Joy and Growing Pains

We have started “formation.” None of us had been quite sure what that word meant before and we are still finding out. Our typical day Monday through Friday will consist of:

- 7:00 am Mass

- Breakfast with the volunteers

- An hour for chores – mostly sweeping the cobblestone driveway so we are outside and moving around a little bit.

- At 9:30 we have our first session with Sister Pat and study the gospel of the day in depth and apply it to our lives now and the coming mission. This is very enjoyable because they haven’t been cut-and-dry scriptures and it’s great to go deep into them. We also get to hear lots of stories about Sister Pat and other volunteers at the different mission sites.

- Lunch and then personal time for us to work on our homework and language lessons

- Then, often we will have an afternoon session with Sister Pat or Sister Lisa on different topics related to the mission.

- Nights are fairly relaxed with cooking, cleaning, and hanging out with each other. On Fridays we will be able to help out at Caritas, a soup kitchen in the area, which will be awesome! We did it just yesterday and it was a great experience.

Alex and I were on the food line and I got to ask people if they wanted uno mela, orango, o pera (apple, orange, or pear). The people we served were very friendly and they were easy on us because they could tell we weren't really italian : ) Brendan was by the front helping check people in and he met a lot of people from Africa and learned how to say a few words in different African languages. So we're all looking forward to this coming Friday so we can switch jobs and meet some new people.

We worked out a schedule for cooking during the week, cleaning schedules for every Wednesday and Saturday, and a schedule for daily prayer on our own.

As for finances, we’re each putting 20 Euros into a common pot for groceries and we’ll all add more when we run out. Brendan is in charge of the account and keeps a detailed record of the money (they found out that Brendan was majoring in finance for awhile before he chose logistics). We’ve done great so far though. Yesterday we planned out meals for the week and got groceries. Everything cost only 50 Euros for the whole week for five of us! But this will be our test week to see if that is enough food.

A new type of grocery shopping! Here’s Chris and Brendan in full gear heading to the supermarket. We looked like tourists to be sure, but we were able to get a week’s worth of food the mile back to the VOICA house.

The reason that growing pains is part of the title is that we talked with Sister Pat today about growing and changing and that when we are stretched by change it will hurt a little. It is the same when children get pains when they have a growth spurt.

Brendan has been doing awesome, but I’ve been experiencing some growing pains just within the last day. When we were deciding about meals and how we want to do the cooking, I went in expecting that things would stay as we had been doing them for the past week – medium-sized breakfast and lunch, easy and whenever, and a bigger sit down dinner. This is how my family does it and I love it! Sitting down for dinner with everyone and talking for a long time is something I would always look forward to during the day.

But in Poland and England, lunch is their big meal of the day. I wasn’t sure about this or how it would affect the running I’ve been doing (because around lunch time has been the easiest time to run with this new schedule). So I was disappointed about this and became quiet. It was a little ridiculous; I hadn’t realized how ingrained these little things have become in me even though they don’t matter at all.

These and many other little things have started this growing and stretching process. I honestly thought that living in community would be no problem. I’ve been training for this my whole life! I lived about home until college and then I lived in the dorms at Iowa State. I loved the atmosphere of being around so many people and always having something to do.

What I didn’t realize until now was that I wasn’t completely living in community… I’ve always had a safe space for myself - my own bed, my own things, my own money. I didn’t have to truly trust all the people around me to treat me as they would want to be treated. If someone spent money too freely or they wanted to have a different eating or sleeping schedule it didn’t affect me too much, because I could do as I pleased.

But here we share everything – the cooking, the cleaning, and all of life’s little details. My way is no longer necessarily the best way. I’ve been sheltered in that I don’t care about most little things, and on the bigger things I’ve usually been able to convince people to do it a certain way, so this time of opening up is harder than I thought it would be. But I’m learning a lot and am so thankful for this time of formation in Rome. I feel like my rough edges that I didn’t even know I had are being exposed by this experience and giving me an opportunity to sand them down.

It is always difficult to try to give up our sense of control to God, and it will be hard to have to completely trust four other people with my welfare for two and a half months. This mission is probably one of the most effective ways that God could have found to get me to truly give up the sense of the control that I (and I think most people) love to have. But the pay off will be great - it will help put me in the right mindset to really be effective at the mission, because I will be better able to be truly flexible and in complete dependence on God.

Now I understand more of why we weren’t able to get more specific information out of Sister Pat before we came. International missions are a volatile thing. She told us yesterday that very detailed, long term planning is something that only highly developed countries are able to have. In the missions that she manages, anything could happen (although she tries hard to keep them functioning smoothly at all times). As God calls, there can be more volunteers coming at any time, or volunteers or other critical people can have emergencies, among other things. She told us that we need to practice flexibility here, because if it is hard here in Rome, it will be incredibly hard there. For a planner like me, it will probably take the whole time of formation to come to grasp with the reality that, in a way that is truer than ever before, I do not have control.