Thursday, January 2, 2014

so sorry! i've been busy bathing and eating salad and using the internet.


A blank page. A white canvas and so so long overdue. I am alive and well and sitting in Reed Creek by a little fireplace. I came home in October and was swept away into a completely other world. A world in which I was very familiar but felt as if I were experiencing it as someone else entirely. A friend I have not seen in years just commented how she feels like it was just yesterday and little has changed. But I am not at all the same. I am a completely different person, walking around in my old wardrobe, meeting up with friends I have known forever. I try to squeeze into their lives and conversations and my heart wants to be there in these moments with them, but it is floating about above a village in Africa instead. I try to bring it back and relate to all that is culturally relevant in this beautifully familiar world, but it won’t come back and linger here for very long.

Every day is full and I feel the clock ticking. The TO DO list is forever long and I am a little overwhelmed with all I have to do yet. There are so many of you I have not seen and I apologize for that. I am not good at this. This living here 8 weeks out of the year. Since being home, I cannot begin to tell you what all I have been doing but I can count the days I had absolutely nothing to do. They are few. For now I am moving everything out of my house in East Point. I should have done it in the very beginning, but I had no idea what to do with it all and left it there for convenience sake. Now that I am most certain I won’t be back in Atlanta any time soon, I feel the need to have everything that I own under one roof and not scattered about between basements of friends and relatives. So this week I have been moving. And I will be moving still in the weeks to come.

Natty and I drove to Brandenburg, Kentucky and I got to meet Laura & John Steen’s newest addition, Baby Eryn who was born in March 2013. Baby Molly is no longer a baby and is all grown up and calls Nathaniel, Danielfaniel. Natty loved getting to play in the snow, was smitten with Hailey the Tween and was just the other day boasting to his big brother that he had a friend Owen, who was not his brother’s friend too, but just his and his alone. The time spent with Laura’s sweet family was way too short. We plan our ideal scenarios, where we are next door neighbors and pop in and out of each others' lives all day, but we have never even lived in the same time zone. Four days was such a tiny visit.  

I have been able to speak to several of you in the Hartwell area and share a little about the last year in Pemba. I love getting to talk about all that was accomplished and am quite amazed by it myself. You all played a part in it and it is just fun to see what was done by everyone giving a little.

The Galeria dos Sonhos project is still running well and each month I have no idea how we are going to sell anything. Then someone comes along and suddenly we have money again. To those who buy from us, THANK YOU. For those who would like to, let me know and I can send you an inventory of items. I have taken them off of our online site for the time being. If you know of a retail space who would like to sell our fair trade items, let me know.

Mozambique has been experiencing some pretty dire political unrest and recently a commercial plane (that my friends and I fly regularly) crashed with no survivors, apparently the pilot crashed the plane deliberately. This is the world over which my heart hovers.

Meanwhile I am here, wanting to see each and every one of you and sit really close and know what is on your heart. I want long chats by the fire and to watch Jeopardy! because what could be more glorious than that?
And then there is the really big question that even I am asking. What next? The answer is that I don’t know. If I had any inkling I would tell you. You will be the first to know. For now, I am only getting direction one order at a time. For now I am hearing, “You are on vacation. Stop fretting and REST." I am also certain it is time to physically move all my belongings into one space and lock them up. So in the next few weeks I hope to have everything I own in a little storage space in Reed Creek, tidy, organized, together and sitting quietly until further orders are received.

I have fulfilled my two year commitment to Iris Ministries and I do feel that I did what I set out to do. It was my intent to establish a school of vocational training and that we did. A vocational school, a language school and a small social business are now all up and running, with amazing leaders at the helm of each. If I were to return I would simply be an administrator, putting out fires and telling people where to go and what to do. That’s not me. The foundations have been built and that is me. I am The Foundation Establisher. Now I am simply looking for someone who wants a Foundation Establisher and who maybe wants one to come and go and come and go and come and go. I am trying to prepare myself for whatever that may look like. Living here and traveling or moving abroad again soon. I could write pages on this subject but will stop for now.

Thank you for giving to me, loving me so well and covering me in prayer.
Much love,
Grace

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