renovacion interna

"El tiempo otorgado a la renovación interna nunca se malgasta.
Dios no tiene prisa.”
–H. Nouwen

[Time spent on internal renewal is never wasted. God is not in a hurry.]

It's a good thing He's not, because I'm slow. For every step forward, it seems there is always a step back...but this week I was encouraged because I got to attend some cool seminars at my new church by a Bible scholar guy on the Gospel of John, which is the first book of the Bible I ever read, and the Word that God used to make Jesus real and alive to me at the very beginning of my faith journey as a Christian. We did the study (in Spanish, of course) in manuscript format, which reminded me of IVCF days...and I loved it.

In a way, I feel like I am coming full circle. I felt earlier this month like I needed to be "born again" in a sense to recover some precious parts of my faith that I feel I have lost over the last couple of years, and as I was sitting listening to exposition of some of the most familiar words of Scripture, they spoke to me in a new way...it made me want to dig back into familiar passages again and see what new things might be in store for me there. I've neglected that quite a bit here, as my predisposition to action and service has taken over much of my reflective side (which seems to only get attention when things reach crisis mode, or when I can't sleep.)

All of that said, it was really cool to spend time these last two evenings talking about my favorite Gospel with a bunch of older Nicaraguan women with lots of insight and humor. Which sort of brings me to another subject that merits another post down the road...my whole spiritual community life has kind of been like a random assortment of patches over the last two and a half years...but maybe, just maybe, unbeknownst to me, a beautiful warm quilt is forming.