Happy New Year!
I like to think of life as one of seasons and since this is a new year I assume it should also be a new season. Now, it's almost the end of January already and I haven't even finished thinking about all this year might hold. Maybe my mind is so filled with all the different things I am learning and thinking about that I can't process anything very quickly. If my mind looks anything like my desk it's not the most organized of places these days. Nonetheless, it's beginning to feel less strange that it's 2013 now - still feels awkward to write that instead of the 2012 that flows far more naturally, but this new year is here and only moving forward regardless of how slow I seem to be at welcoming it. I have started to come up with some goals for the year for me, we've been praying and discussing goals for Jeevit's House as well. I'm all about setting the standard rather high, so my most defined goal to this point in time is to to a better job wiping our kitchen table off after the boys and I eat. I anticipate that being a goal I will succeed at keeping and hopefully it will become a habit and I won't have to think about how necessary it is so much. Maybe next year I'll aspire to something more important.
Other goals are still being discussed and sorted out and figured out and strategies for accomplishing the goals are being decided and dreamed up and schemed up because it takes some work and some effort to catch these goals we make. On a somewhat entirely different note though there's something I've been realizing lately (I'm using the word lately loosely) but it is this feeling and realization that just continues to grow inside of me.
I love Battambang.
I love Cambodia.
I love this city and this nation and this people more than I did before I came for the first time, more than I did when I moved here, more than I did last year or last week. I loved it well enough then, but there is a difference to the way I love this beautiful place now.
There were a few years before I had ever come where I was reading about Cambodia and all that had happened here, where I was praying for God's kingdom to grow in this place and where I was looking for an opportunity to actually come. And I had read and learned quite a bit of information about this nation. I had seen glimpses of God's heart for this nation and my heart was broken for pieces of what I heard and knew, but my love was young and untried - much more like I had a crush on someone I knew a little bit about, but had yet to really talk to myself.
Now, after living here for years and knowing so many different people, after struggling to grasp the language and adapt to a culture different from the one I was accustomed to, after seasons of homesickness and frustration that still arise occasionally, after all the joys that have far outweighed the struggles . . . I am excited that I am in love with this place - the beautiful people I know or don't yet know, the city I can live in and watch expand far too quickly and this nation that is also changing faces so rapidly. It is absolutely wonderful and I find it such a privilege to live here.
So here's to hoping and believing these next 11 months of this year will be all the more wonderful than this past month has been.
Other goals are still being discussed and sorted out and figured out and strategies for accomplishing the goals are being decided and dreamed up and schemed up because it takes some work and some effort to catch these goals we make. On a somewhat entirely different note though there's something I've been realizing lately (I'm using the word lately loosely) but it is this feeling and realization that just continues to grow inside of me.
I love Battambang.
I love Cambodia.
I love this city and this nation and this people more than I did before I came for the first time, more than I did when I moved here, more than I did last year or last week. I loved it well enough then, but there is a difference to the way I love this beautiful place now.
There were a few years before I had ever come where I was reading about Cambodia and all that had happened here, where I was praying for God's kingdom to grow in this place and where I was looking for an opportunity to actually come. And I had read and learned quite a bit of information about this nation. I had seen glimpses of God's heart for this nation and my heart was broken for pieces of what I heard and knew, but my love was young and untried - much more like I had a crush on someone I knew a little bit about, but had yet to really talk to myself.
Now, after living here for years and knowing so many different people, after struggling to grasp the language and adapt to a culture different from the one I was accustomed to, after seasons of homesickness and frustration that still arise occasionally, after all the joys that have far outweighed the struggles . . . I am excited that I am in love with this place - the beautiful people I know or don't yet know, the city I can live in and watch expand far too quickly and this nation that is also changing faces so rapidly. It is absolutely wonderful and I find it such a privilege to live here.
So here's to hoping and believing these next 11 months of this year will be all the more wonderful than this past month has been.
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