Day 11 - Wednesday, July 14th

It's 10:44pm Honduras time and I have just spent the day at the hostel. With the runs. The burning runs (sorry for being graphic). It's been a pretty good streak of healthy days considering how much contact I've had with unfiltered water, shady-looking ice, river water with parasites, and beverages from unknown sources. After a morning of sanding down bed tables for the kids in the local hospital, JLai, Sam, and I went to the Galeria (the mall) down the street and got some Church's chicken. The contrast between the Galeria and the surrounding neighborhood pretty much encapsulates a lot of the economic demographics of what we've seen of San Pedro Sula. The mall is gigantic and brand-spanking new, something right out of suburban America, but it's right next to local mom and pop shops where air-conditioning is non-existent, much like how the cardboard villages are located across the river from a luxury hotel and how huge neon franchise signs line the streets where donkey-pulled carts can be found.

I've been reading a book called "Following Jesus Through the Eye of the Needle" and it essentially talks about incarnational living, or living amongst the people you serve. The hostel lost power for most of the day today and it was all too easy for us to just hop on over next door to an air-conditioned wifi-equipped cafe and spend our afternoon occupying ourselves with frivolous activities like facebooking and window shopping online. But then I remember looking out the window and seeing a family crammed in the back of a pickup truck, wearing stained and sweaty clothes and riding in what can only be described as hot sticky air. I realized that even after a week of 90 degree 80% humidity weather and more sweat than I can remember, we are so blessed to have the option of escaping all this at any moment of our choosing. To be able to jump into an air-conditioned bus after a day's work, to be able to fill ourselves with virtually anything that our palates fancy, to be able to get first-class care in the event of an emergency.

I feel like this trip has put me at a crossroads between the mainstream desire to reach higher and for more and a challenge to, as the caption of the book says, pursue "living fully, loving dangerously". I know it's not that black and white and that there is and will be overlap, but I also know that it comes down to priorities and the direction of my life's focus.

The more I learn about this Christianity business, the more I realize how counterintuitive everything can be :]