"This is about whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated."

"Immigration can be a controversial topic. We all want safe, secure borders and a dynamic economy, and people of goodwill can have legitimate disagreements about how to fix our immigration system so that everybody plays by the rules.


But that’s not what the action that the White House took today is about. This is about young people who grew up in America – kids who study in our schools, young adults who are starting careers, patriots who pledge allegiance to our flag. These Dreamers are Americans in their hearts, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper. They were brought to this country by their parents, sometimes even as infants. They may not know a country besides ours. They may not even know a language besides English. They often have no idea they’re undocumented until they apply for a job, or college, or a driver’s license.


Over the years, politicians of both parties have worked together to write legislation that would have told these young people – our young people – that if your parents brought you here as a child, if you’ve been here a certain number of years, and if you’re willing to go to college or serve in our military, then you’ll get a chance to stay and earn your citizenship. And for years while I was President, I asked Congress to send me such a bill.


That bill never came. And because it made no sense to expel talented, driven, patriotic young people from the only country they know solely because of the actions of their parents, my administration acted to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people, so that they could continue to contribute to our communities and our country. We did so based on the well-established legal principle of prosecutorial discretion, deployed by Democratic and Republican presidents alike, because our immigration enforcement agencies have limited resources, and it makes sense to focus those resources on those who come illegally to this country to do us harm. Deportations of criminals went up. Some 800,000 young people stepped forward, met rigorous requirements, and went through background checks. And America grew stronger as a result.


But today, that shadow has been cast over some of our best and brightest young people once again. To target these young people is wrong – because they have done nothing wrong. It is self-defeating – because they want to start new businesses, staff our labs, serve in our military, and otherwise contribute to the country we love. And it is cruel. What if our kid’s science teacher, or our friendly neighbor turns out to be a Dreamer? Where are we supposed to send her? To a country she doesn’t know or remember, with a language she may not even speak?


Let’s be clear: the action taken today isn’t required legally. It’s a political decision, and a moral question. Whatever concerns or complaints Americans may have about immigration in general, we shouldn’t threaten the future of this group of young people who are here through no fault of their own, who pose no threat, who are not taking away anything from the rest of us. They are that pitcher on our kid’s softball team, that first responder who helps out his community after a disaster, that cadet in ROTC who wants nothing more than to wear the uniform of the country that gave him a chance. Kicking them out won’t lower the unemployment rate, or lighten anyone’s taxes, or raise anybody’s wages.


It is precisely because this action is contrary to our spirit, and to common sense, that business leaders, faith leaders, economists, and Americans of all political stripes called on the administration not to do what it did today. And now that the White House has shifted its responsibility for these young people to Congress, it’s up to Members of Congress to protect these young people and our future. I’m heartened by those who’ve suggested that they should. And I join my voice with the majority of Americans who hope they step up and do it with a sense of moral urgency that matches the urgency these young people feel.


Ultimately, this is about basic decency. This is about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated. It’s about who we are as a people – and who we want to be.


What makes us American is not a question of what we look like, or where our names come from, or the way we pray. What makes us American is our fidelity to a set of ideals – that all of us are created equal; that all of us deserve the chance to make of our lives what we will; that all of us share an obligation to stand up, speak out, and secure our most cherished values for the next generation. That’s how America has traveled this far. That’s how, if we keep at it, we will ultimately reach that more perfect union."






-Barack Obama

Spontaneously.

Blogging was such a big and important part of my life for a long time. Writing or even just choosing a quote and pictures helped me reflect deeper.

It was also such an intentional way for me to be joyful. There were so many wonderful, joyful things in my life, yet the years since college also were very much characterized by fighting back fierce loneliness.

Well, actually, that's not completely true- I didn't want to fight the loneliness, all the time. Actually, I tried hard to be intentional about letting it in and acknowledging it... sitting with it, learning from it, being where I was on purpose and not missing out on what those seasons uniquely were, and offered.

But I fought fiercely the despair that can so easily accompany dark loneliness. This blog, focusing on the blessings and joy my life was so filled with, was a way for me to intentionally turn my eyes to them, to not think longer than I should on the places in my life that ached with what felt lacking.

My fairly sudden lack of inclination to engage in a hobby and discipline I'd practiced usually multiple times a week for years took me by surprise. But it hasn't seemed to make sense to force it; I see so much wisdom in restraining energy from the social media world that I couldn't figure out too many good reasons to make myself try harder to invest more online.

The best way I can understand my lack of desire to write and post on here... is that joy has never come easier to me than it has in the last sixteen months. I don't feel like I generally posted more when I was unhappy?? But I do think there was something in it about talking myself out of self-pity, strengthening my resolve to rejoice in the life I was living: "Look. See. You're happy. You really are, and these are the joys of your life, and they are really, truly good."

And they really truly were. (Are.)

For the last sixteen months, I haven't had to work very hard to remember joy.

I'd expect that someday I will again...

So yeah. Lately, blogging words haven't felt forthcoming, so I haven't bothered...

but then I go back and read things and certain seasons are captured so vividly in the way only real-time writing can do... and I am grateful to have those years saved in that way.

So. We'll see.

On that note... I just reread this, which I wrote more than five years ago.

I summarized where I was spiritually that year with more clarity than I certainly could use to explain where I am spiritually now.

And oh, just, oh. Life!! I wrote that in the Illinois suburbs, living in 27-year-old Ryan and Kendra's guest room. Oregon was a state I'd barely been to or thought about. Matt was working in DC in Joseph's House- no! He was in Ohio with his family, getting ready to move to DC to work in Joseph's House. Christine was living with her parents and dating Luke. I was fairly sure I'd probably never date anyone, ever. My mom was critically ill and I could barely breathe for fear. My roommates had both just moved and Wheaton felt ridiculous without them. I was spiritually and emotionally so sad. And wondering when I'd ever heal back to being comfortably and securely Christian. 

Five years and one week from the day I wrote that, I would get married. In Oregon. To Ben, who I couldn't even have imagined to pray for.

Ryan and Kendra wouldn't be able to come, which would make all of us so sad, but it would be because life would be too insane with the recent birth of their second baby. Matt would be in it along with his husband, who he had married a year before, calmly and happily and legally, with me standing up as an attendant and his family present and Chet having flown in from New York. Christine and Luke, husband and wife for years, would walk in together. My mom would be there and fine, and beautiful. She and my dad and my stepparents and stepsiblings- people  I had never met or imagined five years and one week before- would sit in the front row together,. My roommates and the Tuesday boys and I would pose in our finery for pictures in an Oregon field, laughing and so happy. I've given up on being comfortably and securely Christian, but God and I are doing okay anyway.

Apparently my rambling blog style hasn't changed... ever.

