My Love-Hate Relationship

Bolivia is wondrous.  It is wispy morning clouds partially masquerading magnificent mountains, city lights perched as high as stars, fantastical dream-like landscapes, and pink dolphins gently gliding in the Amazon.  It is juicy ripe mangos year-round that melt in your mouth.

Bolivia is beauty, but it does not boast.  It is humble and simple, and for that is unknown.    

Bolivia is disastrous.  It doesn't know efficiency.  Bolivia is a bus that is lost in the middle of salt flats and rocking on the edges of cliffs.  It is worker strikes and corruption and violence in the streets.

Bolivia is stubborn, but it does not care.  It is traditional and stuck, and for that it lags behind. 

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My love-hate relationship with this country has grown stronger this past year.  It reaches out and loves me or hates me and I love it or hate it back more than I did before.  A reciprocal love and hate, I think.  And this of course results in stronger attachment.

I've always diminished in my mind the amount of give and take, love and hate I can have with a place.  And I've diminished in my mind the way a place can have a hold on me, can reach out and take my heart sometimes just as much or more than a person can.  

I think it's because a place holds inside it moments.  Moments that can happen in day and night, sickness and health, solitude and fellowship, and in praising and cursing.  

Now, I don't want to glorify "place."  I want to glorify God for giving us places to hold moments and stories and for allowing us to feel this strong relationship with place.  I want to glorify God for allowing places to change us, to mark out seasons of life.

When I think of Bolivia now, I will not think of a country in South America.  I will think of a season of endurance, of self-discovery, and of grace.  Upon hearing the word "Bolivia" I will now recall feelings of love, anger, frustration, jealousy, joy, and grief.  It will evoke memories of blundering Spanish, 6-year old chubby faces, and good friends.  "Bolivia" will make me think of conversations, laughter, cooking, playing, singing, reading, writing, running, and teaching.

I thank God for this place that has burrowed its way into my heart and taken root.

And now, may I begin to grieve and rejoice and grieve some more over the loss of this wondrous and disastrous place.