Last night I fell asleep in the dim light of a green exit sign outside my window. This morning we woke up to a downpour of rain - an oddity for Denver, which experiences 350 days of sunshine a year :)
I've felt afraid, lost, disoriented, at peace, hungry, tired, and excited today. This morning we began with a staff meeting...but this staff meeting was full of tears, laughter, prayer, worship, lecto divina, holding hands, and funny stories. The staff at Joshua Station are real. Their prayers were beautiful, because it was a time of authenticity - crying out to God, admitting sins, failures, and fears. It was refreshing to be around people who have nothing to hide because they are in a place where they are loved. I felt home already.
This afternoon - after eating the most amazing sesame chicken at a Vietnamese restaurant, we began to tackle the bus system. We are using public transportation this summer, which takes you just about anywhere you want to go in Denver. I have absolutely zero sense of direction and it was all too confusing. I felt so overwhelmed. The commute from Joshua Station to my internship site is about 39 minutes in the morning. I make a couple transfers and I'm deathly terrified of getting lost. I know it's bound to happen...but I just think that my lost is much worse than someone else's lost. I talked to Greg F. - the Denver Urban Semester director about it all and he is going to ride the route with me in the morning. Pray that I can have a supernatural sense of direction coming home :)
After the bus routes I was feeling so discouraged. I was afraid and not confident that urban life was really for me. I love the big city, but it's not so great when you can't get anywhere :) I was hungry and didn't have time to go to the grocery store or a means to get there. But God is faithful. Lindsay - my internship site director came and picked me up and took me to Treasure House, where I will be interning Tuesday-Thursday. I was able to eat a delicious Mexican meal with the women there and began getting to know them. Food was in my belly...oh how God provides. We met up with the women living in the other houses on the block - all a part of Open Door Ministries and we had a Beth Moore Bible study together. At the end of the study, we got down on our knees and prayed together. It was another time of unashamed honesty.
After the Bible study, I started talking to one of the woman who lives in the house. She had told me several times how excited she was to have an intern for the summer. She is a few months pregnant and told me that she was going through an adoption agency. I told her I was adopted and how thankful I was for that gift. I talked about what a blessing it was to be in the family I am in now. I told her about going back to South Korea last summer and learning more about that culture. I asked her about the adoption process and she told me she had 12 families' bios to pick from and was going to get them tomorrow. She then asked if I would help her pick which family her baby would go to. We talked about the kind of family she wanted her baby to grow up in - she said a family that wasn't filthy rich, because she had grown up in poverty and wanted her child to know what it was like to work for everything. She asked me if I had any tips for her in things to look for. Something I've always felt blessed by was that I never felt different for being adopted - my parents had two biological children, but I was never treated differently than them. I told her I thought that was really important - that the parents were going to love their new child regardless of how they got him/her. She thanked me and told me again how glad she was that I was here.
I've been here for barely over 24 hours now and there is so much that I have learned. I am so humbled to be here.
