The Children of my Heart

I figured I should probably introduce people to the children that have captured my heart, since the next few posts will be about them.A number of children I've come to love are no longer at Casa de Fe, but I will just be posting pictures of our current kids. I'll do a separate post about the kids who aren't here anymore. 

I had to do a giant photoshoot with all of the kids for the sponsorship site I'm developing. I'm obviously using the best pictures (i.e the more professional-looking ones) for the sponsorship program, but I'm going to share my favourites... the ones that best capture the personalities of our kids. 

I'll start with the babies... 

Adrian

Edwin

Jose Luis

Telmo

   

Leonor/Nidia

Elena/Lina

Juliana

Mishell

Rayana

Amanda

Dolly

Frixon

And the toddlers....

Anthony

Moises

Diego

Karla

Yarina

Sausti

Dennis

Esther

Evelyn

Edison

Jordi

Sebastian

And the "younger kids"....

Cristofer

Evelyn

Alejo

Maria

Joselyn

Geimi

Junior

Coco

Nila

Sheila

Marili

Jhonny

Nayely

Samuel

And the "midde-aged" kids... 

Gilmar

Boris

Joel

Greis

Carlos

Genesis

Rubi

Tatiana

Martin 

Nicol

Estefania

Ana

Veronica

Edison

Cuca

Cinthia

Caila

Alondra

Wilson

Javier

Yajairah

Viviana

And the "older" kids....

Abigail

Yulissa

Thalia

Maria

Marcia

Maribel

Rosa

Jenifer

Paola

Evelyn

A Conversation of Hearts

I feel like it's kind of weird that this is my third blog post and I haven't really written about the kids.

Well, that's coming... I promise. 

But, the more I think about it, the more I am aware that my experience here this time was neither shaped or dominated by the kids. Part of that is because many days my interactions with them are limited to the time it takes to walk between the front door and my office... when it takes longer than two minutes, it's because I've ended up having to herd runaway children back inside, mop pee off of the stairs or fish toy cars out of the toilet. 

But really. You'll soon see that they have inevitably contributed greatly to my experience, but the truth is that these past few months have been marked more by significant experiences with Jesus than by memorable moments with the kids. 

Some of the staff get together every Sunday night for community prayer. One of the songs we 'sang' the first night I went to pray was "The More I Seek You" by Kari Jobe. I'd never heard it before, so I just had to listen. It captured the things that Jesus had been inviting me to experience as I waited (for what seemed like so long!) for things to come together for me to come. And the invitation seemed to carry over to my actual time here. And it has. 

The invitation has been to be with Jesus.... to trust him more intensely, to press harder into him, to be intentional about making space to rest in him, to find protection in him, to pursue healing in him and to find peace in being present in the present with him... to be with him in the moment every moment. That's not to say that Jesus was only semi-present before, but the invitation was to be constantly intentional about being aware of his working and his character in everything that happened. And the Spirit has made this abundantly known.

The more I seek you 

The more I find you 

The more I find you 

The more I love you 

The more I've been intentional about seeking out where Jesus is and what he is doing, the more he has revealed those things to me. That was also helpful to experience in all of the really hard things I've been bombarded with recently; these past few months have undoubtedly been some of the hardest in my life, so I've had to spend a lot of time bringing all of the things to Jesus. The invitation from Jesus in that for right now has been to just sit with him in things... to rest in him... and to feel deeply. For someone that often just wants to fix things right away, believe you me, this has required a lot of discipline and intentionality. It's also why this is a thing. I anticipate that the next invitation will be to start to respond passionately to some of these things, but for now it is to wait and to let my faith run deeper. At first I think I thought that was kind of weak, but now I am aware that the things I learn and internalize about the character of God during this time, will shape the way I respond to the things to come. Well, I am aware that I am experiencing these things now so that I can be prepared for what's next.

It's no secret that the more time you spend with him, the more you come to know him. And the more you come to know him, the more you love him. It's really true. 

And it's happened. 

