As always, travel is humbling. I feel like Job must have felt when God takes him on a showy tour of His creations, except I don't meet any whales or anything like that. But seeing the many different cultures, languages, and traditions that belong to humankind? Mind blowing. So, this is what God envisioned when he scattered his people! Yes, there are a lot of ills in all our cultures, but the existence of distinct cultures and ways of being in the world is a reason to rejoice, and to tremble in awe before a God whose capacity for creativity cannot even be imagined. No one person can claim to understand the world. One day, we will see clearly, and oh, what a day that will be.
I must confess that I did not go on my one-week vacation with any goal other than having fun and trying out new food. But even with all that self-indulgence, God made his presence felt. Not in an encounter with the sublime, mind you. That would have been fun as all emotional highs are always fun. But during this week, I felt that God was bringing back to my attention all the little lessons he's been wanting to me to learn recently.
Learning to be kind rather than right, for one. (I think this will always be my Achilles heel.) To give freedom to others, for another. In every relationship, if I am to love them as God loves them, I need to do good by them, but I also need to give them the freedom to choose how they want to interact with me. This can be especially difficult in academia where backstabbing and betrayals occur almost as frequently as they do in soap operas. And in real-life, they hurt more. The third and last lesson that I remember: getting back into "the rhythm" may not always be a good idea. Daily, I think, I will have to learn and relearn how to listen for God's drumbeat. I need to be disciplined, but the progress I make is also dependent on God's grace.
