“Calm, spiritual and confident”.

Those were the three words used to describe the long-ago me by a 53-year-old man today, who was my first junior companion almost 32 years ago in the mission field.

Of course, in July of 1979 I was just coming off a months-long stint in São Gabriel — a mission pothole if there ever was one — and the two sequential Brazilian senior companions who made life hell for me — and had learned several life lessons by the time I was transferred.

In retrospect, I suppose I was calm because I had grown to know that anger and other untoward emotions had not been productive.

I was spiritual because I really believed in what I was teaching and that feeling had not abated for the year that I had been in the field — in spite of others’ best intentions to make that happen.

I was confident because I felt that the cause was just and I was in the right place at the right time — and I finally was a senior companion.

After having conversed with me for the better part of an hour today, I asked my ex-companion if he still felt that that description still fit and he said, “yes”.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 17th, 2011 at 18:43 and is filed under Brasil, Friends, Mission, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.