questions

i'm going to give a semi-chronological update on what's been going down the past week or so. it's been a while since i've done that.

last week was the most intense week of schoolage i've experienced quite possibly ever. thursday i spent literally ALL day doing school things -- from waking up early to study before going to class to take a test, until staying up until 2am working on a paper that night. i think i started to go crazy. does hugging the kettle make me crazy? or just cold from moving very little from my tiny desk...
i had to get away. i had to not do school things. i needed... you guessed it, nature.
so friday night we were going to go to church before heading out of town, but it turns out that everyone except molly, myself, and two other guys got the memo that church had been cancelled on account of the rain. no church because of the rain? yep, you heard me right. they're serious about staying dry here. i mean, the poorly designed streets turn into rapidly rushing rivers with the rain, meaning getting on a micro involves wading through frigid, muddy puddles. all that to say, since there wasn't any church, we went walking in the rain with the two other guys who had been left out of the memo. turns out they were exceedingly interesting, and for the following several hours we talked about everything from linguistic psychology to jesus-changed-my-life stories, we munched on slightly soggy cookies while seated on the beach in the rain, and all-in-all enjoyed aimless wandering in the seemingly ceaseless rain.

we already had our bus tickets for the 10:30 bus to santiago, so we arrived around midnight and stayed at our friend's house that night. Saturday was spent mostly galavanting all across Santiago before we finally made it to our destination, Cajon de Maipo. It is a small town in the foothills of the Andes, where snow-peaked mountain tops line the horizon. we thought we had a cabin reserved, but it turned out to be a swanky hotel. most gloriously of all, it had a heater!!! winter as arrived in full force here, but chileans don't really do heaters, so i hadn't really been warm in a very long time. needless to say, molly and i cranked up the heat in our room almost as high as it would go....
once we had been thoroughly heated all the way through, we ventured back out into the damp cold to have an asado (bbq) in the dark. i can't possibly imagine why we were the only people there cooking out in the cold, damp darkness......... anyhow, we shared conversation, peanuts, and chunks of meat that we ate with our bare hands straight off the fire, then retreated back to the heated room. the friends who we went with are in a tuna, which is an organism far too complicated for me to fully explain here -- largely because i don't fully understand them. but in summary, it's a several-hundred-year-old tradition of university students who play music and travel together to earn money to help pay for their living expenses while they're living. and they usually wear funny rennaisance costumes. yes, it's the men in tights from february!!! (for those faithful readers out there who have been keeping up with this blog all along) once back in the room they serenaded us with all manner of music and merriment for hours upon end.

but the real reason we had come was for the stars... so put on as many layers of clothes as we had with us, and ventured out into the night, following the gravel path into the darkness. miraculously the clouds from the rain that had hoovered for the past two days disappeared especially for our star-gazing pleasure, and from our position on top of a tin roofed building the view was spectacular to say the least. we saw one shooting star after another, and the only other sound besides that of our own voices was the distant roaring of the nearby river.
we talked about God, about Jesus, about the church, about community, about friendship, about chivalry, about respect... We talked until the cold seeped into our bones, and finally we went back. finally around 5am we went to sleep, for the first time in a while that i fell asleep with my arm outside the blanket. the heater was glorious.

sunday we woke up, had a wonderful breakfast of fresh-baked bread with cheeeeeese, then went exploring down in the river. later we walked into the town, had some empanadas and french fries, played with some puppies, danced in the middle of the main plaza, and headed back. unfortunately both molly and I had homework that had to be done, forcing us to leave our friends.


this week has been less intense with school things, although i had one test and a paper to turn in. now all i have left for next week is one essay and two tests and then on wednesday i'll be DONE! Praise God that a guy from my literature class offered to be my partner for the big final paper for that class, which meant I contributed my half of the content to the paper but he was able to fix it to be spanish that actually makes sense. i can't imagine how it would have been if i had tried to do this paper without him.... i am so so so thankful.

yesterday molly and i went to a cafe after classes to cleanse our minds of academic things, discussing instead some soul issues that had recently come up. you see, we've been going to this bible study-ish thing on tuesday afternoons in a small group of 5 girls. this week we were going through some supposedly basic questions about the Christian faith, which turned out to be really difficult for me to answer. i've been going through a process of letting my faith out of the box i had spent my whole life constructing for it. i needed this time to see God outside of the church, outside of religion for that matter. i experienced Him in a much bigger way than I have ever been capable of experiencing Him before, but now, back in the context of a church, these questions are hard for me to answer. What does salvation mean? how does Jesus's death equate my eternal salvation? What am I being saved from? deep down I know these things through the holy spirit.... but i don't know how to answer those questions with words. i mean, i could give you an answer, but i dont know the answers, cachai? So molly and I sat on a couch in the cafe asking questions, looking for answers in the bible, daring to ask. but now, do we dare to recieve the answers? i'm a big fan of wondering... there's something utterly beautiful in a question, but there also comes a time for answers, and i think that scares me more than the questions.

so there's the past week.... the end is in sight, and i'm very ready to be through with school things. not so sure i'm ready to be through with chile, but school can be over any time now. (although another thing God has shown me recently is how to actually be thankful for trials... like being glad that i have to work hard and think hard for school. i dont want things to always be easy, and i want to be challenged) francisco is coming into town this weekend, which is exciting. we're going to hang out at his house all weekend and cook things and stay up late talking and watching movies... it's going to be awesome.