July 5, 2010.

"One of my best friends once wrote this:

"...The last four months were hard. But if a semester is the cross, as are all things, then maybe the last four months saved my life. Maybe all those other things taught me to see my One thing better."


Prayer this semester didn't look anything like what I have known it to look like before. I couldn't journal. I couldn't sit in a coffee shop and follow any train of thought long enough to feel like I was praying. The cheerfully-voiced and neatly patterned prayers I said with friends in the cafeteria before meals bore little to no resemblance to the way God and I were actually talking.

Me and Jesus, the me and Jesus we have been since I was 12, wasn't happening. I didn't know how to talk to Jesus in a world that lets little girls get raped and beaten and abandoned. Not in a fake, "Well, I just don't know how to talk to you if you're going to be like that" haughty way. I mean I literally did not know how to talk to Him in this new world in which I found myself. Sometimes I'll try to tell someone that I feel 'different' since HNGR and I don't know how to explain it. Because we're all different, all the time. We're different every year, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. But I don't mean like I grew, or even I regressed. Sometimes I feel like my entire foundation that I stood on has been taken apart and put back together and I'm standing on something I don't even recognize. Now that I can breathe a little bit more I'm realizing that what I'm standing on is still pretty good. Sometimes I get these tiny glimpses that it might even be better. Stronger. But I had to learn how to do all these things on it that I knew how to do before, but the ways I knew how to do them don't work here. And the main thing that didn't work, was praying.

Praying with the expectation life is going to work out just beautifully didn't work. That sucked, but it was good. That was a wrong foundation I'd had. That's not how God works, and it's not how He's ever said He was going to work. I'm not sure why I thought otherwise, and it's been- it is- painful rearranging that. But it's good.

And, praying with the knowledge that God is good, didn't work. Because I wasn't so sure about that all the time anymore.
That sucked, and it wasn't good.

I didn't know how to pray without knowing that God is good, which means I didn't even know how to pray about the fact that I didn't know God was good. And so praying (and pretty much everything else, actually) felt terrifying.

So prayer this semester felt like it almost never happened. Because it didn't happen in any ways I had known to recognize.

Prayer this semester, instead of feeling like I was "keeping company with God", instead of quiet times in Starbucks or Caribou or long letters to God in my journal, was a lot of long walks, in the snow, by myself, with my iPod. Sometimes if it was cold or too late at night instead of walking it was driving, through my neighborhood, through the campus, going the speed limit and using turn signals, going slowly and mindlessly over the same route again and again as I tried to line my heart back up, in the quiet, for just a minute with the God I was missing.

Prayer was chopping vegetables. Really. So much so that I once heard a housemate confess to her boyfriend that she "kind of love[d] it when Emily gets depressed because we get a good soup". Prayer was hymns playing in the background as I focused on the purpose of peeling and chopping and stirring and found peace in the rhythm and the use of my hands.

Prayer was reading Rilke out loud before bed with my roommate and being able to, yes, line my heart up to these words. It was lighting a candle for five minutes at night as I asked God to bless the girls at Mosoj Yan- candle-lighting is something we did on the HNGR retreat which I found helpful.

Prayer was interceding for others, which I didn't do enough out of sheer laziness, but which by some beautiful miracle did not hold the difficulty that attempts at casual conversation with God did.

Prayer was and is, in an incredible gift of grace, the liturgy. It is going to church and saying and singing the same words every week, and in recent months being blessedly able to affirm them more and more. It is the gratitude that rises up in me that, in my inability to tell God these truths about Himself out of any spontaneity or warmth or even sense of friendship, I can sing them and raise my hands for an hour on Sunday mornings and get to tell Him them in that way. That I can find myself more and more knowing that I do believe these things, and that this liturgy, this church, is providing a way for me to affirm them before my own emotions or abilities are going to let me do so on my own. Oh, how grateful I am to get to praise God through words others have written and songs others are singing when my own heart is so confused and cold.

Prayer has been, greatly, others praying for me. That is something I think I underestimated the power of in these past seven months. People have prayed for me and that has been important.


Mostly as I have looked at myself and my interactions with God in the past seven months I have felt ashamed. Who am I to not pray? To not know how? To be so faithless? Clearly, to feel so far from prayer must mean I am far indeed. And how does this show gratitude to Mosoj Yan and the work they do?

But recently I have been realizing a bit more that it was a good thing for me to learn that prayer that does not look like journaling in a coffee shop and leaving with the feeling of peace, can still be prayer. That crying myself to sleep, God still heard me. That prayers lifted by others on my behalf and the behalf of my girls, do something powerful. And that if walking in the snow and chopping vegetables until my fridge was too full enabled me to be in front of God, then He was happy to meet me there.

I'm not very proud of how I lived the last seven months, but good things came out of them.

Mostly this year I felt like I couldn't see "my One thing". But maybe in His great and crazy mercy, He let me go for long walks and chop vegetables and rely on others' prayers, to teach me something about walking on without clarity or feelings of peace or any pride. Maybe He let me rely on the prayers of the church to teach me about the power of community worship, of the history of the big-C Church, of the importance of repetition for our souls, of the power that is in praising Him by choice and even by rote when we feel cold and dry.

I hope and pray that maybe in the long-term, these will be things that will let me see Him more.

If a semester is the cross, as are all things."

I need Advent.

I need Advent so much.

Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, was absolutely lovely. Filled with joy on every side.

I started the day with a pumpkin pie latte at a coffee shop and FaceTiming with my family in Maryland.

I spent a cozy, wonderful day with the Fawvers, which in no way felt like being with "someone else's" family, but like I was with a much-beloved branch of mine (that I just only happened to find when I moved here).

 i love wassail!

I finished the evening with Brandon and Korie and their family, friends I adore and kids whose Halloween costumes I sewed and grandparents in whose home I am invited to weekly Sunday dinners.

Miss two-and-a-half wanted to have a "girl party" in the hallway.

All day, my phone rang and buzzed with love and thankfulness to and from friends in other places.

That night I felt achingly lonely.

Some context here: I had seven different invitations to do Thanksgiving with friends in town. Two invitations to spend the weekend with out-of-state friends within driving distance. My parents and siblings did not hold back their earnest declarations of loving me and missing me and wishing I was there.

I am grateful I felt lonely after a day when my presence being wanted could not possibly have been expressed any more. It made it easy to see the ridiculousness:

My heart told me, "You're not welcome. There is not a space special for you.", and my mind listed the obvious counterexamples and basically said, "You are an idiot. Stop."

The contrast told me, with gracious clarity:

I need God to love me.

All of the love anyone could want or ask for

is not enough to convince me, deep deep deep down,

that I am wanted enough,

or want-able enough,

or invited into a space just for me.

