Burgeoning Dreams

It’s funny how certain events in our lives can lead to seemingly unconnected revelations. God uses things in often very unexpected ways to teach us, uplift us, give us hope, speak to us. I feel like God used our vacation to the coast last week to help me dig up some buried emotions and identify hidden dreams within myself.
Our vacation, while full of wonderful sights and things to do, was also a well-needed rest. We flew into the city of Barranquilla and spent the weekend visiting the Mennonite church there. Then we traveled to the coastal town of Santa Marta to spend the week on the beach. It was wonderful to be together as just the five of us as a team again! Of our four full days there, three of them were spent in the ocean swimming, sun bathing, and riding the waves. One day we explored Santa Marta’s gold museum and drank coffee in a Juan Valdez café before heading off to a beach near the small fishing town of Taganga.
Throughout all of these activities God gave me a wonderfully bittersweet revelation. Sweet because I realized that the other four girls on my team have become very dear to me, like family, but bitter because in almost exactly two months we will not only depart from Colombia, but part as a team. It has been awesome getting to know Amy, Karin, Melina, and Stephanie on a deeper level, sharing secrets, daily struggles, joys, and God moments. I can hardly imagine life without them after being so close to them for the last eight months! I suppose I saw how close we were becoming before but it only just hit me how much I’m going to miss them.
I also identified something about myself, a burgeoning dream that perhaps has always been there but that I am coming to realize more and more. Before joining RAD I had this mindset that someday I would be perfectly content with a white-picket-fence life: the cute house, steady job, a husband, family. Everything would fit into a compact little bubble. And yet now I see an expanded bubble, one bigger than the confines of what some would call the American Dream. There are places to go, great people to meet, old friends in faraway states and countries to visit. What would it be like to study abroad? To give a year or two or three after college to serve God’s people? To have a job that allows for travel? What would it be like to get to know so many people that every day my email inbox is filled with messages from a dozen different countries?
So where will I end up? As one of my newest Spanish phrases puts it: ¿Quien sabe? (Who knows?) Well, God knows, for it says in Psalm 139: 1-2 that he has searched us and knows us, knows when we sit and when we rise. He knows all about us, and as it says in vs. 9 and 10, “If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your [God’s] hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”
Bendiciones (blessings) and may God also help you to realize your small, insignificant, and hidden dreams.