I feel like we’ve been in a washing machine for the past couple of months. It’s made us really dizzy and extremely soggy, but hopefully we will come out cleaner. Now that we are pursuing a return to the States the reality sets in about much of the learning we’ve done here. The past six months has really been a sort of retreat which we purposed, I would say, for self-discovery, but which turned its focus into world-discovery and God-discovery (which is far better and always sheds light on the self part inadvertently). It’s been a very interesting journey and the pain of it (sometimes self-inflicted) has been worth the price because we seem to be in emerging from it with a transformed view of everything. In a way it feels like we’ve had a very long retreat from normal life or at least from what we had always seen as normal and now we know might not be. We also had some internal organs replaced (soul organs) and isolation therapy was prescribed for the healing and health of the wounds. The surgery that has taken place on our spirit has been mind altering and eye opening. We are seeing things in new ways and with consideration for things we didn’t know existed before. Someone recently asked me how I am spiritually nourished in an environment like this, and I realized that the real question is; how am I nourished normally!? I have found it far more difficult to gain knowledge and understanding, or to even have the will power to seek after it, when I am surrounded by consumerism and everything else that takes over my “normal” life in the states, or wherever else. Being here has exponentially increased my spiritual growth in such a short amount of time, it really puts my normal to shame! Now I’m going to have to work really hard not to fall back into it once we leave. We are already strategizing and planning ways to make this happen. It’s not going to be easy.