[*Disclaimer: I don't normally do this, but in the interest of including people in my experiences here...*] I tried to explain it in my journal a couple of weeks ago and the best way to explain that is to just share what I wrote:

"...I know I still have a lot of things to work through before Jesus is the sole object of my affection, but sometimes - well, often - there's nothing I desire more than to just lie there or curl up and be with Jesus.  

I want to sit at your feet

Drink from the cup in your hand

Lean back against you and breathe 

Feel your heartbeat

And every time I do that, Jesus comes and sits there with me. Well, let's be honest: Jesus comes and holds me. 

As I work through some of this stuff, there's nothing that I desire (or need!) more than to be held by Jesus. And as he holds me, as we sit there, I feel his heartbeat. 

His heartbeat tells me that I am loved and that I am deeply valued by him. 

His heartbeat tells me that I don't grieve alone; that he was grieving for me even before I could grieve for myself. 

His heartbeat tells me that he is sufficient; that he will give me the things I need to keep going; that he is the reason I press on. 

He heartbeat tells me to continue to press into him mas fuerte. That he will not fall over if I slump into him. That he will hold me upright. 

His heartbeat gives me hope: Hope for healing, hope for restoration, hope for beauty from ashes. 

His heartbeat says, "Peace", telling me that he desires to quiet my soul in the busyness and to soothe my fears in the pain of hard things. Telling me that he desires to bring me rest - that he desires to be my rest in the middle of this colossal storm. 

His heartbeat tells me that he will protect me; that he will hide me away in the shelter of his wings; that he will tuck me under his arms and keep me safe. It tells me that he deeply desires for me to lay down the attitudes and behaviours that I've cloaked myself in, in an attempt at self-protection, and come take shelter in him. This calls for vulnerability and authenticity: and it not only makes them okay, it also makes them worth it as they cultivate community.

His heartbeat tells me that he will someday bring me justice. 

His heartbeat reminds me that he is faithful to my heart's desires. 

My heart desires a lot of things, but it mostly desires him. 

This love is so real 

It's more than I can stand 

I melt in your peace 

It's overwhelming "

Some Heart Things

Today my heart hurts.

It's not all pain, but the stretch marks from all of the different emotions are probably permanent.

(I'm pretty sure part of it is that it's starting to sink in that I have very little time left. As much as I don't want to think about it, I've had to plan extensively for the next two weeks, so it seems to never be far from my mind. I am sad.)

My heart finds deep joy in the little things: Edison holding my hand for the first time in two years; getting Boris to smile; Marili's laugh; Telmito's smile and little grunt when I walk into the room; Cristofer's questions; Cuca picking me grass; a warm greeting from the man that owns the pizza place in town; lighthearted banter between the staff; the quiet space I have as I walk to and from work; being called "mi hija" by the tias; .

My heart finds a satisfactory pride in the things I am grateful to have accomplished (and hope to accomplish!). My heart is also proud the kids... their talents, their courage, their grace and their victories.

My heart aches for the brokenness that none of us can escape here. Everywhere I look I see the evidence of the brokenness that has caused these kids to need to live at Casa de Fe: poverty, generational sin, greed, selfishness, disregard for life and despair. I also see the consequences of this brokenness manifested in defiant, distrustful, attention-seeking, isolating, or brokenhearted attitudes and mentalities that we often find ourselves running up against.

My heart is enraged at the injustices endured.

My heart is also tremendously hopeful for the ways that Jesus wants to bring deep healing and restoration to the places that have marked these kids' lives with disgrace for far too long.

My heart is grateful that I have the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with the kids and the staff. It has been such a beautiful experience of building a lasting trust with the kids and establishing community and sharing life with the staff.

My heart is burdened by a deep, deep desire for people to know Jesus... for people to know that Jesus desires to heal and restore the parts of their stories that are ugly or dark and broken... for people to know that Jesus is offering them so much more than mere contentment or a casual relationship with the Father.

My heart is also heavily burdened with a deep desire for people to see and understand how the kingdom of God is being established here and how Jesus is inviting them to participate in that.

My heart is starting to get a little bit anxious about all of the things I still need to do.... and about leaving. Especially about leaving.

