Isaiah 43

This chapter has been taking over my brain ever since last week, which is a good thing. It's too long to post it all right here, but you can click here to see it.

I've been looking ahead towards Haiti more recently - looking at uprooting what's been established here over the past 6 years (friendships, my church, my connection to the city, etc.) and getting ready to step into something new that I don't know. But in all of the natural, human insecurity that gets brought up with that, focusing on God's possessive approach and love towards us (v.1, v.10) in Isaiah 43 has kept me more secure as I think about this transition.

Getting ready to go to a country where I won't have the social, cultural, or (especially) linguistic capital that I have here is pretty unnerving. (ah, Bourdieu. He was so smart.) But with all of that I'm reminded that He is literally with me in every situation in which I'll find myself (v. 1-3). And that's the most comforting thing right now. And I'm told not to fear (v. 1, v.5), that the Lord is strong (like, the whole chapter), that He's powerful enough to make a river spring up in the desert (v. 19), that He loves me and has gone to great lengths to make me His (v.25-). I've been spending a lot of time reading & sitting with that beautiful love expressed in Isaiah 43 for a week and am still overwhelmed by it to the point of being almost unable to get it out into words. But I'm trying. I'm still just amazed at this great, complete, personal, and tangible Love!! This week I have been especially happy to be His.

I think springtime is here? Thunderstorms at night, cherry blossoms, daily high temps swinging between 80 and 50...yep, it's here. Also, I just finished reading The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros and the cover was turquoise, so that definitely makes it feel like springtime, the turquoise. I liked it. It's really easy to pick up and put down whenever and you don't have to put in any effort to getting in and out of a storyline, so that was a nice change from Oliver Twist, which is the other fiction book I'm (sloooowly) reading now. I think Oliver Twist is more of a winter book.

In other random news, I printed out all my paperwork for WHI today and will be filling that out this week. Finally, I have something to do for Haiti prep stuff. If you're just catching up, I'm planning to go to Haiti this summer for 12-15 months in a paired placement through WHI. I'll tell you more about that in another post. In regards to Haiti though, it looks like Martelly won the Presidential election. So we'll see how that goes...