Team Purple!

Hello friends, so as of Tuesday night, we have been separated into our respective teams for the next five weeks! It was an interesting and slightly anxious ordeal. Even though I’ve only met these people last Friday or Saturday, these past few days have been packed days of intense fellowship whether it was through various organized learning sessions, worship and prayer, bus rides and sightseeing, conversations over great meals, or games of Resistance and Fishbowl that you seriously just grow close to people without even trying. I’ll be honest — throughout this trip, I’ve been a little fearful of getting closer to people. I think I have just been fearful of the prospect of saying good-bye when orientation ends (hence, the slight anxiety) and the growing pains that comes from loving deeply (probably rooted in the many good-byes as of late). It wasn’t until after our quiet times Tuesday morning when I read an excerpt from Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love that I felt much more at peace:

“Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you, or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful… When your love is truly giving and receiving, those whom you love will not leave your heart even when they depart from you. They will become part of your self and thus gradually build a community within you… The wider your inner community becomes, the more easily you will recognize your own brothers and sisters in the strangers around you… The wider the community of your heart, the wider the community around you. Thus the pain of rejection, absence, and death can become fruitful. Yes, as you love deeply the ground of your heart will be broken more and more, but you will rejoice in the abundance of the fruit it will bear.”  

 The Inner Voice of Love, Henri Nouwen (58-59)

I was afraid that the team I would be put in would either be filled with all people that I super clicked with or people that I interacted with less fluidly, and I was (prior to the announcement of the teams — of course, typical Jason) anxious and wondering what either case would mean, yet I’m glad to announce that I’m actually really pleased with how my team ended up! I can confidently say that I feel like Dad has blessed me with a heart to love each of the team members I have been placed with, and I deeply admire the faith of many of them. To say the least, I’m pretty excited for the camps to start!

Yet at the same time, in the next day, there are still a lot of good-byes to say. This year, IS-C is in an interesting situation where a LOT of people are leaving early, and so whereas you’d usually have the hope of seeing the same people during the week of debrief, several of the people that I met this past week will be leaving early and the good-bye tomorrow will be good-bye until… who knows when… However, I’m confident that if Dad permits it, our paths will cross again and if not, then well… I suppose I have to believe that these people will not “depart from [me],” but rather they will become a part of the “community within [me].” And that’s a little saddening, but I trust Dad is good — that I can “rejoice in the abundance of the fruit” that will be borne from having met these people at all.

It’s been an exciting week, but there are definitely many things to chat about still, so please chat with Dad for:

1) Uhhh, at least for me, I still have no solid lesson plans, because we just discussed who in our teams will probably be teaching the higher level/lower level English students, so please chat for me to have diligence to really flesh out my 8 series lesson plan over the next two days (or to trust that Dad will pull through even when I don’t)

2) Focus on him. I can feel that a) I’m getting comfortable with people, and it’s easy to want to just have fun that maybe you’d forgo an opportunity for a blessed conversation or alone time with Dad, and b) with the prospect of saying good-bye, it’s really easy to focus more on our IS-C teammates than on Dad necessarily.

3) Unity among our individual teams — for vulnerability, openness, and exhortation amongst the team members — would we be honest to one another and bear Dad’s heart for us for one another.

Thanks for reading, and as always, hope all is well with you. Blessings! J 

P.S. Hopefully, we’ll take a group photo so I can introduce Team Purple to you soon!! Stay tuned for when I’ll post our first group photo (that we’ll hopefully take today, haha).