Peru Christmas Part 2: Finding Love in Lima

All this week, we are sharing reflections & pictures from the team that just returned from Lima, Peru.  Their journey was part of an effort our community made to share gifts & hope with a community we’ve worked closely with for seven years.  After raising nearly $7000 between our group and others @ WBCC, we were able to buy Christmas gifts for kids in Lima, Pachacutec, and Iquitos.  We also bought two brand new moto-taxis as sources of income and employment for the church and those they reach-out to.  Finally, we completed funding several smaller infrastructure projects that weren’t yet finished at El Shaddai.

FINDING LOVE IN LIMA                     Shaya Lawrence

As I reflect on this last trip to Peru, and on the Advent season I have noticed a common theme this year for me. I realize it is an often talked about theme, however it is one that to me is the most mysterious, most difficult to truly grasp, and one in which will take the rest of my life to seek and still may never comprehend even a little of what it is. The theme is Love. I have always truly struggled with this word/feeling/action contemplating; what does it mean to Love?

4.20.99 final thoughts

We’ve spent the last week  hearing different voices look back at Columbine.  A week of remembering draws to a close.  This last day, I thought I’d share a reflection I wrote visiting Virginia Tech in the days after that shooting.  My hope in doing this is to give us eyes beyond Columbine.  Post-April 20th life, for me, became hopeful in the moments I chose to embrace my story and share it.  I found great healing in coming alongside those who had been through similar trauma.  And I still see hope in seeking the way of Jesus, who was one “acquainted with sorrow” far beyond what I’ve known!

Pain, Hope and Choices: From Columbine to Virginia Tech 

 

I recently spent 3 days in Blacksburg, VA at the Virginia Tech campus just days after the school shooting there that left 32 students and professors dead. I went as a survivor of the 1999 shootings in Littleton, CO at Columbine High School. Without an agenda or formula for recovery, I traveled to grieve with the community and support those in this fresh pain.  Three friends who also experienced Columbine- Mat, Margot,  and Shaya, traveled with  me. 

I came because of a sympathetic vibration.  I heard words being poured out by the media like, “another school shooting” and “multiple students killed on campus”, and I not only hurt- I remembered.  I knew the weight of grief found in the moments and days and years after I passed through a similar storm: April 20, 1999.  Columbine.

4.20.99 part 3: joined in suffering

We’ve had a lot of response and heard so much conversation around the 10th anniversary, we’ve decided to continue through this week with different reflections on Columbine out of our group.  Today, Shaya looks back on the road of healing & the journey towards seeing suffering in a new light…

Someone told me a couple of days ago something that I had never thought of before in the 10 years that I have struggled with my experience at Columbine. She said that she saw my Makers thumbprint in my life, and that my gift, not my curse, was that I had joined my Creators yoke in suffering, but not in the way most people think of when they think of suffering.  Suffering to me meant dealing with all of the bad things that happen to you and that sometimes it just happens more to some people than others. My friend helped me to see that while yes, suffering is experiencing trying times in our lives; it is so much deeper than that alone. Suffering is also