As I opened up my blog to write to you tonight, I noticed the four discarded beginnings of posts I had tried to write since my last update. I smiled a little to myself... and then deleted them all, admitting that I still didn't want to finish any of them. They each felt superficial in their own way - all facts and no heart, dry prayer, routine days, nothing out of the ordinary.
But now, having returned to Colorado, I'm looking back on my summer and I realize that the one thing I will most take from it into this coming year as a missionary and team director is just that: the profound simplicity of it all - the life within the ordinary, the richness of friendship, the beauty of silence, and the fullness of grace that can be found within each seemingly insignificant moment.
During one of these ordinary days I did some reading, as was usual for this time of the afternoon, and stumbled upon this little gem from my current favorite book: "The temptation is to look beyond these things, precisely because they are so constant, so petty, so humdrum and routine, and to seek to discover instead some other and nobler 'will of God' in the abstract that better fits our notion of what his will should be." "The plain and simple truth is that his will is what he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems." "For it is not man or what he does that counts most in the plans of divine providence, but rather that a man accepts in confidence and fulfills to the best of his ability each day what God has chosen for him." [He Leadeth Me by Fr. Walter J. Ciszek, S.J.]
As I was preparing to come onto campus I was beginning to get a bit overwhelmed with the new responsibility of being a TD. This was totally not of God; it was pressure I was putting on myself - trying to find that other and nobler idea of what it means to be a Team Director. In reality, being a good TD is going to be best lived out in the ordinary. In daily teaching and modeling for my team and students. In doing expense reports. In serving them by finding the answers to the questions they have. In giving them the encouragement and direction they need to be the missionaries they were created to be. In praying for and with them. In getting up every morning and going to bed exhausted every night. Being with them in the works, joys, sufferings (the ordinary things of life) provided for us today - in accepting them as from God, trusting Him, and being "another Christ" in each moment as it comes.
This gives me a new perspective to the work we do on campus in assisting students as they answer the universal call to holiness. Edith Stein put into words well what I mean when she said, "I ... thought that leading a religious life meant giving up all earthly things and having one's mind fixed on divine things only. Gradually, however, I learnt that other things are expected of us in this world... I even believe that the deeper someone is drawn to God, the more he has to 'get beyond himself' in this sense, that is, go into the world and carry divine life into it."
Most of us missionaries and the students we work with will live out our vocations in ordinary things - in making breakfast and doing laundry and helping with fundraisers and going to work and playing cribbage and swing dancing. This is our "world", full of ordinary things, and we are expected to bring divine life there by doing them with the Love and Joy and Hope of Jesus Christ. Just as he did for the first 30 years of his life on Earth.
Now I'm off to make the agenda for the next two days of team planning before the craziness of fall outreach really hits... and it seems much less overwhelming now that I realize how ordinary it is and much more exciting since I'm aware that it is God's will for me right now to do it :)