I spent most of this past week working on an Advent project. I am so so excited about it.

For days I have been immersed in all of my favorite quotes about Advent, and Christmas. First compiling them and then leafing through the dozens (literally) I had scrawled out on index cards, and then categorizing them, and then slowly copying them out.

Hours of the past week were filled with reading and re-reading words from the Christmas carols, from Madeleine L'Engle, Henri Nouwen, Bonhoeffer, from the Gospel of John, about Christmas:

about what it means.

About God coming to be with us.

Thank goodness.

Advent is a good, good season for my heart.

The simple message of the Incarnation: And the Word became flesh, and made His home among us:

it is the affirmation I need.

It is so good to know that God came.

It is so good to know He is with me.

It is so good to know He chose to be with us.

It is balm for a crazy heart that all the love in the world can't fill quite up.

I need the message of this season. I am so thankful it is here.

"The celebration of Advent is possible only to those who are troubled in soul,

who know themselves to be poor and imperfect,

who look forward to something greater to come.

The Holy One Himself comes down to us,

God in the child in the manger.

God comes.

The Lord Jesus comes.

Christmas comes.

Christians rejoice!...

We are no longer alone.

God is with us."

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christmas 1928

to my friend on her second wedding anniversary.

dear christine,

the title of this post would imply that it's going to be about your marriage,
but it's actually more about our friendship.

sorry, i know that's kind of narcissistic, but hey- it's my blog and i do what i want.

*******

three springs ago, i had a hard break-up. four days later you got engaged.

i remember you calling me to tell me you were engaged. i was sitting in the sunny back corner of the bagel shop in glen ellyn, journaling and fighting sadness like a weight on my chest, when my phone rang and it was you screaming in excitement.

when i picture that sunny corner and your voice and that day,
all i remember feeling is overwhelming happiness.
when we finally both stopped shrieking and hung up,
i couldn't stop grinning,
and when i looked down at my journal,
for just a second i couldn't remember why there were tear stains on the page.

your joy was my joy.

i remember a week or two later, going wedding dress shopping.
you tried on dresses and posed in those three-way mirrors and all the bridal consultants and i oohed and aahhed over you and you kept smiling and making conversation with everyone there like you do because no matter what you are interested in other people,
and you were so beautiful and so excited to marry luke and so excited to wear that dress and so so happy.

and afterwards we went out to lunch to that place with the good milkshakes,
and you tried to make me talk about how i was feeling about the break-up.
i tried to change the subject BECAUSE WE WERE BUYING YOUR FREAKING WEDDING DRESS and we do not need to talk about this right now!! we're happy!! it's fine!!

and you were PISSED. do you remember?
EMILY.
YOU'RE SAD.
THIS IS A BIG DEAL.

you said i was not.allowed. to say why i was grateful everything had happened how it had, or try to find any lessons in it, or claim there were silver linings, for "at least six months!" (but i talked you down to three); this was a period where it was important to let myself just be sad,
and you grabbed my hand and said
i'm sooo sad you're sad, too.

my pain was your pain.

*******

i count that story as one of my most precious memories.

every once in awhile i'll tell it to someone, and i always feel sort of tentative and vulnerable... like does it even make sense why it matters so much to me?

long after the pain of a break-up has faded,
the gratitude for your friendship in that season remains.

it is no small blessing to have a friend
who will mourn with me
when you had every reason in the world to just be happy.

"rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn."

i got relief from the heaviness of that time for me, in your joy;

but what benefit did taking breaks from your delirious happiness to cry with me have for you?

and yet you were all in,
for mourning as well as rejoicing.

*******

two years ago today, you floated- it really seemed like that- down the aisle on the arms of your parents.

i've never seen someone happier.

everyone who loves you and luke watched and cried and praised God for His sweet, sweet goodness.

you and that boy gazed at each other and oh, the joy.

*******

eight months ago, i was in my office finishing paperwork at the end of the day

when my phone rang. i answered and heard your voice.

you were at the hospital. and you were crying.

through those weeks of tests, and through these months of scary appointments and trial medications and an unknown future,

through hard hard questions and aching, angry prayers,

oh, my love, there has been mourning.

big, hard mourning.

young love gets a bad rap sometimes, like it isn't real because it hasn't been tested.

what i wish is that you'd gotten a few more years of not being tested.

i wish people were rolling their eyes at your love for each other because it's young and naive.

i wish you could still be naive in your newlywedness.

but i thought i couldn't hear you sound more in love than when you called screaming that he'd finally proposed,

then i thought i couldn't hear you sound more in love than when you vowed the rest of your life to him.

but now i've heard your voice tell me, as you drive home from picking up prescriptions, "I am so, so lucky to be married to him."

you and that boy gaze at each other and oh, the joy.

and babe, whether you will take this or not:

your community praises God for what we see when we look at you two.

*******

three springs ago it seemed like a cruel joke to have a break-up and an engagement in the same week. i was so frustrated, that it couldn't just be clean and easy: "we're just happy!".

now (with my sage 25-year-old wisdom) life just seems more all mixed up like that.

sometimes stuff is really hard. sometimes it's really really amazing. usually it's something like both at once, especially if you're counting other people's blessings and burdens in your own.

i hope every day for you is happy for the rest of your life. i hope that you have 60 or 70 more years of marriage.

i hope you come with me to try on my wedding dress someday,

and when we go out for milkshakes afterwards,

maybe i'll rub your baby belly and you'll be laughing and still be interested in chatting with the waitress and hearing where she went to school because you're always interested in other people.

but probably it's going to all be some of both.

sometimes we're going to be calling each other screaming in joy and sometimes crying in heartache and confusion.

and when i think about how we'll live those seasons,

i remember what your 22-year-old, glowing, bride-to-be self showed me:

my pain is your pain, even when it's inconvenient for you and you have every reason to choose to enter into it later.

i pray i would be as good a friend to you.

i can't wait to continue shrieking in excitement with you over all of your joys, from good sales at the grocery store to baby kicks.

and when you are mourning,

even if i am in a season where i could choose to turn away and just smile at my own sunshine,

i pray i will get indignant and tell you that you're not allowed to be grateful or find a silver lining for at least six months,

and i will look you in the eye and grab your hand and tell you earnestly,

i know. i am so sad with you.

it is one of the greatest joys of my life to rejoice and mourn with you.

thank you for being an amazing friend.

*******

...umm... also, happy anniversary!!!

i love you both. i have a card for you and hopefully i will even get it in the mail soon.

love forever,
your grateful friend (and bridesmaid!!)

milkshakes and engagement rings,

april 2011

.my stomach hurts.

