"And the second is like unto it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

This blogging thing is new for me, so first, thank you for popping in to see where my heart is, and second, thank you for your patience as I practice a new discipline this Lent:  putting my heart into words so others may read them.  I've no delusions that my soul sees anything new or thinks of the world around it in ways others have not, but it is my hope that through these words and this blog the experiences I have the luxury of living will have lives longer and further than my own limitations.

Sunday afternoon I begin a journey across the globe for which I have no way of preparing nor comprehensive sense of expectation.  I am honored to join seven other journeyers and staff members of Episcopal Migration Ministries on a 10-day pilgrimage to Kenya and Rwanda where we will learn first-hand about the process of refugee resettlement for Congolese, who are driven out of their towns, villages, and country through indescribable atrocities and tragedy.  We will learn not only the process through the relief agencies that minister to these refugees but also through time in the Gihembe Refugee Camp itself.  I cannot begin to consider what the next two weeks will be like and approach the time with expectancy for the unknown.

Jesus' words in Mark and Matthew, and the lawyer's response in Luke, reiterating the Second Great Commandment keep bubbling up as I consider my time away.  I am always challenged when I hear these words, reminding me that I am to love my neighbor as myself, because I have to consider who exactly is my neighbor.  We're accustomed to think of a neighbor as one who shares some sort of geographic proximity with ourselves, but the Gospels' words--indeed a Levitical command itself and unoriginal to Jesus--create no parameters for neighbor-ness; rather, they simply command us to love, with the idea that we love whom Jesus loved, id est everyone.  The concept of neighbor-ness includes or immediate world but extends toward no limit, encompassing all who participate in the human condition, encompassing all whom God has made.  What thrills and awes me so is the opportunity to experience and learn from my neighbors across the globe, neighbors whose lives are inconceivably different than my own and yet neighbors nonetheless, brothers and sisters, children of a loving and grieving God who have endured the terrors of war, unrest, persecution, genocide, and countless other atrocities, and yet have survived.

I look forward to meeting my neighbors.  And seeing Christ.

Thank you for joining me on this pilgrimage.