And yet, the invitation from Jesus has been to remember that, while these are all appropriate emotions, the things he is offering in the middle of that are rest and peace. I am confident that the things God feels in response to what I see and experience here run much deeper than my own understanding or response to them. It's really nice to know that. And so, my heart is very much at peace... not the kind of peace that totally ignores everything crashing around me or pretends that it's okay... but the kind of peace that is just more focused on the thing that's grounding me and keeping me from getting swept away.

The Late Beginning of a Quickly Approaching End

I maintain that there's a difference between being bad at blogging and being bad at having time to blog. I suffer severely from the second. And I suppose the first is debatable.

Alas, I have given many of you the link to my blog and I cringe to think that you checked it out only to find posts from last year. I was hoping to bury them in daily updates from Ecuador.... but again, in case you missed the memo, I'm bad at having time sit down and write something that I'm okay to share with the world. Well, let's blame 30% on my perfectionist tendencies ("If I can't blog every night and/or say exactly what I want to say... why even try, right?!") and 50% on my lack of time and the last 20% on the fact that I work at my computer all day, so the very last thing I want to do when I get home is turn my computer back on and type some more.

And yet, as my semester here is quickly coming to an end, I'd really like to be able to express some of what has gone on here. For a number of both work-related and personal reasons, these past couple of months have been some of the hardest that I've experienced in my life. Even if that weren't the case, I am aware that it is always difficult to transition back into student life with friends and family that don't fully understand the things I experienced living here and they ways they have changed me.

And so I hope to be able to provide some insight into my "Ecuador life". I fear I cannot do it full justice, but I think it will be worthwhile to make an effort to offer a glimpse of the places and people that take up so much space in my heart. I want to share about the community I have here, my work, the kids at the orphanage, my struggles and my [small] victories, my fears, the heartache and the joy of being here, and especially the way that Jesus has been so present in the midst of it all.

Know that it's taking everything in me to share this.

I used to be pretty bad at really sharing about my experiences here, because sometimes it gets messy when worlds collide. But the truth was, if I wanted to maintain even a small amount of consistency and coherence in my life, then things were going to need to get messy. God's been teaching me a lot about the beauty and power of authenticity, so I decided to take the chance, (to inevitably make mistakes), and to get messy. I spent a lot of time in the fall trying to include my community in the ways that God was working to bring me back to Ecuador. At first it was kind of painful and it required a frustrating amount of intentionality, but the end result was worth it: I had a good experience in having people "send me" and God used my vulnerability to spark a lot of cool conversations that are still bearing fruit.

Having experienced the rewards of authenticity and intentional inclusion, my hope is that these stories will:
(1) give you some understanding of the way that my heart has been both broken and restored here,
(2) help you ask the right questions when you want to hear about "my trip" (P.S. It's really not a trip. I live here. Out of a closet, not a suitcase. This is just as much home as some places in Canada now.),
(3) remind you to be gracious in the difficulties of transitioning back into life in Canada,
(4) help me process and clarify some of my experiences as I write about them
(5) give you insight into the way that I have experienced the person of Jesus, the heart of the Father and the way he is bringing his Kingdom here and making all things new, so you can experience it for yourself

I will be honest in this space, but will also use discretion. For a variety of reasons, some stories are better served with tea than over the Internet. Ask me to tell you these stories when we have tea.

When My Field of Vision Expands Beyond Soapy Water and the Rear End of a Little Rubber Duck

I am such an external processor.

Hahah, I still think that is pretty hilarious. Or, at least I laugh about it a lot. I think I laugh ¾ out of sheer joy in the freedom that discovering this has brought to my life... both in understanding so much about my past and in creating a way to understand my future. And I think I laugh ¼ out of incredulousness and excitement as I start to navigate how to engage with this.

I actually feel this way about a lot of things that I’ve recently identified about myself... like how I’m an extrovert. How I’m an external processor. How I’m an ENFJ. And how... well, a lot of other things!!
This is all incredibly freeing, revitalizing. I feel like I’ve been trying to hold my breath under the water in the bathtub for years and years, only to discover that if I just lift my face up a couple of inches I can see without soapy water burning my eyes (and I can see more than blurry water and my rubber duck’s yellow rear end) and I can be a lot kinder to my bursting lungs.

