Broadening our view

If we live truly, we shall see truly. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not everyone wants to travel the world, but most people can identify at least one place in the world they’d like to visit before they die. Where is that place for you, and what will you do to make sure you get there?
(Author: Chris Guillebeau)

Timely.  I leave tomorrow for a mission trip with a group of teenagers.  When we think about traveling, and I'm big on travel, we usually think about exotic locations, or places of great cultural or historical significance, but there is more...

The first place I ever went alone was to El Salvador.  I was 18, and I went alone.  My family felt it was a critical part of my education to travel, and to experience other cultures.  It was an eye-opening trip for an innocent white girl from Knoxville Tennessee.  It changed my life.  It changed the way I see the world.  It changed me on the inside.  I befriended a Salvadorean family, the Delgados.  I would discover many years later that many of them were killed in the civil turbulence that ensued in the 1980s.  I learned that they were a lot like my own family back in Tennessee.  I learned that I can make my way around a country that speaks a language I do not know, and that most people are kind and generous and willing to help  I learned (the hard way) not to eat from street vendors or drink the water.  I learned that we are all God's children. 

This week, as I take a group of privileged youth to a disadvantaged neighborhood to do a VBS, as I think back on all the places I've been...Europe, Egypt, the Caribbean, South America, and all the places in between, as I think about the question posed....where is one place in the world you want to visit before you die and what will you do to get there...as I think about how travel is maybe my most favorite hobby...as I contemplate Bali and the Middle East and Morocco and all the places I still want to go, and there are many, it occurs to me that what Emerson says is true...If we live truly, we shall see truly... 
...and I want to see truly, the good, the bad, and the ugly, the beautiful, the breathtaking, and the heartbreaking, and I want these youth to see it too, because in truly seeing, they will truly live.

With eyes wide open.
Teresa