"The verdict in the George Zimmerman trial...

told my sons that anyone with a gun

has the right to kill them

if he feels afraid for his life in their presence."

but what i have i've offered.

a long day of sad appointments yesterday.

feeling so privileged to be a witness to these families' strength,
wishing so hard to be able to fix their situations,

...and then making goal charts to get a library card and practice deep breathing.

i wrote this when i worked for Head Start...

i go back over and over to the truth in sara groves' song:

there are other glories besides winning battles.

there is beauty and goodness in joining in long defeats.

*******

from October 2010

My sweet friend sits on my couch and cries, for the kids she loves so deeply and works so hard to help. For the lives they return to every night after they leave the after-school program she runs: lives of absent parents, of poverty, of drugs and violence. She cries, and there is no solution to tell her. I hold her hand and she tells me their stories and I hear in her voice and her tears the same realization I am coming to.

So often after a visit full of laughter and finger-painting, when an 18-month-old runs to hug my legs when I walk in the door or a two-year-old knows all his colors, when I make a run to the dentist to act as translator or we successfully get a mom her insurance card, I get that rush of exultation. "YES! This is why I do this job, this is what it's all about."

Except that last week I sat at a kitchen table, while a strong and capable mom wept. They left Mexico because it is so violent, she tells me, they could not let their children grow up there, scared to leave the house. But here they are, without papers, without rights, without money. Without language, without their families- it is too dangerous to go back to visit even a relative dying of cancer, even for a beloved sister's wedding. She weeps with me, finally, this mom whose adorable and thriving kids come home every day to a clean house and her warm hug and help with their homework, because she does everything to protect them. I hold her hand, too... I grasp and pray for something helpful. I tell her she's a good mom... and then I finally just tell her that I'm sorry. And then we just sit together. I have no words for her, either.

Later, in my car, I am silent, even to myself and to God. Because she did not say, "And then, you came and started doing educational activities with my toddler and now our lives are SO MUCH BETTER!!!!".

Yes, it is a good thing, it is an addition. Tamara's after-school program is a good thing, it is an addition. But my "This is what it's all about, this is why we do these jobs!" mindset is changing. It has to be. Because then what do we have, when the strong mom is finally weeping with me about how she doesn't think she can take it anymore- and I have no power to get them the immigration papers they need to make a real better life? What do we have when Tamara helps the kids with their homework- and then they go home to filth and alcohol? If it's "all about" when we win, is it worthless when we can't?


If our hope is based on success, it will fail. Mine did, after Bolivia. I had thought that I was a hopeful person; no. I was optimistic. They are not the same thing. I'm still figuring out what hope is. But it can't be optimism. Sometimes you have love and prayer and hard work- and young parents still weep and children are still not safe. Thank God that sometimes things are made better on earth. But Lord, change my heart, that I fight Your battles because they are Yours, not because I will win. Show us Your heart, here.

Give me gratitude for the privilege of participating.

Give us strength to continue, and to find joy in the long defeat.

"i have joined the long defeat
that falling set in motion
and all my strength and energy
are raindrops in the ocean
so conditioned for the win
to share in victory's story
but in the place of ambition's din
i have heard of other glories."-sara groves, "the long defeat"

.grateful down to the marrow of my bones.

i spent all morning at a clinic for farm workers

where i will be working one day a week

through this spring and summer.

hearing fast spanish flowing

makes my heart happier than i can say.

sitting in windowless exam rooms

and twenty-minute appointment slots,

all of a sudden

i couldn't breathe for gratitude

at where He has sent me...

for bolivia,

where i learned this language,

where i got this fire in my bones,

where i met the girls whose faces propel me.

for my year with head start,

where i fell in love with this population

and learned how i can serve and know Him in others,

right here.

for grad school,

where i am so privileged

to be learning,

which lets me get to do this work.

yes,

yes,

yes,

yes,

yes.

thank you for every single one.

for the homesickness

and the nightmares

and the faith crisis,

for the times in that wheaton year

that were long and lonely,

for the exhaustion

and frustrations

and my misfit in this academia world,

yes,

all worth it,

i would take them all again,

to be here, now, with them;

for all the places i can't believe i've gotten to be,

i thank you.

.to you all hearts are open, all desires known.

dear jesus,

i've been really, really mad at you this week.

i'm feeling so strongly the gap between here and heaven, here and home, here and how our hearts long so much for it to be.

this week as i poured my heart out and held others' up to you, as i journaled pages and pages with scrawled, capital letters and lots of question marks and lots of 'please',
i recognized this anger.

it's the same anger i felt towards you the months i first got home from bolivia, when i walked in a daze through the streets of wheaton.
it's a little bit of anger covering such deep, deep sadness, confusion and hurt.

confusion, sadness, and hurt that you, our god,
our father, our friend, our source of comfort and the one who knit us and knows us and holds us and loves us harder than we can imagine, every day...
doesn't make it all better.
when you could.

this week's news especially, but so many other aches of the last few years, too.

so loud in my head this week, jesus, was the story of how it was all supposed to go.

each would fall in love. and be loved in return, just as hard.

babies would be conceived easily. and born whole.

hurt children would heal.

elementary-schoolers would always come home safe.

everyone's family relationships would develop into deep respect and mutual understanding, with no painful gaps.
and under absolutely no circumstances would parents do anything ridiculous like die before they are old and ready to.

my friends' husbands would be strong, kind, humble. and they would stay in love with my friends and in love with you. always.

in this version of the story, god, no one i love calls me crying from the hospital because the tests are coming back not saying what they wanted them to. no one has to look ahead at their life not sure how it's going to look after all. no one has to lay down all of their dreams and find you when their heart hurts, and very well may keep hurting for the rest of their years here.

in my version of the story, god,
your power is made perfect in ease, comfort, and wishes fulfilled.
not in weakness.

i'm ashamed to admit that i wish for that story,
for myself and my friends.
even when i know i should want most the next part of the verse:
your glory displayed through your grace sufficient.

god.
i thank you that you are big enough to hear and to hold our anger, our sadness, our hurt, our fear.

and even big enough to change my heart.
so that someday, maybe,
i could honestly say that given the choice,
i would choose your story over mine.

i thank you that you give us miracles like friendship, and pine trees, and arms that hold, and and all things worked together for the good of those who love you, and the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and cell phone minutes, and cheap southwest flights.

i thank you for mercies new every morning and faithfulness great.

thank you for the reminder, as much as i push against it:
that we were created to long for things this world will not fulfill.

and i pray that like the psalmist,
my prayers of lament would come to end in praise.

love,
emily

A reflection on 2009-2010.

In three days I will have lived in Oregon for exactly one year.

I've been pondering how to explain what these last twelve months have been for me.

I realized that without planning to, the last two summers I've done a write-up reflecting on the year before.

