NOE, you have my heart...

Sometimes my heart feels too much to properly explain. I’m on the other side of having spent the entire day reveling in my Morelia alongside newcomers. Aside from the exhaustion that is pulling at my eyelids and leaving creases and traces of its presence, I’m left with words that can’t wait for proper timing.

 

Sure, I should be sleeping.

Class will come soon enough and I’ve so many things to do that I haven’t even given a second glance, but words don’t ask for my permission, they don’t look for the most opportune times. In fact, they often look for the times when my soul says sleep would be much more satisfying, but that would be throwing in the towel. That would be giving up, and I can’t let my heart reckon that that is okay anymore.

Tonight, we dedicated the new NOE with the founders and twenty high school students from Portland, Oregon and current students and past students, alike. 

I heard stories of NOE that were absolutely unheard of to me. I listened to the hearts behind this dear place that I know now as home and I couldn’t, I couldn’t keep the tears from falling. Because NOE means too much to me, so much that at times my heart can’t contain what all I am feeling; there is just too much love that compels me to keep settling in and laying down roots for the future that awaits me here.

And well tonight, I’m grateful that I have been gifted with hands to serve cake spilling over with blue icing and steaming pozole. I’m grateful that I have been gifted with feet that can stumble into mini-dances and a voice that can sing to avoid trembling at the cold wind. I am gifted because I have hands, feet and a voice that can serve.

And all it took and all it takes is a willing heart…

I can’t even tell you. I just sit here and I’m overwhelmed that God would use me in such a grand way, that He would use fifty words to bring me to a place that would steal every bit of my heart and stow it away for keeps and my impending return.
 

I am too blessed. I am too blessed to keep it all in to myself.

 

And well, I am sitting here with tears standing in my eyes, because I’m thinking of my darling current and past students and their needs. I’m torn with their hurts and their pain, because they don’t just take up seats in my classroom, they take up pieces of my heart and their lives consume me and keep me here, they keep me pushing forward even when the missing of home becomes heavy, when the thoughts of my loved ones in Indiana take over.

Yes, my students keep me here and I am spent with the idea that I am a 

part of something so grand and 

beautiful, in awe that my Maker chose me with Morelia in mind, from the beginning of time, before I even got graced with my name. And so I will live and so I will love until my sweet Maker says all is well and it is enough...