Reflecting on 2014

While 2014 has not been my favorite year that I've had the pleasure of living through, there is something to be said for times of disappointment, trials, fear, and difficulties.  Although we typically do not seek out the valleys of life, nor do we particularly enjoy living through them, there is much to be learned in our journey through them. Here are some things I've learned throughout the whirlwind that has been 2014:

Even in the darkest moments of despair, always look for the light.  It is there, and though it may not always be burning brightly from all around you, it is there nonetheless.  My bright spots this year have been the never-ending love and support shown to me by my beautiful family and friends.  Who knows where I would be without them.  I'm glad that I don't even have to imagine what that would be like.

Even when the journey seems impossible, keep going.  2014 has been a long, dark, and winding road without an end.  But yet, December 31st has arrived.  The snow is glistening outside on the lawn and the sun is warmly shining (even if it is only a mere 22 degrees outside right now).  Each and every journey, no matter how big or small, begins and is completed one step at a time.  Each step, whether the first one, the one stuck in the mud, the one that drenches your foot in a puddle, the one that twists your ankle, or the one that crosses the finish line, is necessary to complete the journey.  When life seems too big or too dark or too hard, remember to put one foot in front of the other and "just keep swimming" (or walking).

Choose happiness.  Even when we set our sights on the bright spots in our lives or taking one day at a time, it can still be all too easy to focus on the pain and suffering.  The difficulties of life that bring us all down zap us of energy and drain our mental and emotional spirits with ease.  Choosing happiness requires us to refocus and concentrate on what is truly important.  It is a conscious decision that may need to happen more than once a day.  I'll be the first to admit that I've not been the best at doing.  In fact, I've flat out sucked at doing it many a day.  It's hard.  And choosing happiness doesn't mean that it's not okay to be sad or experience sorrow or pain or loss or anger.  It simply means choosing not to live every day consumed by those emotions.  As one of my favorite people constantly reminds me, "It's okay not to be okay.  It's not okay to stay that way." 

As we get ready to close out the remaining hours of 2014 and usher in 2015, I'm reminded of God's promise for redemption.  What greater sign of restitution and grace is there than the cross, where out of wounded hands, redemption was provided for the lonely, the broken, the depraved, and the hopeless.  The valleys of life are not comfortable.  But where one is comfortable, one does not grow.  In 2015, I'm looking forward to seeing more bright spots, taking each step in my journey with meaning and purpose, and choosing happiness in the face of trials. 

Paz y amor, 

JMF

God's Love in Our Time of Great Suffering

Sometimes in our seasons of despair and deepest need, we turn away from that which we need the most.  We ask ourselves: Why have we been abandoned?  Where is God in our time of suffering?  Why can we not see the light?  This has been my latest struggle in the reconciling of my faith with life’s seemingly unnecessary hardships.  

All too frequently in our culture, we are accustomed to treating our Christian faith in terms of cause and effect… in the sense of rewards and punishments.  We believe that bad things should not happen to good people and, likewise, that good things should not happen to bad people.  Where would be the fairness in that?  What would that mean for justice?  However, I’ve come to realize that God does not operate in such humanly-minded terms.

Similarly, many followers of the Christian faith presume that our failure to live up to what God calls of us should result in punishment, and, contrarily, that our success in being obedient to God should result in reward.  Thinking of our faith in such a way causes us to lose focus on what really matters.  If our faith is genuine and true, then we ought not to think about what rewards or punishments will come from our actions.

These ideas surrounding a rewards-based religion are especially apparent in our times of great trial. While suffering, we often question why God has abandoned us or why something so grave has happened. I cannot help but be reminded of the story of Job, perhaps one of the most beautiful and passionate books of the Bible.  Although he suffers, Job continues to believe.  As the book of Job points out, Job had not done anything particularly disobedient to God to reserve such relentless punishment.  In fact, he was regarded as a man of integrity and innocence, but still suffered immensely.  Why then?  It is this line of questioning that we must leave behind.  We must live disinterestedly (not seeking gains for our obedience) and talk about God in such a way that will allow us to accept His love in our time of great suffering.

But how are we to talk about a God who is revered as love in situations plagued by suffering?  How are we to proclaim a God of life to those in the darkest of valleys?  Like Job, we must come to the conclusion that justice is beyond a matter of simple retribution.  God revealed to Job that His love dwells in freedom and is not subject to this doctrine of retribution.  God asserts that he does have plans and that the world is not a chaos.  The plans do not control God, however, but are controlled by human beings.  God’s gratuitous love is the ground of all existence and provides justice.  But justice alone does not tell us how we are to speak about God.  It is only when we come to the realization that God’s love is freely and gratuitously given that we can enter into his presence and know how to talk about him. 

