beginnings

Today began as a partially early morning. My flight to Colorado Springs (via Houston) departed at 8am. At Houston, I almost met Ryan, the other new India intern (from Austin) who, by pure coincidence, booked the same Houston to CO Springs flight. I thought that it might be him sitting directly across from me at the gate and our eyes kept meeting, but I am not the type to go up to a stranger and ask, "Hey, are you perhaps named Ryan?" Later, after we got off the plane in CO, Ryan said that he followed me onto the plane to try and get a glimpse of my name tag on my carry-on bag. While in CO, and before we needed to be at the meeting location (all new interns from all world offices are here together), I decided that I might as well invest in an actual coat. Being from San Antonio with our two weeks of "winter", I have never owned a real coat that will hold merit in a mountain climate ... oh say like the Rocky Mountains, or better yet the Himalayas. So Ryan, another girl going to Costa Rica who picked us up at the airport, and I went to buy me a coat. Then we walked around a shopping area for an hour and a half to kill time. There is snow on the ground - not much though, but enough to allow my feet to play a bit.

Anyway, we are now at a retreat center just outside of CO Springs called the Hideaway. There are 15 interns right now with two more to come soon, and about 4-6 staff that will be giving talks about EMI and its (our) role globally, their testimonies, cultural issues we will face, the role of the church universal, and even a bit of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On Thursday we will give our testimony to the group.

But for now, there is much praying and spiritual and mental preparation to do. I have a new thing - thought, feeling, whatever - that I am not sure I can pinpoint yet. I am not anxious or worried or at all fearful ... but there is an unsettling in me. God is preparing something - something big. I know this. In conversation with some interns who have gone to India previously, one guy said that he came back "ruined". Ruined in the sense that he can no longer see with the same eyes he had before. Another guy corrected him with: "not ruined but fixed", made right. When you see with God's eyes using your heart, change is a must. I suppose the question then becomes: what is our response? I am in great anticipation for how I am going to see God working through great poverty, great hardships, great injustice, but maybe most importantly (at least for now) the vastness of the blind eye, our ability to be consciencely unaware even when it is Indians among fellow Indians.

There is much going through my mind right now - and it is only day one! A parting thought: "Go there - and do there - what you do here."