Perspectives

Right now I’m here in my room listening to some jazz music that I’ve never heard of before, but that I like fairly well. Jazz is music I can get lost in and I like that. It’s the same with classical too; you get absorbed in your own thoughts and time looses it’s meaning if only for awhile.

My roommate just walked in… and prompting walked out again.

Many things have changed for me these last couple months. I live in the same house thankfully, but that just about it. I’m living in a new room now, that doesn’t have its own bathroom, but is closer to the office building which means I can get internet in my room now. The roommate, although he is a really nice guy and all, is only temporary, just the month of December. He is one the kids here that started University in Costa Rica through the support of the Hogar Escuela.

I have new Parents in my house which I really love, and they seem to be able to tolerate me too so that’s good. They really deserve a blog entry of their own. I have learned much from them; they are some of the best parents I’ve ever known. They are always very accommodating and we are forming this really great relationship over time that is really special I think. That’s not to forget that we also have a bunch more kids than before in my house as well. What happened was that due to lack of funding that Hogar was forced to cut back the number of houses that we operate meaning houses had to merge. Thankfully the messy business has turned out very well. Instead of my house consisting of just guys, as before, we have two high-school- aged girls and five younger children. One of the new kids is David, or Davidsito as most call him now. He just recently turned six. I don’t know a lot about where he came from, but I do know that before he came here he was found living in a chicken pen because that’s where his mother kept him. You see, David has some mental retardation at least partly due to the fact that he drank some poison when he was really young. When he first got here he would barely talk at all or interact with anyone. But you would never know that about him now; he has the most pleasant disposition of any six-year-old that I’ve ever known. His joy is just so contagious that it’s almost tangible, as if you could reach out and touch it. He doesn’t know how to say or do a lot of things that a normal six-year-old should be able to do, but to me he proves that language has so little to do with words. It just is something I wonder at with real perplexity. He is a little boy who knows nothing of philosophy or ethics, he hasn’t read a bunch of some-help books, likely has a past, at six, that would make ours look like a stroll through life, and yet he has such contentment and simplicity. I just wonder if we make things so much more complicated than they really are. It makes me think about how broken I am inside, and why, and what do I do with that brokenness? To be honest, I don’t really know; I mean I’ve got answers but they all lead me to thinking that their really isn’t a lot I can do about it. The bible talks about how it’s really all God’s business; He’s in the salvation trade, not me. But what do I do with that? Is joy and an embracing of what he is doing the answer? It certainly seems a little backwards to what’s in my background. I remember seeing people that would tell you they had some joy, but I always found it hard to believe them. If that was joy I don’t know that that’s the answer, but now having seen real joy, like the sun rising out of a star lit sky, I wonder if that really it; that it’s possible. If I am really capable of responding to what God is doing in such a simplistic and often nonsensical way. Is there really a way to go back to that child I used to be and experience joy like Davidsito does? I hope I can and, too, know that I am. I really feel that I do experience that kind of joy here. I feel that if you can wake up every morning with the kind of joy and excitement about life that David does it’s like oil on the gears of God’s plan to not only save you but complete you outside and inside.