Updates

I really need to work on updating the format of this blog and am going to look into other things to add to it. I would like to start adding photos and have reflections on them, and perhaps this will be the first entry that I do that with. Other required updates have to do with my life in general. I need to learn to be more patient, to be more hopeful for a better tomorrow, and to spend more time with people that help me to think in this way. Things are actually very good right now in my life. There have been many blessings and many difficulties, and by the grace of God all things have turned out well, and I am completely free to choose whichever road I want to follow from here. Some opportunities still need to be decided on, and others I perhaps need to let fall, but this is possibly part of the secret to life, that we discover the things that we enjoy and pursue them to the fullest. For example, I love volleyball, and so I have it set up that I play about three times per week here at home. It is nice to have all the connections and a good memory of what's going on to be able to make that happen. This evening it is off to Dubuque for a wedding reception, and I know neither the bride nor the groom, but Mike is coming too!

It's a beautiful morning, and promises to be a productive day. We have a garage sale to put together, and I have a bit of translating that I should get working on. I am starting to adjust to not having as much to do, which may come back to bite me when I get back to grad school, but for the moment it is refreshing, and encouraging that life can indeed be relaxing and somewhat transparent with regard to what we want to do with it. When I am at home, this is much more true than when I am in other places. A comment on this....

I have been to many places outside of my home country, and my tendency is to down-talk the place I have come from, and to promote the values, morals, traditions of the foreign culture as the "better" option. However I have learned that this is not necessarily the most positive approach. All that this has lead me to do is adopt the values, morals, traditions of the culture I am experiencing instead of my own, and we cannot live this way. It is to live a lie. Just because it is ok for someone from that culture to live in that way, does not mean that the same way of life would not be detrimental to my own way. I believe that we must learn to appreciate all cultures throughout the world, but cling to the truth in them all. The truth will lead us to correct values, morals, and healthy traditions. Sometimes this can become unclear, especially when everything in the foreign culture seems so vogue and much better than what we had in the culture we left. However, at the end of the day, all we have to rely on are our own experiences, which have shaped us in the way we are. We do not have the basis that the other person from the other culture possesses as a groundwork for their beliefs and way of living. Thus it is important to always come back to the truths that you have learned from your own life, and not simply adapt everything to the foreign beliefs you have learned. For if we do this, at the end of it all, we are no one, pertain to no people and no culture, and blow about as a leaf in the wind to whatever the dominant beliefs of the day are at that place and time.

May we hold to the self-evident truths in our own lives, and go seeking the others that we have to discover in other cultures, and that can broaden our understanding of the central Truth that governs all creation. For in coming to a deeper and deeper understanding of this Truth, we are more and more set free to live as we know to be right, and to have all the opportunities and accomplish the wildest dreams that we can ever imagine.