He’s the only one who’s completely constant and completely
omnipotent, so why depend on anyone else?
I’m a verbal processor so I like to talk about everything that’s on my
mind with my close friends (and anyone else who’ll listen). This is fine and dandy, but God is the only
one who can truly bring peace. I just
wrote that other post about peace and when I put Philippians 4:6-7 in
there I realized how much that verse has been exemplified in my life this semester.
Here in Guatemala, I have no piano to play as an outlet. I have no internet at my house to waste time
on. I don’t have my best friends from
school that I’m used to confiding in.
And I have lots of free time. When
I came to Guat, I decided that I wanted to deepen my relationship with God and
draw closer to Him in every area of my life.
I wanted to be fully reliant on Him.
I have been making an effort to bring every single request to God and
let Him take care of it. That verse in
Philippians says not to be anxious, but to be thankful and in through prayer
present everything to God, and we
will receive profound peace.
Well, it’s true.
As I prayerfully pushed through the frustrations, instead of
becoming grumpy and resenting my situation, God continued to refresh me and I
was filled with thankfulness and patience.
The issues didn’t go away, but neither did God at my side. It was humbling and interesting to wrestle
with the unfamiliar feelings of frustration towards a new culture, and because
I leaned on Jesus the whole process was much easier.
Postscript:
My friend Heather took some kind of cultural communications class last year and
she informed me that the feelings I was experiencing are normal in a progression
of phases that occur while living in a new culture, and she experienced them
too when she lived in Cambodia for a summer.
The name of the stage I was in was resentment, though I did not resent
Guatemala because I let God take the reins instead of my selfish heart. The next stage is acceptance, and I am happy
to say that I think I have passed into that one. I’m back to being okay with my dusty floor
and itchy, bumpy feet. I am so thankful
that I get to live here. I still need
Jesus desperately for patience and fulfillment, but that fact will never change
:)
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