I realize I talk about this a lot. But it is exciting! I still feel like a baby on the day it first realizes that their 2D playmate is actually their reflection.... their curiosity and intense wonder is mine. I feel like that little girl at the Sunday School Christmas concert who, halfway through singing Christmas Isn’t Christmas ‘Til it’s Christmas in Your Heart, realizes that her voice is being magnified by the thing called a "microphone", and upon that realization proceeds to very rudely shove all of her other little Sunday School classmates nearly off of the stage, in an attempt to have the mic all to herself... (Yes, said girl was Little Cheralyn). There’s something beautiful (though embarrassing if you are the parents of Little Cheralyn... Yup, I’ve seen the tape – I can’t say I’d have blamed them if they’d driven home with an empty car seat that night) about those moments of discovery... life is just never the same afterwards. And there’s always a part of you that wonders how on earth you managed to live your life before that.

If you’re laughing [with/at] me on this one, it’s probably because you’re thinking of all those times I sit there and say little or nothing. Though that may be true of me, that’s another story. External processing can also take the form of writing or talking to yourself. I do both. (My apologies to the couple that was walking towards me as muttered to myself in Spanish tonight on the way home from church. I realize it probably looked strange, but, I’ve got to say, I was a little hurt that you crossed the street). It was nice to discover the rationale behind the drive to just get things out. As someone who, until recently, mistook herself as an introvert – or who had “become” one out of perceived circumstantial necessity, it’s also been beautifully freeing to begin to experience the way other people play a HUGE role in my externalizing my experiences and feelings. A big part of it is learning to just trust people as I test these waters - getting used to my sea legs, so to speak.

Probably the most exciting and beautiful thing about this is that I’m finally in a place where the people around me are making space for me to explore this (It really, really helps that most of them are people that use words like “internalize” and “externalize” and “introvert” and “extrovert” and “process”... and encourage and cultivate good self-awareness!). Oh, how I thank you for your patience, your encouragement, your trustworthiness and your shared excitement in this newness!

I actually just feel like a brand-new person. Or at least more like the Littler Version of Me. But that’s exactly what’s happening. As I continue to identify and face the circumstances and experiences that have moulded me into a generally guarded and isolated person, it’s clear to me that Jesus is restoring and unveiling a lot of these things in me (It’s like Jesus is in the recycling business or something!) and is offering me so much more if I engage with the world in the ways that I was created to.

And that is exciting!

This totally is not what I was going to write about tonight, but I guess I ended up externally processing about externally processing, haha. How delightful.

Spontaneous Combustion Pending...

I started my blog this way, but I feel like it's still true: A truly good story really does start with a lump in your throat.

It's been a lumpy sort of a week... a month... a semester... a year, actually. All the things have just been building and building and building x 37... I feel like the poor little frog from the Hulk movie that explodes. Like the bird from Shrek that unsucessfully tries to match Princess Fiona's rising intensity in song. The background music giving plenty of warning for those with weak stomachs to look away.

Fortunately, no one has had to mop my guts up off the floor yet, but I'd like to avoid that scenario.

This feeling is definitely a combination of all of the things that have happened over the course of the year and the way I've come to process those things... Haha, it's probably also partially because of the music I've been listening to and the level of depth and intensity it adds to it (Mumford & Sons has been on repeat all week... Listen to it for a week on repeat and tell me that's not true, I dare you).

This is definitely not the space to go public about some of my experiences this year, but as I continue to engage with them, to face them, to embrace them, this is the space to externalize some of that. And to engage with the new things that come up. Ha, every time I identify myself as an external processor there's a little part of me inside that rolls its eyes. I never thought that would be true.... Cheralyn? An external processor? What? Except that it actually has always been true, I just haven't had space to do that well up until recently. My whole life made a lot more sense as soon as I named that as a thing. I think I'm an external processor both in the sense that I organize my thoughts and come to a conclusion in voice/writing and that I need to vocalize something before I can internalize it as true. Craazy.

I think that's what this space is for.