As I collect my thoughts and heart on the past year, it is good to reflect also where I was roughly this same time as I finished, first college, and then my first year out of college.

This was written in July 2010, seven months after returning from a six-month, completely life, faith, and self-changing internship in Bolivia, and five months after my mom was diagnosed with advanced and aggressive cancer.

Prayer this semester didn't look anything like what I have known it to look like before. I couldn't journal. I couldn't sit in a coffee shop and follow any train of thought long enough to feel like I was praying. The cheerfully-voiced and neatly patterned prayers I said with friends in the cafeteria before meals bore little to no resemblance to the way God and I were actually talking.

Me and Jesus, the me and Jesus we have been since I was 12, wasn't happening. I didn't know how to talk to Jesus in a world that lets little girls get raped and beaten and abandoned. Not in a fake, "Well, I just don't know how to talk to you if you're going to be like that" haughty way. I mean I literally did not know how to talk to Him in this new world in which I found myself. Sometimes I feel like my entire foundation that I stood on has been taken apart and put back together and I'm standing on something I don't even recognize. Now that I can breathe a little bit more I'm realizing that what I'm standing on is still pretty good. Sometimes I get these tiny glimpses that it might even be better. Stronger. But I had to learn how to do all these things on it that I knew how to do before, but the ways I knew how to do them don't work here. And the main thing that didn't work, was praying.

Praying with the expectation life is going to work out just beautifully didn't work. That sucked, but it was good. That was a wrong foundation I'd had. That's not how God works, and it's not how He's ever said He was going to work. I'm not sure why I thought otherwise, and it's been- it is- painful rearranging that. But it's good.

And, praying with the knowledge that God is good, didn't work. Because I wasn't so sure about that all the time anymore.
That sucked, and it wasn't good.

I didn't know how to pray without knowing that God is good, which means I didn't even know how to pray about the fact that I didn't know God was good. And so praying (and pretty much everything else, actually) felt terrifying.

So prayer this semester felt like it almost never happened. Because it didn't happen in any ways I had known to recognize.

Prayer this semester, instead of feeling like I was "keeping company with God", instead of quiet times in Starbucks or Caribou or long letters to God in my journal, was a lot of long walks, in the snow, by myself, with my iPod. Sometimes if it was cold or too late at night instead of walking it was driving, through my neighborhood, through the campus, going the speed limit and using turn signals, going slowly and mindlessly over the same route again and again as I tried to line my heart back up, in the quiet, for just a minute with the God I was missing.

Prayer was chopping vegetables. Really. So much so that I once heard a housemate confess to her boyfriend that she "kind of love[d] it when Emily gets depressed because we get a good soup". Prayer was hymns playing in the background as I focused on the purpose of peeling and chopping and stirring and found peace in the rhythm and the use of my hands.

Prayer was reading Rilke out loud before bed with my roommate and being able to, yes, line my heart up to these words. It was lighting a candle for five minutes at night as I asked God to bless the girls at Mosoj Yan- candle-lighting is something we did on the HNGR retreat which I found helpful.

Prayer was interceding for others, which I didn't do enough out of sheer laziness, but which by some beautiful miracle did not hold the difficulty that attempts at casual conversation with God did.

Prayer was and is, in an incredible gift of grace, the liturgy. It is going to church and saying and singing the same words every week, and in recent months being blessedly able to affirm them more and more. It is the gratitude that rises up in me that, in my inability to tell God these truths about Himself out of any spontaneity or warmth or even sense of friendship, I can sing them and raise my hands for an hour on Sunday mornings and get to tell Him them in that way. That I can find myself more and more knowing that I do believe these things, and that this liturgy, this church, is providing a way for me to affirm them before my own emotions or abilities are going to let me do so on my own. Oh, how grateful I am to get to praise God through words others have written and songs others are singing when my own heart is so confused and cold.

Prayer has been, greatly, others praying for me. That is something I think I underestimated the power of in these past seven months. People have prayed for me and that has been important.

Mostly as I have looked at myself and my interactions with God in the past seven months I have felt ashamed. Who am I to not pray? To not know how? To be so faithless? Clearly, to feel so far from prayer must mean I am far indeed. And how does this show gratitude to Mosoj Yan and the work they do?

But recently I have been realizing a bit more that it was a good thing for me to learn that prayer that does not look like journaling in a coffee shop and leaving with the feeling of peace, can still be prayer. That crying myself to sleep, God still heard me. That prayers lifted by others on my behalf and the behalf of my girls, do something powerful. And that if walking in the snow and chopping vegetables until my fridge was too full enabled me to be in front of God, then He was happy to meet me there.

I'm not very proud of how I lived the last seven months, but good things came out of them.

Mostly this year I felt like I couldn't pray. But maybe in His great and crazy mercy, He let me go for long walks and chop vegetables and rely on others' prayers, to teach me something about walking on without clarity or feelings of peace or any pride. Maybe He let me rely on the prayers of the church to teach me about the power of community worship, of the history of the big-C Church, of the importance of repetition for our souls, of the power that is in praising Him by choice and even by rote when we feel cold and dry.

I hope and pray that maybe in the long-term, these will be things that will let me see Him more.

Verónica's mom.

"That's Verónica's mom," they murmur to me, as we pull up to a small, garbage-filled park by a traffic circle. They nod at a tiny woman sitting on a bench with a group of men. She is dirty, tired-looking. I know her to be in her early thirties, but her size suggests she could be one of our girls; yet her drug-aged face suggests she has lived through decades more.

Verónica's mom?? Stories flood back to me...

***********

"Why is Verónica here? She's younger than the other girls we normally have."

"She doesn't have anywhere else to go." Gladys explained to me about Verónica's mom: a street girl herself, Verónica born when she was just fourteen. Verónica, as a baby and toddler, sleeping on the sidewalk on the street corners, as traffic screeched by and drunk men called out terrifying things, laughing.

"Verónica was referred to us at ten, and we keep her longer than most... she just doesn't have anywhere else to go."

"Do they have contact?"

"Yes. Sometimes. She's visited."

"Does she love her?"

Gladys paused. Her composure fell a bit.

"Yes. Yes, she loves her." She nodded. "She loves her... but... she doesn't know how to be a mom."

***********

"Hermano, why aren't the girls allowed to get phone calls at the house anymore?"

"We can't screen them all, to make sure they're good for them. Verónica, for instance. Her mom calls, sometimes. We used to let Verónica talk to her. But her mom would be drunk, or on drugs... or, often, she'd have just been beaten up by a boyfriend. And Verónica would cry and cry and want to go to her. She'd say she needed to go take care of her." 

