Drip, Drip, Drop, Little April Showers…

One of the first things I noticed about Peru when I arrived was that it was hot. Nope, maybe that was an understatement…extremely hot. At first it was not too much of a mental change because I had just come from experiencing a hot and humid Tennessee summer. As time went on though, the heat began to get a little old. When the first day of spring arrived down here, I joked around with my friends that it actually seemed even hotter. Ponytails, tank tops, and shorts became my every day attire. Day after day of visiting in the hot sun, I would pray for rain so it would cool off a little bit. For weeks and weeks none came. As I heard different people talk about the rainy season I thought it sounded like a wonderful, perhaps too good to be true, myth. In my mind, rain almost every day would mean less dust, cooler weather, and pretty much everything else amazing! Therefore, for a long time counted down the weeks until this special time of year would come.

People had told me that rainy season could start as early as October but as the days continued flying by, I began to wonder. That is until about two weeks ago…It all started when I woke up in the middle of one night to hear some intense rain coming down (or at least it sounded like it on our tin roof). I remember thinking how nice and cool it was and then crawled into my sleeping bag. When I woke up again in the morning, the wonderfulness continued on. We set out our water buckets and got a ton of free water. Throughout the day, I visited families and enjoyed the refreshing weather. It seemed like rainy season was everything I had dreamed it would be…at first, but towards the end of the day, it was getting a little old.

Day two I woke up, though, to once again find the rain coming down off and on. By this point in time, I was tired of the rain. During the night my lightweight fleece sleeping bag hadn’t cut it, and therefore it had not been a super restful night. I was not looking forward to another shower out in the cold, and I wanted to actually have a dry towel when I got finished. While visiting I got soaked and came back to find that our house was flooding. We had to put everything up on the beds and tables and there was no where to sit or relax. Water had collected on our floor and mud was tracked all throughout our room and kitchen. Our toilet hole was now full of a grand mixture of feces, maggots and water. Our garbage pit was quickly filling with water too and was beginning to smell since we were unable to burn it. When riding in the motor cars, several times I was convinced we were going to completely slip and tip over. For several days all of this continued on, and finally I concluded that maybe rainy season was not all that it cracked up to be.

Since then the rain has cleared out a little bit, but many things are still drying out. The other day it was hot again and for the first time I think I actually enjoyed it. But my question is, why can’t I just be happy with the way things are, when they are that way?

It is interesting to me that so often in life we focus on the good things that are ahead of us. We don’t enjoy where we are at presently. Almost constantly I find myself looking to the future instead of focusing on the present. When I am in one place, I always want to be another, when I am part of one conversation, I always want to be a part of another, when I am with one person, I always want to be with another.

For a while, conversations amongst us SMs frequently would turn to discussing what we were going to do when we returned to the States. Here we are in another country having an amazing experience, but way too often think, only so many more months and then we will be able to go back home and continue on with our lives! But I know this is not what I should be thinking! I feel like this is something that I would really like to work on…being completely content with where I am at all times. I want to learn to enjoy exactly where God has placed me every moment of the day. Only when I have this attitude or change of mindset, do I think that I will be able to enjoy life to the full capacity God created me for.

(P.S. Had a really appealing picture of our bathroom to go with this, but forgot to put it on my zip. Sorry I guess you will just have to imagine :)....