The silence of God is hardest to bear in time of trial.  This fact is true.  And I’ve come to know it as a hard truth, especially in these uncertain and difficult times.  However, without moving away from this idea of the doctrine of temporal retribution, we cannot completely accept the free and unmerited love of God.  Eliminating this method of thinking from our minds is a difficult (seemingly impossible) task.  And even after doing so, suffering will still remain.  But we have to remember that God will always turn the valley of misfortune into a gateway of hope (Hos. 2:15).   God is a presence that leads amid darkness and pain.  Luis Espinal, a priest murdered in Bolivia, wrote the following:

Train us, Lord, to fling ourselves upon the impossible, for behind the impossible is your grace and your presence; we cannot fall into emptiness.  The future is an enigma, our road is covered by mist, but we want to go on giving ourselves, because you continue hoping amid the night and weeping tears through a thousand human eyes.

This is exactly what Job did.  He flung himself into an unknown future, despite suffering and pain and hardship, relying fully on God’s love.  And in this way, he met the Lord.  

It seems that I have been asking the wrong questions throughout the past year and weeks.  So, I’ll stop asking “Why?” and starting asking, “Where can I find You?”

I leave you with the following poem by Juan Gonzalo Rose entitled “La Pregunta” (“The Question”).  I’ve included the translation for you non-Spanish speakers. Its profound message has certainly hit my heart like a wave.

Mi madre me decía:
si matas a pedradas los pajaritos blancos,
Dios te va a castigar;
si pegas a tu amigo,
el de carita de asno,
Dios te va a castigar.

Era el signo de Dios
de dos palitos,
y sus diez teologales mandamientos
cabían en mi mano,
como diez dedos más.

Hoy me dicen:
si no amas la guerra,
si no matas diariamente una paloma,
Dios te castigará;
si no pegas al negro,
si no odias al rojo,
Dios te castigará;
si al pobre das ideas
en vez de darle un beso,
si le hablas de justicia
en vez de caridad,
Dios te castigará.
Dios te castigará.

No es este nuestro Dios,
¿verdad mamá?

------------------------------

My mother told me:

If you stone the white fledglings,

God will punish you;

if you hit your friend,

the boy with the donkey face,

God will punish you.

It was God’s sign

of the two sticks;

and the commandments of God

fitted into my hands

like ten more fingers.

Today they tell me:

If you do not love war,

if you do not kill a dove a day,

God will punish you;

if you do not strike the black,

if you do not hate the Amerindian,

God will punish you;

if you give the poor ideas

instead of a kiss,

if you talk to them of justice

instead of charity,

God will punish you,

God will punish you.

Mamma, is that really

our God?


Paz y amor,

JMF

Self-Discovery

Discovering yourself and who you are never happens when you want it to. It's also never as easy or simple as you want it to be. Of course, you can intentionally try to walk the road of self-discovery, set out to determine right then and there who you are, but those paths are often filled with wrong-turns and almost always end in dead-ends. Think “No Outlet.” One does not simply decide to discover who he is and that which makes up his life. We cannot determine in an instant who we are, for it is our life that does so.

In looking back, we find that our memories and experiences are the very things that shape who we are. The struggles we face, the doubts we have, the love we share, and the roads we walk all form a part of our being. The sum of our experiences forms our identity. We are shaped by them, molded by them, influenced by them, and changed by them. In a sense, we are them... the good and the bad. Every decision, every choice, and every moment had a collective hand in leading us to this moment, to who we are today. And we are not alone in that.

We have all been afraid. We have all been lonely. We have all run away from the light. We have all forgotten to love when it counts. We have all failed to show grace in another’s time of need. We have all failed to do the right thing. These moments are not unique to our own identity, but what point is there in living if we cannot learn from each other? What is the point if we cannot support each other in our time of need? What is the point if we cannot recognize the shared human experiences of failure, disappointment, doubt, and disbelief? Each of us has a story, and that story is not meant to be locked away in secret, but rather, shared with others as a testament to who we are and from where we have come.

In learning from the past, it is then that we find who we are. And even if we do not like the picture we see or the path we’ve carved, we can all rise up from the ashes. We can always relight our candles, even those blown out from the winds of life. And, as Natalie Grant reminds us in her song “The Real Me,” we can all mend the tattered fabric of our lives into a beautiful tapestry.

