My Life as a Folk Festival

I've been trying to get a feel for living in Canada again. I was listenting to the CBC today as I drove around doing errands, buying 2 winter coats from value village, stopping at Tim Horton's and looking out at the farm fields and the encroaching suburbia of southern Ontario. How's that for trying assimilate?

I heard some Canadian folk-ish music. It reminded me of being at a folk festival, which made me think about the experience of camping out at a park for a weekend, being inspired, thinking of ideas, meeting new people, celebrating life by jumping around (my version of dancing), screaming (my rendition of singing) and thinking about the greater meaning of life. There is intense spirituality present in my life during a folk festival, the energy of kindness and generosity, the messages of loving your neighbour, the faith in God that comes through for me in so many ways (even though most people who go to those events probably don't label themselves Christians). There is an intense reality of values from loving each other, finding freedom from the confines of our society, and sharing, inspiring us to think beyond ourselves.

This is what I love: Jesus, community life, kindness to each other, loving the poor and refusing to neglect the realities of peoples lives who are living in the depths of injustice and oppression. I aspire to live everyday of my own creation of a folk festival where we come together (friends and not yet friends), we believe in God, we know Jesus, we hear the Holy Spirit, we make words into action, we pray, we get quiet and move to truly love our neighbours, especially those who have been neglected.

When I reflect on our year in the slums of Manila, I have all these amazing feelings of folk festival life. Yeah, I know it wasn't always like that. We had to work through all those relational things from time to time, I yelled at my kids more than I care to remember (in fact, I've blocked it out already) (not very folk festive-ish), I drank tea lattes at Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, etc etc. BUT there was community, there was collective pursuit of Jesus, there was personal Communion with the Holy Spirit and there was a proclamation of the Sovereignty of God, on a daily basis.

I am writing this down to inspire myself that living our values is possible, even as I am deeply struggling to reconcile my North American life with the reality of the world.