I have six days left at camp hebron this summer.
That sentance shocks me. I have been through orientation, been a counselor for five camps, worked in the kitchen, spent a week at the beach, and I have one week left. And that's it - then I am getting ready for school.
I don't know how, yet, to process the last six months of my life. Leaving the States to fly to the Middle East, witnessing beauty and tragedy, normal life and revolutions, calling out marhaba! kifek? to people in the streets of Beit Sahour, eating a Shabbat meal with two Jewish families, praying in the church of the Holy Sepulcher, planting grape vines in the West Bank -
and then coming back to work alongside people who have never seen the sun set over Jerusalem, who do not know what it is like to descend the cliffs of Arbel looking over the Sea of Galilee, who have never watched the news in Beirut with a quickening heart, hoping, hoping that peace will win, that democracy will take root, that revolution will spill into Damascus; coming to work alongside people who do not carry the horror of knowing that what you hoped for is coming to pass, that revolutionary things are happening and people are dying and you could leave, because you are wealthy, because you are lucky, blessed, because you are American -
and friends of mine are working in Colombia, are giving two years of their life to seek out the heartbreak, the ugly, the pain of a new place and breathe life into it, bring redemption, hope, Jesus into it -
and I am here. loving kids and their families and singing silly songs and planning devotions and eating pizza and swimming in a swimming pool that so many syrians, egyptians, palestinians, jordanians can only dream of. i am here and what is my purpose, what am i doing -
it is difficult. beyond difficult; perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done. trying to sort through the emotions, the memories, knowing I need to be present now, that I have been asked by leadership here (and by God) to throw myself wholeheartedly into loving people here.
I am still confused about so many things. And I don't know when, if ever, I will come to the place where my questions will find their answers, where I will feel like at long last, to use music terminology, the suspension will be resolved.
But I am able to testify to this: God is in the transitions. I've felt like I've gone through whiplash the last few months, and it's been painful. Through it all, though, I know I've never been alone.
