Etched Into Our Hearts Day by Day

By Rebecca F., missionary in Costa Rica

The last few months have been marked by the struggles of community life, a changed love for our friends, and receiving people in our home more often. I knew that the Lord was inviting me to grow in love by learning to love my community. To be completely honest, I was utterly failing at it. I had arrived at the moment when you get down to the nitty gritty trenches of truly loving, when affection has dissolved and sacrifice has lost its appeal; when you’re slapped in the face with the fact that charity isn’t concerned with the injustice of the situation and mercy doesn’t count the cost. You can continue to justify why the other is undeserving or you can choose to love them as they are. It was such a basic lesson of love that I was ashamed to admit how difficult it was to actually live it out. I suppose that’s why so many volunteers call this experience the kindergarten of love: because the simplest truths of love that we know so well in our heads can only become etched in our hearts by living them out day after day.

While this truth was making its slow and painful pilgrimage from my head to my heart, I was battling other frustrations. As usual, I was trying to white-knuckle my way into aligning my feelings with what I imagined they should be, to live a magnanimity that I simply didn’t possess. The Lord heard my pathetic complaints and took pity on me. We went to El Salvador to do a several-day silent retreat with the volunteers in the mission house there. We received several talks that shed light on my particular struggles to accept my circumstances, my community, and even my own failing to love as I desired. In the silence and infernal heat, the Lord took advantage of my mid-adoration naps to work on my heart without my interference, and I left with a renewed enthusiasm for the neighborhood that had disappointed me so much in the beginning.

Immediately upon returning to Costa Rica, our parish had a large celebration for the feast of St. Isidore and many of our friends in the neighborhood attended. I found myself greeted by one family overflowing with things to tell me only for the conversation to be cut off by another friend’s embrace to be surrounded just a moment later by half a dozen kiddos talking to me all at the same time. Everywhere I turned, there were the faces I had come to know so well, faces with stories and sins and sorrows. For the Mass I chose to sit with Marla, a single mom and an immigrant from Nicaragua who lives a humble life of constant hard work, but always finds time for the Lord. Just before the Mass started, she took my hand, slipped her bracelet off her wrist and put it on mine: “To remember me by,” she whispered. To remember her–how could I forget her? She had become so dear to me. That night as I reflected on my day, it struck me for the first time that our friends were truly beloved to me. I didn’t just visit them out of compassion because I knew they needed it, but out of desire to see them, to be with them. Suddenly, my complaints vanished. Nothing about the circumstances had changed, but my perspective had. I can only say that God rewarded my faithfulness to His call during the months of internal struggle with a special grace to embrace the reality in which I could encounter my Beloved.