For example, the first thing I did the week after Keila traveled back up north was sit down and write a letter to her parents. This proved to be rather difficult. It wasn't easy to sit down in front of a computer and introduce myself to complete strangers 2,161.36 miles away (I checked the miles on google earth...as the crow flies...though I doubt a crow could fly that far without stopping, then I'm sure that would change the miles...) What made the whole thing even more difficult for me was that after I wrote this perfectly crafted letter I sent it to someone to have it translated into Spanish. I couldn't have Keila translate it, so I had to have my pearls read by someone else and just the thought of that was hard for me.
Over the first couple weeks of January, 2003, Keila's parents and I exchanged several e-mails. I would write an e-mail, send it to my translator, they would send it back to me, then I would send it to Guatemala, then my future in-laws would read it, respond to me, then I would have to take the e-mail from them, send it back to my translator, who would then send it back to me in English. Wow! It is definitely so much easier now that I master the Spanish language. Okay...maybe master is a little bit of a stretch...let me rephrase...it is definitely easier now that I can speak and understand as much as my two year old daughter.
Now mind you, this whole time I was writing to Keila's parents, I had no interaction with her. This was difficult, but I knew that better days were ahead.
I have my sister, Andrea, to thank for the regular updates on the life of Keila. I would regularly call Andrea and my conversation would go something like this,
"Hello?" Andrea would answer.
"Hey Bean...it's Ben."
"Oh...hey!" She was always so chipper, though she knew I wasn't calling to see how she was doing.
"How are you doing?" I would ask...nice brother, huh?
"Good. Things are going great up here. How about you?"
"Pretty good."
Then silence. That conversation lull when it's about to turn to what the phone call is really about.
"I saw Keila today." Andrea would tell me, I can still see her smiling in the phone.
"Really? How is she?" I would ask like Andrea didn't already know the question.
"She's doing great." She would tell me like I didn't know the answer.
"Cool. Well...gotta go! Love you..."
"Love you too, Ben"
And that would be the end of the conversation. I think over the course of this waiting time, Andrea and I talked an average of once a day, easy.
Meanwhile, back to my regular e-mails with her parents, one thing that regularly came up was my need to travel to Guatemala and meet them. I saw this as a real big thing. (The funny things is...I would travel to Guatemala three times that year, but I never would have believed that in early January).
So while I waited for this season to end, I felt God asked me to do two things:
1) Renew my passport. It had been years since I used my passport. I had traveled to Ukraine on a missions trip as a teen and that was the last time. My passport had expired.
2) Pay off credit card debt.
I was able to get the ball rolling on both of them early in the month of January. I do think it is amazing that even if it seems as if nothing is happening, God's idea of waiting is not sitting on the couch watching TV, but it is a waiting with active faith, pursuing the call of God for that specific day. I remember how God showed me during that season the importance of every moment, and every decision. Every day had something special in it from the Lord, and it was up to me to hear Him and follow.
Before I knew it, three weeks had passed, and Keila was back in town. I got my haircut (it was really expensive and really bad...I was so disappointed), I got my passport picture (which forever immortalized by bad haircut), and I showed up at another one of my brother's concerts where Keila would be (I was so nervous she would hate my haircut).
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