Normalcy

In sort of unrelated news to anything except my emotions, here is an update.
I figured something out today, but first, lets go back.
When we left home, I didn't think that I would miss very much. Growing up, I always had to adapt to change & changing environments. In the most extreme of examples, I moved from living with a Mexican family in the backwoods of Montana to living with a white family in LA when I was 10. Needless to say, I adjusted because that's what kids do. Of the two, my motto has always been closer to "out of sight, out of mind" than to "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and I was ok with that, hence why I thought I wouldn't miss home too much.
Leaving Moreno Valley was difficult. As we drove off from saying goodbye to Jessika and Robert, I couldn't help but to cry, a lot. It was strange-I had left friends before and I had lost friends before. Why was it so difficult this time? Perhaps I just needed to get over it, give it a few days. Time wore on and on and I missed home more and more. For the first 5-6 months, time dragged on. It seemed as though we had been gone for an eternity. Life had become a pattern-pull into a city, go to a church, make some friends, connect, create an awesome bond, hang for a few days, then, just like the last time, leave, not knowing when or if we'll meet again.
Fast forward to the semi-present. We arrived in Ocean Grove, NJ on November 10th. (It is now December 20th.) The longer I'm here, the more I fall in love with this place. It really is the picture of classic, innocent, American charm-small town, Christian community, cute little cottages everywhere and everyone knows everyone else. In an ideal world, this is what my city would be like, only where I actually live instead of way on the opposite side of the country and the reason I wouldn't move here is because everyone I love lives roughly 3,000 miles away. And yet, as our time draws to an end, I am sad to go. Sad to be here and yet, sad to leave. How does that work?
Well, that's what I figured out today. What I miss about home is the familiarity, the people that I love and the faces that I know. I look at my girls and I know their stories and I know that they know mine. I go to church and I know who is who and where I can help and what I can do. At work, I dislike the job, but I love the people and experiences, all because they are mine. I have all that I need, I feel normal, steady, welcomed. Everywhere else, I am a stranger. I don't know their history, their family issues, their trustworthy people, I don't know anything. I am a foreigner.
But now, now I'm in a place where, by the time I leave, I'll have been here for 7 whole weeks. That's a decade in comparison to every other state. And I realize why I'll be sad to go-I've developed normalcy. People know me and, albeit surface, I know them. I can walk down the street and say hi to Hellen and Bill, I can run into Jackie at the Barbaric Bean, I can chat with Robin as I fold laundry, I can joke with the same guy at the hardware store because I'm always in there, or run into Walter, Mark, or Chris, because they're always around. I am comfortable, welcomed, accepted here. They've let me in and although I don't quite belong, I'm not a foreigner. I'm grasping at the wind of this feeling that I only have for a few days at a time on the road but everyday at home-comfortableness and I've had it for 6 weeks now. Come the 28th, that will make leaving all the more difficult.
Today we said goodbye to the 2 people I will probably miss the most here in Ocean Grove-Rob and Meg. Having worked side by side with them nearly everyday, they have become such good friends. Even though they were our bosses, they treated us with such equality, love, and respect and we never felt as though they lorded anything over us. I will definitely miss them incredibly.
For some time now, I have had a feeling that after our commitment in Georgia ends on January 5th, we would be called back to California. I didn't put too much stock in it, only because I had had this feeling before and clearly, it wasn't God's timing so much as my desires. As I've prayed, and definitely not as much as I should have, I am reminded of God's goodness. The other day at the coffee shop, we were able to have an evangelistic and borderline apologetic conversation with a gentleman who had some pretty far out ideas about God and heaven. It kind of sparked an excitement in me, a remembrance of the good ol' days where that's all we did. Later that day, as I was copying pictures to an external hard drive, I started to look through old pictures of the trip. Ten months is a lot of memories, 8,108 pictures thus far to be exact and once again, that excitement and nostalgia started to set in. My firm grip on desiring normalcy loosened, albeit just a tad, to let in the adventurous, spontaneous, and ever changing reality of life on the road....again. Now we have just about a week until it's time to go and everyday I grow a smidge more ok with it. Maybe because I don't have a choice, maybe because I truly am excited, I can't really say.
All that to say that I miss home, but that is the semi-permanent state I'm in. I figure, I'd rather miss home than suffer what Paul suffered through so bring on the foreign-ness. :)
Thanks for taking the time to read this, it helps me to know that people I love, care. :)

hurricane relief.....sort of.

And then we were back to Jersey for hurricane relief.....

(Disclaimer-if you are expecting a bunch of horror stories of devastation, there aren't really in here, so don't be disappointed-you were warned.)

We got into town on Saturday, November 10th in a flurry of volunteers & chaos. We pulled into this little city called Ocean Grove that looks virtually unscathed. 

Here is a quick background of Ocean Grove-years and years ago, a group of Methodists got together to have revival meetings in tents. They were there so often, they just bought all of the land & moved in and started building it up. Today, the "Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association" still owns all of the land (not necessarily the property) and it's a little Christian community. The town itself is less than a square mile-you walk around and everyone greets each other. It's a quaint little city that is affectionately nicknamed "God's Square Mile". 

