Turning Enemies Into Friends. You are the Gift.

As I’ve been pondering on what Sharon Eubank would want me to take away from her devotional entitled “Turning Enemies into Friends” I have discovered a lot about myself and how I can make myself the gift in all my service endeavors. If I have learned nothing else, it is that people are important. People are more important than the service being performed, more important than the money being raised, and more important than any of the political factors that may separate people. There mustn’t be any strangers among us.

This time here in Merida has been interesting for me because I have had more free time than I am normally used to. We work in the mornings but because of the extreme heat we have the afternoons free. Sharon Eubank gives an excellent example of two animals that spend their free time differently, one being an eagle, soaring high into the sky, and the other a pig, rolling in the mud. I’d say that free time isn’t the most common commodity now days and thinking about wasting it made me sick to in the stomach. I have tried my hardest to use this time to make better habits that would help me be successful in my internship and that would be sustainable to make me better as I return home. I want so dearly to be as the eagle, working hard in my free time to soar high in the sky. I want to be clean, pure, and worthy of the atonement in my life. To do this, I have spent a lot of my time trying to learn all I can about the topics we teach here in Mexico. I hope that in doing so my conversations can be more uplifting and educational to all the people I interact with here.

I’ve realized in doing so that it isn’t always about what you know, but how you see people. We can know all the latest health trends, teach people about nutrition, or even supply opportunity to succeed and build new habits, but in the end, none of us know anything perfectly. We may all be a little right, but we are all wrong in some respects. That may only make sense to me, but I feel oddly okay with it. In the Book of Mormon we read about Ammon, a true prince to the name, that while working with the laminites, sees and refers to them as his brethren and nothing else. True learning and loving don’t happen until we see everyone as our equals. We are all brethren here, and there should be no more strangers among us.

Who are the strangers among us? Who are the people who don’t feel like they fit in? It is because of what they wear? The color of their skin? They way they talk? How do we get everyone on the same playing field to start with? True questions to ponder. “AND IF A STRANGER SOJOURN WITH THEE IN YOUR LAND, YE SHALL NOT VEX HIM.”

I believe that one of the biggest parts of not “fitting” in or continuing to feel like a stranger has a lot to do with the hunger for human contact. Not the kind of contact you get ordering food through a drive through, or passing others on the sidewalk, but the kind that makes you feel important, the kind that warms your heart and makes you want to smile, the kind that makes you want to interact more. A very powerful quote from her devotional reads “it’s not the clothing, not the hygiene kits, the school desks or wells. It’s you.”

To be the gift, I have tried harder to listen with patience, to speak with kindness, and to listen with real intent, and this has made the world of difference in my project, and in my life.