Mission: Urban

You hear a lot, as a student of ILE, that learning Spanish may not be God’s primary purpose for bringing someone here. I think the first time I heard that I knew it was going to be true of my experience. The past month or so, I’ve been struggling with culture shock issues, language learning issues and personal issues. I was balancing a lot of different roles and responsibilities, but not doing any of them well.

Call me crazy, but The Cat In The Hat opened my eyes to this. The page where The Cat is balancing every possible object on his body has always been an intriguing picture to me. He says, “…I can hold up the cup and the milk and the cake! I can hold up these books and the fish and the rake! I can hold the toy ship and the little toy man! And look- with my tail I can hold a red fan! I can fan with the fan as I hop on the ball! But that is not all. Oh no. That is not all…”

And everything falls. It’s always sort of annoyed me that The Cat tries to precariously balance so many things. And the subsequent chaos has always frustrated me a little. So as I was reading this book to Em last week, my feelings toward this part of the book resonated a little with my life. I mean, I think it’s good to have lots of interests and challenges. And I think balancing them well is honorable. However, balancing life, Spanish, cultural stuff, and the miscellaneous became a little shaky when I started doing it on my own. Eventually, everything fell. I’ve been walking around frustrated with so many things. Somehow in the chaos, I understood something more about God’s strength and my weakness. I tend to like my strength. I like to have a handle on things. And it seems that I also like to suppress my weaknesses.

So I’m beginning to see that Spanish is not, in fact, the main reason I’m here. I think that maybe God wanted me to watch my strength exhaust itself. Once that happened, my weaknesses started to emerge. And that’s when I started to see His strength. His strength is made perfect in my weakness. “He said to me, ‘My grace is enough for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ So then I will boast most gladly about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may reside in me.” 2 Corinthians 12:9

I’m not sure how to bring this back around to The Cat in The Hat. So I’ll just leave it at that.