As my MTC entry date (July 27) begins to bump up against my consciousness I am making many important appointments: interviews, endowments, wisdom teeth removal, goodbye get-togethers, farewell talk, etc. I am extremely grateful for my mission call and couldn't be more ecstatic about my destination, but as I think more and more about Korea I can't help but feel how automatically intelligible Latinate languages are, how much more accessible almost anywhere else in the world seems than someplace of which I have zero mental concept. I have been many places and I know what to expect from international travel, particularly from the Arab world and super-metropolis cities. But I have not been anywhere like the Korean countryside and in my mind it is a question mark, which is less bad than it is totally blank. I simply don't know what's coming. I don't know what spending three months at the MTC will be like, and I don't know what I will feel when I am dropped into a country and expected to become eloquent and convincing enough to persuade a person to change the fabric of his or her life using a language I will have studied for only three months. What I do know is that I am an adjustable person and can make a life out of practically any circumstances, regardless of how heavily the shadow of change feels before I take the plunge. And I take comfort in the fact that it will be the Spirit, not me and my choppy Korean, that will convert the people who are ready to hear the truth.
Throughout my entire life I have consistently and naively jumped into the end-games of specialists; with no particular preparation I chronically end up in situations for which others spend years training. As a novice I skip into and out of culminating events in people's lives and once there I get my bearings, adapt, and eventually mold myself into a semi-functional entity appropriate for my context, at which point my timeline skips again and I find myself somewhere completely different. As the youngest member of a medical aid team in the Philippines I had to translate physicians' notes but spoke no Cebuano; as a fifteen-year-old I moved to England alone to study liberal arts at Cambridge; at nineteen I bought a sublease in Boston and trained in cutting-edge stem cell research at Harvard Medical School; my freshman year in college I found myself heading a DNA research team of male students five years my senior and TAing for almost-graduates; my introduction to Middle Eastern Studies came through months of trial and error feeling out linguistic and ideological divides in Jerusalem; I selected Arabic as my first second language with no previous linguistic background; for no apparent reason I decided that my "sport" would be adult figure skating and, skipping the first three classes, I spent weeks bruised and falling until I learned to spin.
Missionary work is another end-game, and as usual I know I will work alongside people far more qualified than I am, people who know what they're doing and what they're getting into because they've worked to become good at what they do. And as usual I will have to feel out my boundaries, figure out my position and lay out the things I don't know so I can learn to function in my context, modeling those I see and admiring their commitment and knowledge. But this time I am in for the long haul; months in Western Europe or even the Middle East are small potatoes compared to a year and a half in Southeast Asia. Thrilled to start my journey, I realize that it will be a journey, a long and difficult learning process peppered with both positive and negative experiences. I guess my time on such a path is a microcosm of life, a small iteration of my living fractal sped up to fit in eighteen months. As usual, I don't feel ready. I'm not ready. But maybe feeling ready is impossible, because I can't prepare for what I can't anticipate. And maybe I need to accept that and simply move forward in faith.
Throughout my entire life I have consistently and naively jumped into the end-games of specialists; with no particular preparation I chronically end up in situations for which others spend years training. As a novice I skip into and out of culminating events in people's lives and once there I get my bearings, adapt, and eventually mold myself into a semi-functional entity appropriate for my context, at which point my timeline skips again and I find myself somewhere completely different. As the youngest member of a medical aid team in the Philippines I had to translate physicians' notes but spoke no Cebuano; as a fifteen-year-old I moved to England alone to study liberal arts at Cambridge; at nineteen I bought a sublease in Boston and trained in cutting-edge stem cell research at Harvard Medical School; my freshman year in college I found myself heading a DNA research team of male students five years my senior and TAing for almost-graduates; my introduction to Middle Eastern Studies came through months of trial and error feeling out linguistic and ideological divides in Jerusalem; I selected Arabic as my first second language with no previous linguistic background; for no apparent reason I decided that my "sport" would be adult figure skating and, skipping the first three classes, I spent weeks bruised and falling until I learned to spin.
Missionary work is another end-game, and as usual I know I will work alongside people far more qualified than I am, people who know what they're doing and what they're getting into because they've worked to become good at what they do. And as usual I will have to feel out my boundaries, figure out my position and lay out the things I don't know so I can learn to function in my context, modeling those I see and admiring their commitment and knowledge. But this time I am in for the long haul; months in Western Europe or even the Middle East are small potatoes compared to a year and a half in Southeast Asia. Thrilled to start my journey, I realize that it will be a journey, a long and difficult learning process peppered with both positive and negative experiences. I guess my time on such a path is a microcosm of life, a small iteration of my living fractal sped up to fit in eighteen months. As usual, I don't feel ready. I'm not ready. But maybe feeling ready is impossible, because I can't prepare for what I can't anticipate. And maybe I need to accept that and simply move forward in faith.
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