take-off and land, take-off and land (part one)

I am sitting here in the Miami Airport, and I am drinking the biggest iced coffee Dunkin Donuts had. It was probably brewed before lunch, but I forgot to pack food. Somehow in all my planning, (or lack of planning. Hahaha…I packed yesterday) I didn’t think of bringing anything to eat between 2pm Sunday afternoon and 7:45am Monday morning. I can’t help but laugh. So here I sit, with iced coffee, pretzels, and the only thing I did manage to bring: chocolate. I had half a bag of Dove chocolates in my room at home (Surprise!) and I found Harry London mint chocolate (the best mint chocolate there ever was) for super cheap the day before I left. SO. I have chocolate. And coffee. And pretzels.

Airports are both my favorite and least favorite places in the world. As I was walking from my landing terminal to my next boarding terminal, I saw a plane that was boarding for Bogota. It was the last call. I seriously stopped walking in the middle of the huge walkway because everything in me wanted to forget my luggage and my commitments and my plans and everything in Paraguay and America and everywhere else in the world, and switch my ticket to Bogota. I don’t know where this strange wanderlust came from. I want to go every place that humans can go. I want to leave footprints in all of the deserts and wear every different kind of clothing. I want to identify with every people group, to become a part of them. I want to have people to call family, all over the world. I can’t decide if this is just another kind of greed or not. Airports are my favorite because there is so much opportunity that when I sit down and watch it all walk past me, I get a little giddy. People-watching is my favorite. I want to speculate and build stories. I want to make up relationships and understand why people’s eyes are drawn to certain things and not to others. I want to see how each of these threads are woven into culture and time, and I want to follow the threads to their roots. The idea is so much more captivating than it should be—probably because it’s impossible. I will never know all of the people that are here.

They are also my least favorite because they make me leave little pieces of me all over the world; pieces that I will never recover. They cause me to, by necessity, hack shapes out of the fabric of my being and tie them around yucca trees and house stilts and the ankles of foreign children. Leaving is easy, it’s the coming back that’s so hard.

I think Jesus is teaching me about Hope. Some of you already know that Hope has been a huge and terrifying thing in my life lately. Maybe it’s a not-thing. I am not sure. I can’t understand it and I don’t know where it comes from and I’m not sure I want it but I don’t think I can do without. This Hope-thing began with me not knowing what to set my heart on when I wasn’t sure that all the money would come in for this trip. I wanted to plant my Hope in the fact that God's will would be done, but how did I know his will would be done? What if the people he told to send money to me didn’t listen? Then I wanted to set my hope on the idea that He could redeem any situation in my life, but I have been down that road before. Although I know that He can redeem any situation, the idea was of no comfort, and there wasn’t much of a direction to that kind of Hope. When I would think of Hope, two things would come to mind.

The first was a huge, nebulous idea where I have reasonable cause for belief that good things will eventually come about, whether they’re what I want or not, and that at the end of all things, I will go to heaven (whether that’s actually what I think it is or not). In this version of Hope, I am unsure of anything except the ultimate ending in heaven and the Lord’s ability to use every circumstance for his Glory. I have no idea what that last part means except that it brings to mind an image of a cruel man with a salt-and-pepper bear sitting in a rocking chair on a creaky porch, sipping lemonade and watching people die. That is not my God, and so I will openly say that Glory is not something I understand yet. Someone once told me to live inside the revelation I’ve been given. Since I don’t understand Glory, I will not try to explain it to anyone until He explains it to me.

The second kind of Hope that came to mind was more like certainty. I wanted to know what was going to happen for sure (i.e. the money does or does not come in for the trip to Paraguay) and then be able to act on that surety. But that is a very, very dangerous thing. You see, I have spent my life (like many women, I believe) teaching myself how to keep a chokehold on my Hope. It’s safer not to hope at all, or if you have to, to have the first kind—the nebulous kind. The second kind is childish. It is sure of something that it has no right to be sure of, and it puts all its stakes in that thing.

I’m not sure about those two kinds of hopes, but I think I know something for sure about my kind of Hope now. It’s not a static thing. It isn’t just an object that you have or don’t have. It’s not something you acquire. It’s alive, and it grows and changes. I think it is a tiny, tiny animal, and it is wild, for sure. The first time, you barely have the strength, but you can’t go without, so you choose it. It’s like a tiny little spark, and it burns inside you when you choose it. It’s so scary, but it’s not big enough to take you over, so you choose it again. Maybe like an addiction? Only it is a good thing, a green thing. A thing that looks foul and feels fair, a thing that only comes from Aslan’s Country.

[He gives good gifts to His children//The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Blessed be the name of the Lord.]

I think I am beginning to like it. It’s dangerous, but it’s mountain-climbing dangerous, not hitting-my-elbow-on-a-running-circular-saw dangerous.

Last topic of the day: Dove Chocolates. They have these touchy-feely inspirational quotes on the insides of the foil wrappers, and most are the typical, “Women just really don’t hear enough of this,” business, but there was one today on one of my chocolates about choosing to enjoy the moment you’re in. I think (especially during red-eye travel) that can be a hard thing to intentionally do. But I think it goes along with Hope. I haven’t quite figured out how, but I am going to figure it out. I also think that it will be pivotal to giving and receiving the most I can during the two months I will be in Paraguay. It is not something I do well, so I think I will practice.  

All of the people sitting here waiting to board my plane are speaking Spanish. They speak much faster than the Costa Ricans. I’m a little afraid.