It's our job to protect you, hija. We can't let you go to her. We know you love her, we know you want her to be okay. But it's not your job to protect her. It's our job to protect you. It's our job to keep you safe. Because we love you. We're sorry, hija. We can't let you go to her right now. We're so sorry.

***********

"Verónica, it's your turn to go on a date with me. Just you and me! We can go anywhere in the city you want. Where do you want to go?"

The other girls, on their turns, wanted ice cream, or the park nearby with swings and slides. They were giggly and chatty, excited to be out alone with a worker, excited for attention and a treat.

Verónica was quiet. We got in a taxi and she explained to the driver exactly where to go, in fast Spanish I couldn't follow. We got out in la Cancha, the open air market. Without hesitation, she led me through the stalls, past the stores, to a dark, less populated section I'd never been to before. She pointed to a small, faded sign advertising fried chicken, and we entered the restaurant. "My mom used to take me here when I was little."

It was dim and dank inside. The food was cheap, just pennies for our meal, really, and when it came it was stale and the worker didn't smile, just tossed it on the soiled table and walked away.

I tried to make conversation with her, ask her about school and friends, but, uncharacteristically, she was almost silent, giving me one-word answers. Eventually I gave up, and we just sat together. She ate slowly, staring around her at the surroundings. Drinking them in, I realized suddenly. Given anywhere in the city, she wanted to come back here. Where she used to come often, with her mom.

***********

Verónica, squeezing her eyes shut as she earnestly prayed out loud before a meal, thanking Papito Dios for how He provides for us. Verónica, begging to choose music to play as we did chores in the morning, always campaigning for reggaetón; Verónica, exlaiming, "Hermana! I have red hair dye! Can we streak your hair?".

Verónica, the girl who had been there the longest and who, though they'd never admit it, I think the staff think of most as their real daughter. Verónica, in Albergue the whole time I was on HNGR, and still there last summer when I came to visit. Eleven months ago, the day I flew away from Bolivia for the second time, she pressed a note into my hand at the airport. "Thank you Hermana Emily for spending time with us... I love you so much."

Verónica, now out of the house, working, finishing school. Verónica, living on her own in her very own apartment, but she comes back to visit every Sunday afternoon. Verónica, Gonzalo told me on this visit: "She broke the cycle. She used to want to go back to the streets. Now, when she has time to go 'home', she doesn't go to the streets anymore. When she needs something, she wants to come to Albergue."

***********

"That's Verónica's mom," they murmur to me, as we pull up to a small, dirty park by a traffic circle...

Verónica's mom... and though at our last stop on the streets, interacting with people unbathed and visibly drugged, I had felt uncomfortable and out of place, suddenly I am pushing out of the car, walking up to her, needing to see her face, to connect... Verónica's mom, and  I am suddenly reaching for her, introducing myself, looking deep into her eyes, somehow feeling like I owe her something, like I need to apologize. Most of all... I just want to know her. This woman... Verónica's mom.

I reach her, and then I stumble, falter. "Hola... me llamo Emily... yo conozco tu hija." I know your daughter.

She looks at me, nods. A slight, hazy smile, through a face I know to be aged by drugs, by street life, by more pain and less connection than probably I could imagine.

"Mi hija, conoces? Verónica es."

"Sí... Verónica... ella es muy preciosa a mi." Your daughter is precious to me.

I grab Asharae. "Ash. Can you take a photo of us? I want a photo with Verónica's mom."

Why? I don't know. This woman is the mother of someone I love. Someone I have gotten to have a tiny part in getting to care for. This woman standing in front of me, loves this girl we love... she loves her so much more than my twenty-three-year-old, childless heart can fathom. And yet we were the ones who got to raise her. I, a twenty-one-year-old American college student, got to feed her dinner and laugh with her and hear about her school day. I got to watch her pray before meals and see the results of her experiments with hair dye, got to hear her dancing to pop songs with her friends and giggling as she played tricks on Hermano Gonzalo.

I put my arm around Verónica's mom's shoulders. She grins at the camera, a gap-toothed, stoned smile.

"Gracias," I say to her, "Gracias,"... and I think I am thanking her for her daughter.

I'm sorry, I want to say, though I don't know why.

Because Albergue gets her now, and you don't. Not in the same way.
Because your life is this dirty park and these men who hit you;
because of the opportunities I've had, the life I was born into... someday when I have my babies I will get to raise them myself, but you didn't have anyone to teach you how to do that.

"Ella es muy preciosa a mi..." what else can I say to her? Why should she care what some young, American girl has to say about her child? "...I pray for your daughter."

She looks at me. Then looks away. "Sí... sí. Pray she will get off the streets. Not like me."

 ***********

"Does she love her?"

"...Yes. Yes, she loves her."

"Pray she will get off the streets. Not like me."

And we feebly watch for You and wait.

"...Teach us how to weep while we wait,

and how to hope while we weep,

and how to care while we hope."

-Brueggemann

Rape.

In the spring of 2010, an event was held at my school: Take Back the Night. Take Back the Night exists to raise awareness of sexual violence, to prevent it, and to decrease shame and isolation among survivors.

In my opinion, to work to remove shame and isolation is a holy calling. It is a picture of who God is, and it is His work. He makes broken things into beautiful. That is who He is.

At that point, I had been home about four months from my internship in Bolivia, where I had spent my days (and nights) hanging out in a group home with fifteen beautiful, hyper, joyful, crazy girls. Beautiful girls who had been hurt, objectified, made to serve others' evil whims, abused, raped. Adrienne, the president of the club organizing the event and a good friend, asked me if I would speak. I prepared and gave a short talk on a few themes of what I had learned: on our calling to watch out for those who are utterly unprotected; on redeeming physical touch.

An important part of the night is an open mike time, where people can step forward and share their stories. Of being hurt, of being objectified, made to serve others' evil whims, abused, raped. It is a safe space, and after each story is finished, together we all shout, "THAT'S NOT OKAY".

My clearest memory from that night, though, is not my talk, and it's not the open mike time. My clearest memory from that night is an upsetting one. It's not a bad memory, exactly. But it was jarringly painful to me when it happened and has been every time I've remembered it since- which, to be honest, has been often.

I walked away from campus after the program with one of my most beloved and respected friends. It had meant a lot to me that she had come, in the middle of the week in a busy semester; I knew it had been mostly because I was speaking and she wanted to support me.

We walked in the dark together, both silent. And then, after a few minutes, she told me that before that night she had not known that it is always not okay.

I do not have words to convey how much I love this girl, or how much I respect her. That day, and today, and every day in between. She has a heart which is more kind and humble than almost any I know. And, perhaps in large part because of my deep love and respect for her, I also cannot put into words how painful that statement was to hear.

