Life is beautiful

Life here is busy but in a good, full and rich kind of way... Life here is beautiful!

Last weekend I had the opportunity to do some traveling with our Madam as she needed to take her soldier to his barracks in Mombasa. It was a great weekend. I really enjoyed getting to see the coast again, but mostly getting to know the Madam more on a person to person level and to share some family life with her. Life here is always family life. If you are under the misconception that that is something very much different than family life in America, you are wrong... it is mostly just love and grace and sharing life despite our humanity together, and it is beautiful, just like it is in America... sometimes hard, but beautiful...

Another thing which is beautiful is Kenyan countryside, which I have had the opportunity to see a lot of. While I had been to Mombasa before back in December, I had made the trip their on a night bus and had no idea what lay between Nairobi and Mombasa. While on Friday we drove through the night to get there, coming back was Monday during the day, and it was stunning from the coastal farmland through the hours of African grassland, to foothills and farmland back to the outskirts of industrial Nairobi at dusk. I would have taken pictures, but I tried once and if you take pictures out of a moving vehicle, they are blurred... so you will have to simply believe, that Kenya is insanely beautiful.

Coming back to Hope is always beautiful too, even after being gone a few days; the greetings of my fellow teachers, the smiles that light up the children's faces when they see I return, and the feeling of coming home. The day to day is beautiful... the teaching which still terrifies me slightly with the gravity of my job; it is the children's future!... the babies who are getting so big but are always ready for some quality cuddling and reward you with big eyes and bright smiles... the teasing of friends as we go about our day to day... the feeling of home...

With just over a month remaining in Kenya, I feel torn between two homes; the home I have made for myself here with the children and the home which calls me back to America. It is completely natural and logical for me in the same breath to be excited to see my family and to lament how I will ever say goodbye... to count the days both in anticipation and in terror... Often, I simply begin to reflect on this past year and on the richness of it and on how much I have grown as a person, on how much these children have taught me. Often, I am simply overwhelmed by the grace in it all, by God's grace in my life in somehow bringing me here... Sometimes I simply reflect on how life is beautiful...