Paz y amor,

JMF

The Tower of Babel as a Warning against Uniformity and Self Alienation

Wow. It certainly has been a while since my last blog, nearly a year to be more precise. It's hard to believe that during this time last year I was blogging to you all from over 5,000 miles away. As they say in English, "time flies." Or in Spanish, "el tiempo vuelva." Whatever your language, time never stands still. I could probably rant on and on about this topic, but I'll spare your retinas the time you'd spend staring at your computer screen reading nothing of great significance.

Anywho, to progress toward the real meat of the blog, I wanted to share some text that I wrote for my modern language seminar. We were to read Genesis 11:1-9, which I will provide for you in just a few moments so don't preocuparte [worry] too much, and were to write our own interpretation of the passage and what implications it held for us. I thought it was something worth sharing in hopes that you all could benefit from it, too. To refresh your memory, here is the passage that we were to contemplate:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth. 

Now that you've read those nine verses, the following is my reaction to said verses:

Throughout the Bible different verses and passages mean different things to many different people. The story known as the Tower of Babel, found in Genesis 11:1-9, is one of those. There, we find God’s people in a world where all nations are one with a single language. They are unwaveringly determined to erect a giant tower in order to reach the heavens, so that “[they] may make a name for [them]selves.” It is quite obvious through the Lord’s destruction of the Tower of Babel and the scrambling of the people’s language that the construction of the tower was not meant to be a part of God’s greater plan. But what significance does this possess for our lives? Or, in the words of the overused question often asked throughout our elementary and middle school days, “What is the moral of the story?” The importance here is twofold: the passage is a warning against uniformity and against self alienation from God.

The Lord scrambled, mixed up, jumbled, and confused the language of the people because they were using it in a way that allowed them to go against God’s will and plan for them. They did not question themselves because the task was so easy, as is evidenced in the sixth verse when God says, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” The unity of language among the people allowed them to build this tower. They demonstrated no doubts about what they were doing and remained steadfast in their decision to construct it. By confusing their language, God sent a warning against uniformity. There is great beauty to be found in our distinctiveness. Diversity teaches us to be tolerant and better citizens of a global world. It brings out true human kindness and understanding. It provides us with multiple points of view. It presents another perspective, different than our own. The Tower of Babel is an encouragement of our distinctiveness and clear warning against the uniformity that so blinded God’s people.

The second counsel that this passage offers us is a warning against self alienation from God. As I mentioned earlier, the people thought they could do it all on their own. Their desire to make a name for themselves in the heavens was brought about by eliminating God and moving toward an idea of self reliance. They thought that they didn’t need God. After all, they shared the same language and because of it “nothing [was] impossible.” This idea of self superiority that plagued the people was completely contrary to what God wanted for them and what he wants for us. This passage warns us that there is no meaning in life apart from God and we must be cautious not to alienate ourselves from Him.

In conclusion, the implications found in the story of Tower of Babel are ones that warn against a desire for uniformity and for self sufficiency. God confused the language of the people to create differences among the people. These differences provide us with others who have different views and perspectives than our own. In the sharing of this diversity and distinctiveness, we invoke critical thinking and reasoning to work together to solve some of life’s greater problems. However, we must ensure ourselves to include God as the director of our collaborative work, as this passage also serves as a reminder that we cannot experience success when we eliminate God from our lives and try to do it all on our own.

Well, in the famous words of Porky Pig, "that's all folks." I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope it challenges you. I'd promise not make you wait so long for another blog entry, but with this semester already kicking my butt, I don't know if I'd be able to keep such a promise. Hasta pronto (or not so pronto)!

Paz y amor,
JMF

MI PRIMER VLOG [MY FIRST VLOG]

Hola amigos de blog, que tal?? Once again, it has been a while since I last blogged. (Shocker of all shockers, I know). But I decided to do something different this time, aka: video blogging or vlogging, whatever you prefer. I've been too tired to get all of my experiences down on paper virtual web-space. So follow this link on over to my YouTube Channel to get a look at life in CHILE!


Don't forget to "like" and comment, peeps!

NO ME HE OLVIDADO DE USTEDES [I HAVEN'T FORGOTTEN ABOUT YOU PEEPS]

Amigos de blog,

These past few weeks have been filled to the max with things to do, pages to read, exams to take, and parents and g-ma to visit with. I promise I will keep you updated... Look for a new blog sometime this weekend.

No te preocupes (don't worry). Everything is going wonderfully and I can't wait to share the past few weeks' adventures and stories with you. Stay tuned for updatessss, porfa.