The point of this isn't to share anger or shock or even pain. The take away from that interaction was that her information and therefore her opinion had changed. That is exactly the hope and the purpose of Take Back the Night. And, further proving my opinion of her, her life changed- immediately. As in, she went straight to her computer and wrote a letter to a friend conveying compassion.

I don't think I ever thought it was okay. But without Bolivia, would I know?

It is horrifying to me that there could ever, ever, ever be a question in our minds or a bit of indifference in our hearts about beautiful, beloved, image-of-God bodies and souls, and the protection they deserve.

I don't know everyone who reads this blog. I don't know your stories and I don't know if you think it might sometimes be a little bit okay. I don't know if you've ever had someone tell you that it was okay. It is not okay.

Removing shame and isolation is who He is.

(on prostitution.)

.how will He not also?.

"God and I,

we've long had trust issues."

-Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts

 

Trusting God has been hard for me the last couple of years.

So often our reasoning for trusting God's faithfulness is based on ways we can see it in our past and our present. "He's been faithful before, He'll be faithful again" sings a popular song on Christian radio these days; "Has thou not seen how thy desires ever have been granted in what He ordaineth?" comfort the lyrics of a hymn from the 1800s. I wrote last year about my struggles with that since HNGR: What about if His providence in the past looks like no definition of the word protection, what if none of their most simple, basic desires have been granted?

I love this book and can read it and learn from it, because the author goes there.
I've been soaking in this chapter this week:


"In an empty pickup truck I hear voices scarred- the voices of people I have long loved and their voices cry pain and I honor them with the listening:
When your memories have an old man groping for your crotch, hot, foul breath on your face, and your skin crawls? Give thanks?
And an ultrasound screen stretches still and you're sent home to wait for the uterine muscles to contract out the dead dreams?
Or the woman you lay down with, shared the naked and unashamed, she beds another man, hands you back the wedding albums, and says she never knew love for you, what then?...

The words sear. I know their voices and I remember their faces...
I wait, just wait. In the wait memories blister.
And in the still, Spirit comes and He whispers a name.
Christ.
And I see a world through His lens: "He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all- how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?"
He gave us Jesus. Jesus! Gave Him up for us all.
If we have only one memory, isn't this one enough?

 Why is this the memory I most often take for granted? He cut open the flesh of the God-Man and let the blood. He washed our grime with the bloody grace. He drove the iron ore through His own vein. 

Doesn't that memory alone suffice? Need there be anything more?
If God didn't withhold from us His very own Son, will God withhold anything we need?

If trust must be earned, hasn't God unequivocally earned our trust
with the bark on the raw wounds,
the thorns pressed into the brow,
your name on the cracked lips?...

All gratitude is ultimately gratitude for Christ, all remembering a remembrance of Him.
For in Him all things were created, are sustained, have their being.
Thus Christ is all there is to give thanks for; Christ is all there is to remember.


It is safe to trust."

Only when.

Last week I made a friend turn off a rerun of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because there was a torture scene and I couldn't handle it.

They were gracious and a little confused. I tried to laugh and make light of it, but was panicking inside a little bit, and was clear that, sorry, but I need to turn this off, now. Her husband pointed out, "Um, I mean this is from the 90s. I don't think they're going to put anything really graphic on..."

I know it probably wasn't going to be graphic. I know that it, honestly, is a silly TV show, and the fact that it was involving vampires and an overly-dramatic David Boreanaz should have meant that I could continue eating my ice cream as I gave the screen my half-attention and chatted with my friends.

But I can't do torture. I can't do a person looking up at someone with fear- even badly-acted, clearly fake, for-the-sake-of-ratings fear. I can't do screams or grimaces or any visual of knowing someone is about to hurt you and being unable to get away.

Those are real girls to me. Those are real faces, and that is real terror. People I know felt that terror and knew that pain. And so I cannot watch it, or listen to it, or think about it.


I can't watch it or listen to it or think about it unless.

Last night, I sat on the phone with a new, precious friend. We talked for over an hour and it was one of those conversations where you're both falling over each other with excitement and shared passion and ideas and understanding.

And at one point, she started a sentence and I knew what I was about to hear.

I felt the familiar clenching in my stomach- that I feel when a friend suggests watching a movie I know has violence in it, when I know I'm about to be in a group situation where there may be kids crying and I won't be able to physically turn and see: they're safe, they're fine, no one is hurting them, they're just crying because they're kids.

Normally I pay attention to that clenching in my stomach as a sign to get myself out of a situation. But I didn't stop her this time. Because she has held so much more than I have, because it was important, because I took a deep breath and knew, I can handle it, when I really have to.

We talked and I heard the stories. And a few minutes later in the conversation I realized something.

Yes, this makes me sick. Yes, I hate this. Yes, this is everything horrible and evil and full of death and the fall, just like my girls' stories are, just like Buffy the Vampire Slayer's producers' lame representations of someone scared are.


But I knew that I wouldn't be waking up in a nightmare... not tonight.


We talked and laughed (only crazy people who understand what it is to have loved street kids can laugh in a conversation that includes rape, by the way) and understood each other and groaned over stories and figured out how we can combine our resources to get more information, more help, more healing, more redemption, more love, to these kids.

We were talking to heal. We were talking to help. We were talking because we want to use our gifts and resources to contribute to His work of bringing all things right: even street kids, even rape, even torture, even terror, even death.

When I'm hearing it then?
My stomach clenches. My heart races and my skin gets clammy. I want to throw up and I want to scream.
But I don't want to hide. I don't need to leave the room.

Not when it's to, in some tiny way, be a part of the redemption.

"And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
"Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man...

He will wipe every tear from their eyes,
and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning,
nor crying, nor pain anymore,
for the former things have passed away."

And He who was seated on the throne said,

"Behold, I am making all things new."

Revelation 21:3-5

.nuestro Dios todo lo suplirá.

I sent this email to some close friends today. I'm never sure who's reading here, so thought I'd post it here too...
<3

Hey friends,

Lauren H., who is the current intern at Mosoj Yan, my organization in Bolivia, wrote this blog post this week. It captures beautifully, and painfully, some of the battles we fight for our girls there, and the lives they have been through.

I was incredibly moved by her words and reminded to be praying for these girls. I've been thinking a lot about how... eternal... (sorry, I don't know how to make this non-Christian-ese-y) the work they do at that home is. I was so so so so blessed and reminded of that in my two weeks there this summer. Just that they are truly loving girls who ARE "the least of these".
That the staff are doing work, not because it is fun or easy or what they want to be doing all the time, but because it is what they are called to, the purpose for which they think the Lord made them.

I've been thinking a lot about how much these girls matter to God, even if no one else knows their names. And what holy work it is to work for loving even the tiniest, least significant-in-the-world's-

eyes life.

