To all those who have been praying for me and have waited a long time to hear from me again, I thank you for your patience and your prayer. I know that your concerns for me must be great by now seeing that I have not updated my physical and emotional well-being as well as my Spiritual Growth since I last made an update in New York. Please be rest assured that I am getting better physically.
Let me begin by putting some of your fear for me to rest. To answer the question most people have asked me both here in Honduras as well as the United States “Are you enjoying your time in Honduras?” My answer to this is simply “Yes”. My time here has been enjoyable for the most part. My experiences at first were challenging. For instance my experience with some of my host family was difficult because of some of their comments that I found distasteful or stereotypical. An example of this is they asked me if I like alcoholic beverages in which I immediately said No and that I would be going against the law in the United States, (As well as going against the STEP rules for proper conduct in another country.) Encounters like this angered me, but I shook those kinds of comments off because I came to the conclusion that this was their world view of most Americans. I am happy to be different in this aspect and happy to be able to shake up their view of most Americans.
Language learning was also a difficulty for me and it didn’t help that my host family, and tutor, would get on my back for “not studying enough” when nothing could be farther from the truth. I would study for at least 2 hours a day maybe more but I did not realize at the time but although I was understanding what my teachers as well as my host family but I could not speak the language coherently so they would automatically think that I was wasting my time. In this I was also glad to prove them wrong for all my hard studying did pay off and I can now speak partial Spanish but I still have grammatical errors that still make it difficult for me to communicate effectively so they continually try to speak to me in English even though I try to tell them to speak only in Spanish thus hindering my efforts to learn the language. Even though I spoken ill of some of my host family it is important to note that all my family members are very sweet and accommodating to me. They continually make strides to make my time here enjoyable as well as help me live in place where my allergies seem to run rampant, but even my allergies have started to become manageable because of them. They are wonderful hosts and wonderful people. It’s only because of cultural misunderstanding that I have had some tension between some of my members of my family. We have and continue to have an enjoyable time together. The first month was just hard for me to emotionally adjust.
As for my physical well-being, from the moment I literally set foot on my plane to Honduras to my time writing this letter I have not felt a since being healthy. At first it was my allergies that kept me miserable for a month and a half. Then from then I have continued to feel ill or have stomach problems or have some kind of sickness. Some of my sicknesses have had explanations for why I am sick but some sicknesses the doctors here cannot figure out why. I have a strong inclination that the Devil has his hand in this so please continue to pray for me.
So some of you are probably wondering as to how my answer to the question of “Are you enjoying your time in Honduras?” could possibly be a simple “Yes” well though my emotional state and physical state continue to be a perpetual rollercoaster, there is one part of my well-being I have not mentioned and that is my Spiritual Growth. Although my emotional and physical states continue to be shaky at times my Spiritual Growth has taken flight. I am constantly growing closer to God. In fact I feel my closer than I have ever felt before. I started reading through the Bible and the more I read the more I can’t get enough of learning about my God. One morning I woke up and I was just hit over the head with a sack full of Gods joy, the Spirit of God. I was happy and there was no reasonable explanation for it. I mean my emotions were not where I would have liked them to be and I was still sick that day but I WAS HAPPY and continue to be happy. I felt embolden as well, filled with a chrismal and a tenacity that I haven’t felt. But it was not only that something else happened. Something I haven’t felt in a long time. For the first time in a long time I GOT EXCITED the thought of just talking, listening, acting with the lord just gets me EXICTED. Every time I think about it or talk about it I can’t contain the Joy that he has given me. It just burst forth from every pour of my being. So all these things that most people would want to change like circumstances of relationships with others or sicknesses, these things have become my secret joy because I believe in no other way could God have changed me in the same way he is doing now. My God has and is and continues to be too good to me so I will thank him and worship him because he is good. I am growing and being stretched all over and I love it.
When I think of several passages of scripture that I feel I can relate to this experience I think of Psalms 1:1-3 as well as 2 Corinthians 4:7-18
