I'm frantically running through my daily life, grasping for things that I think will make me matter, make me worthy. Suddenly.... The Voice.... in my heart. Like a depth charge in my soul. A single utterance that breaks through my chaos, my defenses, my fruitless clawing for significance. The Voice that with a single word makes me drop to the ground and cover my head. A burst of soul-deep emotion breaks through... cuts through the desert of passionless nothing.... A feeling of shame and acceptance.... only in the Presence of one Person can both exist together. The striving ends... the busyness of fighting battles in my own strength that He has already won for me. Will I lay down my pride and my desire to earn everything given to me... this desire that is ingrained into the fabric of my flesh... Will I lay it down and RECEIVE the love of the One to whom this Voice belongs? Will I RECEIVE from the One who holds back nothing from me? Will I surrender and be apprehended by the One who leads me to the depths and comforts me even there?
Today my girls and I were learning about Mexico. I shared with them that both Aaron and I used to study Spanish. We both spent years in both high school and college learning Spanish. Now it's difficult to remember anything beyond "Hola" and a few colors and numbers. Mandarin has used up most of the language area of our brains. One of the more challenging aspects of living as a foreigner in another country is learning the language. Language is not just grammar and vocabulary; a language exists in a culture, it has a context. There is a way of calling someone an idiot here that is just a series of numbers, a series of numbers that you would surely use when bargaining. If you don't remember to use a different name for the numeral "2" in the number, you will offend the shopkeeper. I can know the vocabulary but if I don't understand the context then I miscommunicate. We have a store of language bloopers, so many that it's hard to re...
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