Paz y amor,

JMF

ARGENTINA Y BICENTINARIO [ARGENTINA AND BICENTENNIAL]

Amigos de blog, ¿cómo estai? Since it has been the trend to start off my recent blogs by apologizing for the lack of updates, I have decided not to break said trend. Entonces (the best Spanish transition word that exists.. I use it for practically everything), I'm sorry.. I apologize.. Lo siento.. permiso.. perdón.. disculpa... Take your pick of apologetic words and phrases. It has been a super, tremendously busy past week and half or so. I've spent my last two weekends in true Chilean style (más o menos | more or less).. and by that I mean by visiting Argentina (not so Chilean) and by celebrating Chile's Bicentennial (much more Chilean).

Two Fridays ago, some of my gringo friends and I trekked the eight hour bus ride through the gorgeous Andes Mountains to spend a week in Mendoza, Argentina. Although it's nearly impossible to share the entire experience with you (too many inside jokes and stories to be told), I'll give it my best attempt.

Getting into Argentina was súper rápido (really fast) and surprisingly easy. Getting back into Chile, however, was not that easy... and definitely not that fast. With Chile's strict border control policies and security procedures, it took us more than two hours to get back into the country. Although we enjoyed taking in the absolutely beautiful view of the snow covered Andes Mountains surrounding us, two hours was definitely longer than we had bargained for. But at last, we experienced success (with only a few minor mishaps, thanks Jamie... we owe it all to you.. kind of) and crossed the border back into Chile.

While in Mendoza, we took a bike tour through the countryside of Mendoza. Can you say wine country? Yes? How about in Spanish? Anywho, Mendoza is packed full of vineyards, farmers, olive oil producers, and chocolate manufacturers. We spent nearly six hours biking through and visiting many of these vineyards, while enjoying the breathtaking view. Mendoza is truly beautiful. During the bike tour, we stopped at a beer manufacturer to indulge in some delicious empanadas while sitting on bales of hay and being surrounded by the Andes Mountains.

After the tour, a few of us decided to head out to a nearby restaurant to indulge (yet again) in some famous Argentinian steak. Lemme tell you, there's a reason they are "famous." So good! We also decided to indulge (third & fourth times) in some ice cream. Throughout two nights a few of us consumed 1.5 kilograms of ice cream. For those of you in the States, that's approximately 3.306 pounds, yes pounds, of ice cream. It cost us a total of less than 9USD. Now that's a good bargain. You know I love my ice cream.

We also spent our time visiting many of the plazas that are located in Mendoza, reliving our childhoods by playing in the playgrounds of the aforementioned plazas, stepping foot into one of the most well known chocolate factories in Argentina , visiting the largest park I have seen in my life, eating pizza, jumping on hostel beds (well, that was only me...), and riding a double-decker bus back into Chile. All in all, it was an exciting, fun, and wonderful trip! Some notes: Argentina is surprisingly different from Chile, as Argentinians

1. modulate their words while speaking (hallelujah for understanding every single word!)
2. are more calm and laid back than Chileans (I never thought that was possible)
   
3. look and act more European (who knew?)
   

Those are my mere observations after less than four full days in Argentina. Take them as you will.

Entonces (favorite transition word!), back in Chile we just wrapped up celebrating their Bicentennial. Lemme tell you, it was one big deal. Stores and businesses closed for the entire weekend, beginning on Friday until now (Monday). There were fireworks on two separate occasions, ramadas (carnivals) complete with games, vendors, food, and rides (don't worry, I resisted the urge to try out a rickety and shady Chilean carnival ride), and enough asados (barbecues) and comida (food) to keep anyone happy for a long time. Oh, did I mention the cherry on top, creme of the crop? (look, I rhymed)... no classes!

In other thrilling news headlines.. James's ability to spell accurately in any language has taken a dramatic tumble. Learning a second language really screws with one's ability to spell... yikes! Once a pretty darn good speller (especially back in my elementary and middle school days), I've become more reliant on spell checkers... thank goodness for Firefox's auto-correction feature. I'm in love. (Sorry, Firefox, although your auto-correction idea is genius and a most wonderful invention, I'm taken). Seriously though, this spelling thing is driving me up a wall and across the ceiling! Ay!!

Classes start back up again tomorrow, and I am "supposed" to get back the results of my first exam. Take note of the quoted key word in the previous sentence. I have been "supposedly" getting my exam back for the previous two weeks. My professor has assured us (for the fourth time) that we will indeed get it back tomorrow. I'm not holding my breath, that's for sure. Although I am nervous and excited.. it's my hardest class. We shall see.

Thanks for sticking it out and waiting patiently (or not so patiently) for my posts. Until next time,

Paz y amor,
JMF