A Story for Beth

Alternatively titled, ¨Why My Heart Calls Mexico Home¨

One day, a year and a half ago, my hermanita, Michelle, unknowingly turned my life upside-down. She asked me at lunch, ¨Hey, hermana, any chance you want to go on a mission trip to Mexico for two weeks this summer? Point Loma has a trip.¨

To which I replied, ¨Y´know, no. Not really. ¨

Background: The previous year I had traveled to Panama with a group from my church. It was a good trip, I had no complaints, but my heart wasn´t ¨in it¨ so I didn´t feel like I was in the right place, thus, I didn´t feel that mission trips were for me.

My dear hermanita let it go at that, even though I knew she was disappointed.

It wasn´t until almost a month later, as I was driving to school, that I thought again about her offer. I was driving along, listening to my ipod, singing along obnoxiously, like you do when you´re driving to school alone and only cows can see you. The lines of the song went something like,

¨Jesus I believe in you, and I would go to the ends of the earth for you...¨

Pause.

This is where God said,

¨Really, Charlie? Do you mean that?¨

To which I replied,

¨I´d like to think so?¨

And the divine creator of the universe responded with,

¨Oh good. Let´s start with Mexico, shall we?¨

Now how am I supposed to argue with that? And if that wasn´t enough, just to spite me, the next song on my ipod was ¨Mexico¨ by James Taylor.

So then I was faced with a few difficult conversations:

1. Hermanita. "Hey, you know that trip? The one I turned down? Is it still open?...." -- turns out it was. Because Point Loma extended the deadline at the last minute. Oh yeah, my higher power covers his bases.



2. My father. More difficult. "Hey dad, you know how I said I didn't want to go on any more mission trips? About that....."


Fast forward three months.


I'm sitting around a table in the PLNU cafeteria with hermanita, Brittaney [another high school friend] and some new friends, all headed to Baja California early the following morning. Mary, a 40-something woman from the midwest who somehow found herself headed to Mexico with 25 teens from SoCal and 77 Mexican students, was telling us her story. Afterwards, she asked us, " What about you? Why are you here?" Listening to my new friends tell their stories, and listening to myself tell my own, I had an overwhelming feeling that God was about to open his mouth again.


" Charlie, you're going to find your heart here."

And I did. Not in the way I originally expected to though.

I assumed that ¨finding my heart¨ meant that I would hop off the bus and instantly know what God wanted me to do with my life. This was the summer before I started college, and so naturally majors, careers, callings, and life goals had been heavy on my mind. I became a woman possessed. Every city we drove through, every stop we made, I waited expectantly for something magical to happen. It was as if I was looking for a billboard in every skyline saying, ¨Charlie. This is where I want you to be.¨

Loca, right?

It wasn´t until over a week into our trip, while sitting next to hermanita during our customary evening worship service in Cabo, that things began clicking. We were singing a song in spanish:

¨Hoy te rindo mi ser
Te doy mi corazon
Yo vivo para ti
En cada palpitar
Mientras haya aliento en mi
Dios haz tu obra en mi.¨

which translates to:

¨Today I surrender my self to you
I give you my heart
I live for you
in every heartbeat
while there is breath in me
God, work your masterpiece in me.¨

Pretty deep stuff, yeah?

So as I´m listening to myself say these words, and their meaning is hitting me, I realize that THIS is what finding your heart means. It´s not about places, or careers, or even callings. It´s about motivation and surrender. Knowing what (or who) you´re living for.

As I started scribbling these things down in my journal, 2 Corinthians 5:17 was on repeat in my brain:

¨Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come!¨

I copied it down at the bottom of the page, and just as I finished, the remaining blank pages fell out of the binding. Time for one more divine conversation:

¨Charlie, this is a new beginning. Trust me. You´re not walking with me anymore. Let´s dance.¨

¨Lord, what about the whole ´finding my heart´ business? I mean, did I hear you wrong?¨

¨Charlie, sweetheart. I told you that you would find your heart. I didn´t say I you were ready to know where to put it.¨

And he still hasn´t told me.

That trip started a domino effect in my life that I´m still feeling today. I´m sitting in front of a computer in an Ecuadorian house partly due to it. I ended up transferring to Loma almost a year after the trip, largely due to it´s impact and the people I met there. And some of those people, those strangers around the table, I now count among my closest friends, including the lovely lady to whom this post is dedicated (who will also be my roommate in January).

I can´t say for sure if I´ll ever get to go back to Mexico long-term, though I can think of few things that would please me more, but I do know that it´s where I found my heart, and that for that reason it will always feel like home.