On her blog Lauren invited her friends and family to fast and pray on Thursdays with her for the girls and I am going to take that challenge. I wanted to ask a favor- that you would consider joining in that. To be honest, I am not planning on fasting from food. I'm not sure what yet, probably the computer, which is maybe really stupid but so far every time I've fasted from food it's just been disastrous and I figured it was more important that I at least do something (because too often when I fast from food I end up giving up and not fasting at all).

I truly hope this does not feel like a guilt trip and I will never ask if you do it (and wouldn't be upset if you didn't!). But you have all been a big part of my life/Bolivia journey and I wanted to invite you in on this part too.

Please know how much of my journey to those girls and their place in my heart and life and prayers is due to each of your HUGE RIDICULOUS INSANE investment in my life. Your prayers and love on me has truly touched girls in Bolivia who you will probably never meet. Which I think is really cool. Yay for life and friendships and love.

Thank you so much for your prayers- love you guys!!!
Em

Our girls.

Please read Lauren's blog post today-

and please pray with us for God's protection over these precious girls.

...mi oración en el desierto, cuando todo en nosotros seco está

mi oración en la necesidad

mi Dios todo lo suplirá

mi oración en la batalla, cuando el triunfo no puedo ver
somos coherederos y conquistadores , en Cristo permaneceremos

Te alabaré , Te alabaré , contra nosotros nada prevalecerá
Me gozaré , declararé...
Dios es mi triunfo y Él está aqui.

    

What is promised.

I read two quotes this week in two different places, echoing the same theme. They articulated something which has been rolling in my mind and heart, and I'm grateful for their words.

"It is a pagan idea to dwell on the possibility or impossibility of God's suspending the laws of the universe and working tricks and wonders and miracles... But it is a Christian idea to believe in God being constantly present and continually creating, if only we are open to Him." 

-Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered (a book I highly recommend, btw)- HT, Brittany :-)

and

"One of the many temptations[...] is to create reasons or explanations of what God is doing... We want a reason and if God won’t give us one, we’ll find one (or make one up)... We want reasons because we want our suffering to have a purpose... For example:

-God is setting up all the heathen and arrogant doctors for a great demonstration of his power by making our situation so impossible that they can’t deny that a miracle has occurred.

-God is punishing me for sin by causing my child to suffer.

-God is preparing me for a great ministry and using my child’s suffering as a “thorn in my flesh” to keep me humble...

-God is…, God is…, God is…

At times, it bears a striking resemblance to superstition. The only thing we can be confident that “God is…” is that God is working everything for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose."

 -Needy Parents blog.

Two stories and some leaving pics.

1. We are out to lunch and I am idly playing with the hair of the girl next to me as I eat my papas fritas. She leans her head on my shoulder and I look up in surprise a minute later when I feel something wet. She´s picking at her tomato salad diligently but tears are slowly leaking out of her eyes onto my arm. I cast a confused glance at Chacho; he concernedly shrugs back. Can I take her over there, I ask with my eyes and a toss of my head, and he nods.

"Want to walk with me for a minute?" I whisper, and she nods and stands up. I take her hand and we wander a few feet away, to out of sight of the rest of the girls around a corner.

I hug her and she burrows into my neck, still crying.

"What´s up, babe?"

She doesn´t say anything, just shakes her head and stays buried into me.

"Anything happen, or just a sad day?"

She pulls back, shrugs, wipes her eyes.

"I just don´t want to be here."

"Here, like out to lunch? Here at Albergue?"

"I just..." she starts crying again. "I don´t want to be in Bolivia. I want to go far away."

She is 14. She is an orphan. She´s slept under bridges, been bounced around from center to center in the city before landing here. In the house, she is a cheerful presence, laughing and making jokes constantly (she is the one who rubbed flour on her face and announced she was American). She always does her chores without being asked.

"I want to go somewhere far away"... I know that feeling. Don´t we all have days like that? I have no idea what to say. I tell her I feel like that sometimes, too. And I think to myself goodness knows I felt like that at 14 often enough.

What do I need when I feel this way, I pray desperately. I try to channel my mother. I pull this girl close and kiss the top of her head. I rub her back in slow circles and murmur whatever comforting sounds I can think of into her hair.

"I´m sorry you´re sad. We all love you so much and we´re so glad you´re here."

Is it too cheesy to give her a Bible verse... is it forcing faith down her throat, minimizing her pain? But this is the real thing I think of when I feel this way, that I want to be nowhere or anywhere but here, that my emotional clothes don't fit.

"Can I tell you something from the Bible?"

She nods into my shoulder.

"One of my favorite verses says, ´Lord, You are our home.´ Sometimes I feel like that too... like I want to be anywhere but here, like I just want to go somewhere new and start over. Like just... aahhh!" I let go of her and dance like a crazy person for a second, shaking my body and head, trying to convey the whole, 'Nothing works and everything sucks!' feeling. She laughs. "And when I feel that way, I try to think of that. The Lord is our home. He is our house," (I noticed this week that the Spanish Bible translates Psalm 90:1 as "nuestra casa"- literally, our house). I lean my head over my knees and fold my arms up, trying to get the point across of hiding in God, and also still trying to make her laugh. "...I try to imagine I can actually just live in Him, when I don't feel like I live anywhere."

She wipes her face and smiles a little, and nods. I go back to hugging her and we kind of rock for a minute.

"OK. I'm ready to go back now."

"Okay, honey."

**********************

2. The girls have BIEBER FEVER. It is ALL about Justin Bieber. We listen to him every morning as we do chores and every afternoon as we hang out outside and they frequently ask us to translate lyrics- this is, for the record, the mark of truly great lyrical talent, if the translation from English to Spanish is exactly the same: ("Oh, oh, oh, baby, baby..."). And the other night I got asked in total seriousness for his email address. Cause you know, Justin and I are bffl.

Yesterday morning was my last breakfast in the house. I am sad and quiet, but trying to be cheerful. The girls have been telling me how sad they are, too. "Hermana, please don't leave." "Hermana, when can you come back?".

Justin is playing over the CD player as we eat our bread and tea... I have an idea.

"Hey, girls. What if I called you next week and said, Hey, I'm coming back to Albergue for a year..."

"YEAH!!!"

"...OR, I told you that I could send Justin to be here at Albergue for a year. Me. Or Justin. Who would you choose?"

There is silence at the breakfast table. The girls stare at each other. Finally one clears her throat and offers...

"Um... could we maybe... have both of you?"

**********************

I had the absolute coolest goodbye party at the Cochabamba airport. All the other travelers were totally jealous.

 

 

Man do I miss them already.

So so so so so thankful for these past two weeks and all of these beautiful faces.