Soledad (Solitude)

To My Most Amiable Readers,

Greetings! My scribblings have been scant of late, so I beg your leave to launch upon a patchwork update....

Last week I took a two day retreat on Isla Tenglo. The retreat was a time for solitude, prayer, and meditation on His word and presence. For a busy mother of two to suddenly have nothing to wash, cook, vacuum, scrub, scold, read to, change diaper of, or dust; this was quite a dramatic change. It was just me, a few books and journals, a candle, a tent, and a sleeping bag. Outside of those luxuries, I had creation: birds, flowers, plants, trees, seashells, the ocean, seaweed, horses, oxen, and wide vistas of snow tipped mountains. I had sunsets and sunrises, birds' calls, and the weightless exhilaration of swimming and being held by the muted underwater world, goggles allowing my eyes to enjoy the plants and shells. I had the healthy exhaustion of hiking and swimming. I had the deep peace of sitting in the woods unmoving. When I read the Word, the verses jumped out at me with new life and meaning. Above all, I felt that I had entered His rest. What a time for closeness with our Father.

And He is not without humor. In the middle of the night I awoke to a loud noise. My head was right below the screen door of the tent, and I turned to see what it could be. The moon was shining bright as day and showed me, inches from my own groggy face, the huge oxen peering down at me, breathing big puffs of air which stirred my hair. It licked the tent and slobber smeared across the netting. It's nose dripped as well. Now, oxen are huge to begin with. They're even huge-er when you look at them from the ground up (and all alone on an island in a tent doesn't help much either). I froze. I waited. Eventually he got bored of bathing my tent in vile fluids and starting munching down the grass around my tent. RRRRrrrrriiiiiiiiiipppp! MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH RRRRRrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiippppp! MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH MUNCH...and so on. It sounded like each bite cleared half an acre. So I tried to go back to sleep with the "rip-munch" lullaby, but didn't have much success. Then a much more alarming sound broke through the noisy eating. About five horses had gotten startled by something and were crashing through the trees like wild things fleeing a banshee. And I mean crashing; like big branches snapped off as these panic-stricken beasts charged about wildly. Amidst the pounding of the hooves and destruction, I realized they had spooked the two curious oxen grazing by my tent. Immediately my mind read my obituary: "American missionary Sarah Gingrich was killed on Tuesday after being trampled to death by stampeding oxen on an island off of the coast of Chile..."

Fumbling with my matches, I lit my candle. My reasoning was this: If they see my glowing tent as an obstacle, they may just avoid stampeding directly over it. Not one to waste good candle light, I spent my time reading Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ, now and then jerking my head up to attention when the stampeding grew exceptionally close. Eventually man and beast both settled down, and though the first thing I heard on waking was "rip-munch", I held no grudge. I was not trampled...life is good.

If you would like to see recent pictures of our family and doings, click on "My Albums" in my "Links A Plenty" section. Blessings!

Your Most Devoted, Sarah