2012 in Review: Part One

 
A week or so ago Facebook gave me the option to “See Your 2012 in Review.” It made me weepy because 2012 has been the most incredible year of my life, the year with the most change, impact, growth, adventure, and spiritual experiences, and perhaps the part that leaves me the weepiest is watching it melt into the past.

On January 17th I boarded a flight in Chicago that I thought was only bound for the modern-ancient city of Athens, Greece. As the plane lifted off of the ground, as it flew over the Atlantic Ocean, and as I tried to spot one of the other 35 unfamiliar Harding University students on the plane I told myself, “You are going on this trip to see things, don’t lose sight of that.”

They were strangers to me, every one of them, and the only way to calm my anxieties of flying across the world from my entire life was to say, “they don’t matter—places, places, places.” I think that deep down in my heart though, I knew that it would change. And so when the flight finally made it to Greece, through exhaustion and balmy hands, I tried to make connections.

We didn’t become a family right away. The first three weeks before we left for Israel were fun and the days were slow. We were all figuring out this HUG thing—how the classes worked, how to ride the metro into Athens, where to get the best gyro. I developed great friendships and that was good enough, I decided.

However, on February 13th we flew to Israel and our ten days there were so full that we didn’t come back the same people. When the charter bus picked us up from our hotel in Tel Aviv to transport us to the airport, a friend sitting beside me—Laura Jo—said, with bleary 4 a.m. eyes, “This changed our group.”

Looking around the bus, everyone was sitting with someone new, sleeping on someone’s shoulder, sharing iPod earphones, and I smiled at Laura Jo and said, “This trip made us a family.”
How could it have not? I believe the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groans in our weaknesses, but perhaps my fiercest belief is that He intercedes for us in joyous times and in our relationships with his children. I believe that when we were washing our feet in the Sea of Galilee, He was there. I believe that when we were singing worship songs on the bus between touring, He was there, and He was connecting our hearts. I believe that there is a connection with the person standing beside you when you are staring at the place where Jesus was crucified, and I know that the memory of that day makes my heart ache.

Perhaps that’s what it feels like to have the Spirit intercede: an ache in the heart, a physical throb that sinks into your stomach and pricks at your eyes.  

The semester progressed with trips to Turkey, northern Greece, and a cruise to the Greek islands. We absorbed ourselves completely in a culture and for four short months we called it home. Leaving Greece took a lot out of me. I cried for days, an uncontrollable amount of tears that shook my body and made my eyes burn. With a dull headache I finally said goodbye to home and to my group and to our experiences and as I took one last look at the Artemis before walking out of the sliding glass backdoors, I told myself,

“You came on this trip to see places, but you are leaving with so much more.”



--It should be noted that I wasn’t even entirely ready to wrap up this post. I’m never ready to say goodbye to Greece.


*photo cred to aforementioned Laura Jo