Week 7: It All Started With a Sunset

I'm not sure when it happened, exactly, but over the past two months I've done some serious soul-searching. It all started with a sunset. Since I've been in Peru, I've sat down and watched the sun set more times than I can keep track of. Before I came to Peru? Not even once. The first night I watched the sunset, in fact, I told the girls how cool it was for me because I'd never watched one before. I've seen hundreds of sunsets in my life, of course, but they were always just background to whatever else was happening in my life at that moment. It never was the moment. I'm only 22 years old, but I realized I've already just been going through the motions in my everyday life, not actually living it. Somewhere in the midst of school, work, and extracurriculars, I lost sight of what's really important. People keep asking me if I even go to class while I'm here and while I'll admit I only have class once a day, four days a week, I've still learned more in two months in Peru than the past few years combined. I'm not going to come back to the United States knowing everything there is to know about Spanish, but I'm starting to understand that was never the point. I've learned more about myself, my life, and what I truly want than I even thought possible and in the end, that's all that really matters. The things I learn in the classroom, money I earn at work, people I see on the weekends; none of it matters if I don’t discover who I am as a person and what I'm capable of. If I don't find that along the way, then how will I know where I'm going or if I'm taking the right roads to get there? Maybe a sunset is just a sunset, the end of another day; but maybe it's so much more than that. Maybe it's about living for the first time in my life, not just existing. Inevitably days come and go, but it's up to me what I make of them. I was given one chance at this life, and I don't intend to waste it. I don't know yet what God's plan is for my life but I do know this: I'm not going to watch it as it happens. I'm going to live it.

Máncora, Perú 2016