Brothers and Sisters -

I am a bit remiss to have been so long absent from this weblog.  I live in the Dominican Republic right now, and I work for Cuerpa de Cristo Iglesia Cristiana and Christian Dominican Evangelistic Mission.  I believe that my ministry here has benefitted and will continue to benefit from my previous experience in England.  To my shame, I admit that I was negative and critical toward many aspects of English culture.  I came to the Dominican Republic expecting anything - I came expecting to miss my friends and family, and the comforts and familiarity of my home.  I came expecting to embarass myself with an incomplete knowledge of the language and culture.  I came expecting difficulty, and discomfort, and discouragement, and disorientation.  But I also came expecting to see the work of God in this place, and I believe I will see it, and I believe I must lean into His strength.

I have been nostalgic for my home and my friends, and for other times - specifically, for the summer and fall of 2004.  I said then and I have said since then that it was the happiest time of my life.  My friend Thom shared with me a passage from C. S. Lewis's preface to Pilgrim's Regress that I think explains my sentiments toward that time. 

The experience is one of intense longing. It is distinguished from other longings by two things. In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long ansent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognise the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is being rejuvenated. This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it. 'Oh to feel as I did then!' we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness. For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having. To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.
     In the second place, there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire. Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some inexperienced all their lives) suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring. Thus if it comes to a child while he is looking at a far off hillside he at once thinks 'if only I were there'; if it comes when he is remembering some event in the past, he thinks 'if only I could go back to those days'. If it comes (a little later) while he is reading a 'romantic' tale or poem of 'perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn', he thinks he is wishing that such places really existed and that he could reach them. If it comes (later still) in a context with erotic suggestions he believes he is desiring the perfect beloved. If he falls upon literature (like Maeterlinck or the early Yeats) which treats of spirits and the like with some show of serious belief, he may think that he is hankering for real magic and occultism. When it darts out upon him from his studies in history or science, he may confuse it with the intellectual craving for knowledge.
     But every one of these impressions is wrong. . . .
     Every one of these supposed objects for the Desire is inadequate to it. An easy experiment will show that by going to the far hillside you will get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desire which sent you thither. A rather more difficult, but still possible, study of your own memories, will prove that by returning to the past you could not find, as a possession, that ecstasy which some sudden reminder of the past now moves you to desire. Those remembered moments were either quite commonplace at the time (and owe all their enchantment to memory) or else were themselves moments of desiring. The same is true of the things described in the poets and marvellous romancers. The moment we endeavour to think out seriously what it would be like if they were actual, we discover this.

Think about it.  I sure love you.

Your Friend to the Bitter End,

-zfa