My Lent

Last week I recived my permanent resident card that enables me to have the freedom to stay in this country, to travel back and forth to Mexico and to have the possibities to get scholarships and financial aid to study at the University. Even though I was jumping of happines last Friday and and a friend told me that I was a “Mexican Jumpin Bean”; my hearted was sadden with two news, the first one was with the death of a friend who lost the battle with cancer and the second one with the first immigration raid made by the Obama administration. I can not keep living like nothing happens, I can not live a truly spirituality if I am not fighing for human rights and against social injustices. I can not start a season of lent without thinking about my brothers and sisters who are going through difficulties due to the immigration raids. I can not keep pretending that nothing happens in my surroundings and just live doing my own stuff, studying and living without being able to change. I would like to be a voice of change to people that can not see beyond themselves, beyond undocumented immigration, beyond gay movements, beyond ethnocentticity; beyond all these areas there are human beings suffering, families  thorn apart.  This is my lent, a period of change  to become a person for the people. A season to leave the walls of pretension and go to the streets with the voice of change.

What is worthwhile!

May be I am disappointing in many things in my life, but one of the things I am most grateful is all the people I can call my friends. For the last eight years since I came to live to USA, I have met so many wonderful  people whom most of the time have become like brothers and sisters to me. I used to have a good friend from El Salvador, Johnny Groenow, who will call me “mi sangre”(my blood). This expression made me realized that in life we have many relationships that, as the blood, give us life to keep living. Last week Paula and I spend many days enjoying the company of old and new friends. I usually can find a lot of things that makes my life unhappy, but I am forgetting about the many people who makes this life worth living it. For Anthony de Mello, an Indian Jesuit “There was only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs we have in our head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to us to question them.”

So this day, I am so grateful for all the good friends I have known through out my almost 39 years of a living soul, and for the many others I will know.

Where?

Monotony is not only what has been affecting my life lately; it is also the realization that may be I have failed as a minister. I have been wanting to create community at Connection for so many years, but I feel like that dream is fading away and the more I desire it, the less I feel it. I know now that I can not create community, because this is not something you can put together, plan or even dream about it. Community comes out from the heart of each other, when in the deepest of our soul we want to be part of of someones heart and suddenly we are liked and accepted. This is part of every human being, real tenderness is what follows when someone reveals to your own inner beauty, when you discover you belovedness, when you experience that you are deeply and sincerely liked by someone” (Brennan Manning, italics are mine).

The other thing I am dealing is the fact that I am not serving just because I am getting paid, but lately I feel like I am getting paid to serve. It is a painful feeling knowing that expectations of people fall into my shoulders wanting to create a fruitful ministry. To convert every penny I am paid into a place where good music is played, good and deeper teaching is taught and programs are created. This is why I have realized that may be my called is not to lead people into deeper waters, but to walk and serve among them.

Even though my life seems a little bit uncertain in these moments, I know, deep inside of me, this is doing something in the relationship with Christ. Manning says, “The physical suffering in our lives, along with various forms of mental anguish–loneliness, tension, unjust criticism, fear, contradiction and confusion, the inability to relate warmly to others–are among the undramatic life circumstances through which we’re formed int the patterns of Christ’s death”

So my question will be, Have you ever find yourself wondering how to make the next step in your life? ….It is like crossing a creek through a stone bridge…we know we need to keep going but we don’t know if the next stone will be sturdly enought to hold us….