So we get here, and there was A TON of people and not very many leaders to direct people what to do, which is understandable because it's the first disaster relief these churches have worked on. Day one was filled with a lot of standing around, waiting to receive direction, too many people trying to unload the same trucks and nobody knowing where anything goes, and things like that. Slowly but surely over the next few days, things became more organized. We got put up in this place called The Grove Hall Retreat Center, a nice little inn that we've been using to house volunteers. (Basically, where we are is the hub-right in the center of the 2 founding churches. So the teams meet here & stay here & eat here and every morning we send them out to work on houses.)

After a few days, our pastor from back home, Pastor John called us and asked us if we could commit to being there for 6 weeks. Because we have zero obligations until December 31st, we agreed. Then we became the minions!We have been pulled aside as floaters, so we are always running around doing the most random of things from sorting clothes to stacking groceries to airport runs to unloading trucks to being the go between between the volunteers and the bosses. Never in my life has the phrase "I wear many hats" applied to us more than it does now. I've been helping to keep the inn where all off the workers are staying, so if I ever want to get a job at a hotel I will be officially qualified, although I'm not sure I'll ever want to fold another fitted sheet for as long as I live after I leave here. Marc does more of the stuff that requires physical strength-mostly moving boxes and leg work. They are long, tiring days. I think we might be starting to become grown ups or something, because we go to bed by 11 usually every night, which is at least 3 hours earlier than usual! But in all fairness, we are up around 5:45 or at least by 6 everyday. 

In the first week we were here, local people started noticing all of the food & clothes that were coming in, so they began to show up, asking when it was going to be distributed and thus began our thrift shop where people come in and in one section they have all of the clothes and then in the other are care packages of food and toiletries that our teams have put together. It went really well. A lot of the people who come are homeless, which is not what the intent was but it's who God brought us, so they were ministered to. There were a few people who came in who weren't homeless, but had just been wiped out by the hurricane, they didn't have much of anything, so we did the best we could to replenish their wardrobe at least and to feed them spiritually and there was a lot of fruit from it. At least one person got saved everyday. As the people came, a volunteer for the most part stuck with them and navigated them through the "store", which was an excellent ministry opportunity. We served them hot coffee as they waited in line. The volunteers were so helpful and joyful. They truly had a heart for Jesus and to serve Him by serving the people.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the powers that be decided to shut down the "thrift shop" because there was a lot of abuse going on with it-people taking way more than they needed, reports were coming back of people selling what they took, things like that, so they decided to refocus our efforts & volunteers to strictly hurricane relief. 

During the time our store was open, I was personally involved in 2 very awesome events. The first one, this girl randomly started talking to me, allowed me to minister to her, and we met up for coffee & to have a study together. It was pretty awesome!

The other woman, Cynthia, told me that she lost everything, not in the hurricane, but just the circumstances of like. She lost faith in God a few years back when her mother passed away, but her abusive father was still alive and since then, she's been abusing herself. I was able to share some verses and pray with her. Later that  day, she came back and asked for me to pray for her again and she received Jesus! We hugged & cried & prayed, it was one of the finer moments in life for sure. Afterwards she told me, "I just feel like I have so much light in me" and "I'm feel like I'm really loved for the first time in such a long time". And that's what it's all about. In a long series of events, she agreed to go to a rehab program called U-Turn for Christ all the way down in Tennessee & left the following Friday. Because it's an at will program, she left after a few days, so please, please pray for her if you think about it. 

On Thanksgiving day at noon, we headed over to St. Paul's Methodist church, who had cooked a huge Thanksgiving dinner for whoever wanted to come & specifically invited & honored the Calvary Relief volunteers. It was pretty sweet. Then we took off up to Newark, NJ (about an hour north) to visit our awesome friends we had left just a few weeks earlier. We stopped by CC Kearny to say hi....where we had dinner #2, then headed off to the Loaiza household for dinner #3. :) It was a really good Thanksgiving. 

Now that the outreach center has closed down, we have slowed down a lot in the Youth Temple. A typical day in the life consists of breakfast, doing any prep work for the teams before they go out (ie, Marc gets them tools or we help them make sandwiches for lunch, etc), cleaning up around the youth temple, and general organization and prep. If a team has recently left, we clean up their empty rooms & change the beds, maybe wash a few loads of towels/sheets at the inn. I know, exciting stuff.

Here is some odd, yet exciting, news. We got in about 7,200 Klondike bars. I don't know why they donated them, but they're here for my eating pleasure nonetheless. Also, there are about 3 more pallets of various ice cream flavors. 

One really cool thing about being here is that a bunch of people that we've met from all over the place come here! A group from Maine came down that we knew some of, then a guy that we met in Connecticut and even a group from Kansas! And on Saturday, a team from our church! Yeaaaaahhh!

Something God has been teaching us through everything is servitude. The first week we were here, there was probably about 50 other people here & they were awesome. A couple little things here and there, but for the most part, they were great. The next week there was also an abundance of awesomeness when it came to the teams. Dun dun dun, then came the 3rd week when we got people who were difficult to serve. They were needy, pushy, and not the easiest people to get along with. Of course, not all of them, but they definitely made my life more difficult than all of the other groups, and Marc felt it, too. However, we realized almost simultaneously, that God wanted us to learn to love and to serve those that we didn't want to, that we felt didn't deserve it, because that's what He does. It definitely wasn't an easy adjustment, but it got better.

That's really all I've got for you now. :) Check in later :)