Reflections
Letter to my team:Hey friends, it was only a few short hours ago that our stories diverged at the airport and after saying goodbye to fellow teammates and starting to share stories with family, each of us will eventually come to that place where we are alone, alone with our thoughts, with God. After experiencing life together for two intense weeks, we now find ourselves alone, surrounded by people who have no idea what just happened. We try to connect, we try to invite them into our experience, but there aren’t words enough to explain. Everything feels enchanted, like a faint fiction that I know I should remember. My mind and body have adjusted to a Kombie seat, but now when I drive on the wrong side of the road and I glance at a stop sign I think, ‘That looks vaguely familiar.’ From the taste of my Smokehouse Turkey to the way the sun sets across the parking lot, I recognize this place like memories of a previous life. And as I think back on the last two weeks, the dream is already beginning to fade. Jokes take longer to recall, faces begin to fog just beyond my sight, and the memory doesn’t stir near the emotion that the experience once did. I’m afraid, afraid to forget, like returning from Neverland to a life absorbed with meaningless distractions. I’m afraid I won’t recognize what’s real because my senses have been so tuned to accept the satisfactions of this culture. I’m already tempted to throw in a CD rather then enjoy the quiet I’ve come to love. I’ve already settled into my routine of checking my email and frequented websites. Those things that once seemed so important to me now seem like shadows, they’re empty but you can never quite get away from them. But for now I long for real, the reality of my current setting combined with the fullness of our care-free, relationship-oriented lifestyle of the last two weeks. So now as I do everything I can (except chop down a tree) to stay awake until 10:00pm, I’m struck with the same tension I always face, the tension between the dream and the reality, between what’s asleep and what’s awake. These are the tensions that will bring us back together. Slowly, one by one, we will bring those lonely thoughts back to each other, back to this blog, back to our memories of the trip. And it’s here, together, that we realize the dream isn’t over, it’s only just begun. Until next time, my friends....
posted by mike @ 9:05 PM
