"Act as if you did."

    “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”  

And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.  

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  

On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” 

-Matthew 22:36-40

    Nine months ago when I first began this journey of following the Lord's calling to Mexico, one of the biggest struggles that I had was trying to understand how I could love a people who I knew very little about, and honestly had grown up having very judgmental and hateful feelings toward. I grew up in a community and school where we had quite a large population of Mexicans, and through experiences and encounters that I had with a few "bad" Mexicans, I took a very selfish and hateful stance against learning to have patience and love these people that I was surrounded by. After high school, I went on to college not really even addressing those feelings and thoughts, and I honestly allowed it to influence my studies as well when I purposefully didn't want to learn about Mexican history in my Political Science classes. My concentration was in Latin American Countries, but I did everything I could to avoid having to think about Mexico. 
    But this is just a testimony of how much the Lord loves each of his children and desires for us to reflect him in this world by growing in his likeness. The Lord was not content with allowing me to stay in my sinful state of mind, and in a very loving and intimate way he has been challenging me and molding my heart to be like his over the past 9 months. 
   Before I left for Mexico this summer, I had no idea how I could pray for these people. I still felt so distant from these people I was coming to serve and live alongside. I tried looking at pictures, reading articles, and keep up with the news, but I still couldn't stir up those feelings of sympathy and compassion in prayer. However, at the end of this summer, when I was getting off the plane in Atlanta, I experienced something that made me realize how incredibly the Lord was moving mountains in my heart. There were some Mexican elderly people getting wheelchair assistance from some American airport workers, but the workers didn't speak any Spanish and the Mexicans didn't speak any English. I could see the rudeness and just lack of compassion the workers were showing to these elderly people, and my heart was flooded with all sorts of emotions. I went over to translate and to welcome these Mexicans to America with the hopes that they wouldn't be discouraged by such a harsh first impression. Afterwards, one of the girls that was in the Summer program with me and was flying with me came off the plane, and I just looked at her and started crying. I was angry for the lack of compassion I had just witnessed, ashamed that I had once been the same way, grateful to see the smile on the elderly people's faces and to be able to use my Spanish in a selfless way, grieved as I was missing my Mexican host family and friends, and just plane out-of-place as the start of reverse culture shock was starting to settle in. Thankfully my dear friend, Amanda, is very wise and loving, and she helped encourage me to let the tears come but then to find the light and hope in this situation. And in the end of this experience, I was able to focus on and dwell on giving God the glory in physically seeing a miracle he had worked in my life, in my heart, and in my thoughts. 
    And this morning as I was reading, I came across this quote that so eloquently and beautifully explains what I experienced this summer in regards to this:

"Though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable [loving] is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings... The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less... [W]henever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less... The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he "likes" them: The Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on- including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning."

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity