Costa Rica Missions Project - The God in Me Sees the God in You
Duke Chapel Scholar Lindsey Huth (far left) shares her experience of traveling to Costa Rica on a Duke Chapel Spring Break Trip. This Spring Lindsey coled a house course titled, "How We Do Mission: Sustainable, Informed, Relational Service Abroad." Read her reflections in poetry form below.
May 8, 2015
The God in me sees the God in you
This life is a tilt-a-whirl
We find a seat that looks relatively clean, sit down with people we are comfortable enough with, and begin spinning
Spinning in our own private circle
As we spin the ride moves up and down
Other people’s circles spin to our front and back
Never getting any closer
Or further
Just spinning
We see splotches of color, hands moving in rounds, blurred faces
Words get tangled in wind over a space too loud for more than small talk
Too small to share a comfortable apathy
We spin
Spinning is safety
It’s a reassuring incoherence
It’s never knowing too much or asking the wrong questions
It’s a substitute for meaningful interaction
The plane landed and we found ourselves in a place that felt different
And somehow familiar
The air was a little thicker
The sun shone a little brighter
Time moved a little slower
Their world didn’t spin like ours
Beneath deep green palm fronds
Over reddish brown dirt
In the heat of a Costa Rican spring morning
Our tilt-a-whirl broke down
And for the first time we saw each other
No longer were we blurred faces but beautiful stories
As our tongues tripped over phrases breaking language left and right we somehow managed to finally speak to one another
I’d never touched you before but somehow your palms fit perfectly in my hands every time we prayed together
And we did more than pray together
We began to understand together
We sang together to open windows in an off yellow bus
And I heard the culture in their voices
They found home in a place they’d never seen before
As our shoes filled with mud from construction site trenches
We finally found our mouths full of meaningful conversation
It tasted sweet and unfamiliar like the crunch of sugar cane atop untrained teeth
Impossible to take in all at once, yet it still left me wanting more
More of this place I’d never seen before
More of this food I never liked before
More of these people I never knew before
More of this feeling I’d never felt before
What is it about this place that I’d never known before?
Something about people changed here
It was like looking into the ocean and seeing the sky
Or is it, looking into the sky you and seeing the ocean?
He spoke English better than I spoke Spanish, but sometimes our words still found themselves bouncing off one another
He told me his testimony and as we read the bible together in two different languages I quit seeing in double vision and was caught by a unity that for so long was unbeknownst to me
I was the sky looking into the ocean
I didn’t see myself I saw him
But I didn’t see him
I saw myself
The God in me
Saw the God in him
And the God in us see’s the God in you
But don’t be afraid
I assure you, you’re more than beautiful
The tilt-a-whirl begins again with the start of a plane engine
Buckle your seatbelts
Read the safety instructions
And begin spinning at your own pace
We expect you to be at full speed by the time we reach the states
Adios, gracias, mucho gusto
I hold the image of God in my mind as the spinning begins
Please don’t let us lose this
Dios
nunca nos olvidemos
de que encontrar uno en el otro
Dios es amor
Nosotros son amor
By Lindsey Huth, Duke Chapel PathWays Scholar, Trinity '15