Me and Emotions

I really appreciate your feedback on my post about sensitivity. I haven't been to an internet cafe since my last post, so perhaps some of you have felt a little in the dark about how I've been doing in that area. The issue has actually been even more encompassing of my life than just how I deal with people on the streets. I realized that my emotions have been numbing in just about every area, which definitely wasn't a good thing. I've been stuck there for a few days, but yesterday evening I started to gain some insights into myself.

I took the day off from Nabo Jibon today to spend some extra time with God trying to figure myself out. A lot of my initial triggers came from our current book, Compassion. This is an amazing book, but what really hit me was when he talked about being bombarded with the pain of the world. He says that outside of community this will almost always lead to numbness and anger. That pretty much exactly described me, numb and angry. I realized that as part of this, I was becoming numb and closed off to my team (i.e. community problems), but I assumed it was because of the general numbness to everything else. Then I thought back to LAUP and realized that there was at least one very clear point where I closed off to my team there. When I started thinking about this as a problem of the way I'm plugging into community here in Kolkata, it really changes things.

Anyway, I spent today reading my LAUP journal, and then journaling on my thoughts from that. I am so glad I thought to bring that journal with me to Kolkata. It was so valuable to read through that again. Then I read through my journal thus far from Kolkata and journaled on trends, similarities, and differences between the two. I am very convinced at this point that my problems and their solutions have to do more with community than anything else. I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to say anything bad about our community here. Certainly there are many ways for us to grow as a community, but anything along those lines will be brought up with them and will not end up here except perhaps in hindsight as something we have gone through that I want to share about.

Please keep praying for me and for us. We need a ton of prayer support and I greatly appreciate all of the prayers you have been sending.