How to share in 5 minutes an experience which changed my life? I’ll do my best but please feel free to catch me later if you want to hear more.

In 1989 I was living a pretty typical middle-class life. I’d graduated from college, moved out on my own, bought my first car, and was working full-time as a nurse at a local pediatric hospital. There were only a few things left in the script I assumed was written for me: get married, buy a house and have kids.

God had other plans, which I could never have predicted. Through a interesting set of circumstances, I went on a one-week delegation to my church’s sister parish in El Salvador, a country the size of Massachusetts, which I couldn’t locate on a map prior to visiting there.

I learned more in that week about the direct effects of US foreign policy than I had ever learned in school, church or through the media. El Salvador was in the midst of a civil war financed by US tax dollars to the tune of 1.5 million dollars a day at its peak. We visited marginalized communities, church leaders, and human rights organizations. I returned having fallen in love with the Salvadoran people and with the burden of knowing the truth, having see it first hand.

I knew I needed to go back. For the first time in my life I felt a calling. I never understood what people meant by that phrase. But this is how I knew: up until that point, I had spent my life following the rules and being a good girl. It was very important to me what my friends and family and others thought of me. Most of my friends and family thought I was nuts to want to return to El Salvador to live and work. That didn’t matter to me. I knew deep inside that I needed to go back and if I didn’t have support and understanding of my loved ones, so be it.

I eventually spent over 5 years living and working in the countryside of El Salvador, first through Christians for Peace in El Salvador (CRISPAZ) and then Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). Mostly I worked with a diocesan health promoter program. But the work was secondary to what I learned through the people I met and the relationships we formed.

I, a US citizen, learned hospitality from people whose family members had been killed by bullets and guns paid for with US tax dollars, people forced by US trained soldiers to flee their homes at night with only the clothes on their backs, losing grandparents and babies along the way so others would survive, from people living on United Nations rations yet always with enough for one more. My host father had a saying, “If there is enough for 2 there is enough for 4, if there is enough for 4 there is enough for 8.”

I learned, as someone would later describe to me, to read the Bible with my heart from popularly trained Salvadoran “Celebrators of the Word” whose only formal education may have been 1st or 3rd grade. Oh, but it meant much more to me as seen through their eyes than from all the Sunday homilies I’d every heard.

I got over myself in some ways. When I met human rights workers or church leaders – some even with young children at home, who never went anywhere alone and slept in a different place each night because of death threats – all my excuses for why I couldn’t do this or that crumbled before me. The Salvadoran people taught me courage. I was terrified to speak in front of people, but how could I go home and not tell their story? Gradually, over the years I got better at public speaking, not because I enjoyed it, but because it was necessary.

I also learned the responsibility of my actions. There was a Jesuit priest at the University of Central America in San Salvador who told our delegation that the 1/3 nations people (i.e. those of us in the “first world”) can live the way we do because the 2/3 nations people live in complete and dire poverty. To this day, I believe this is true.

One week in El Salvador changed my life, the ripples still strongly affect me on a daily basis. Twenty years after my one week delegation, I’m still in touch with numerous Salvadoran friends and family. I still visit every 2 or 3 years.

My faith is so much stronger since my time in El Salvador. I think for me church was something you did on Sunday to feel good about yourself. I remember the story I heard of someone from the US visiting El Salvador on a delegation asking a Salvadoran who had obviously suffered a lot during the war, “How do you still believe in God?” As if, because so many bad things had happened to him, he would quit believing.

The Salvadoran replied, “How can we not believe in God? God is the only thing that gets us through each day.” From Salvadorians I learned the dependence on and integration of God in daily life.

For me, the lesson of my story is not that everyone should do overseas service work. Rather, that we should all listen to God, the Spirit, your inner voice, the universe – whichever term you use for any calling or gentle nudging towards our path in life.

I can’t say that I’ve continued to have such clarity when discerning my path. I wish sometimes it would be clearer. But I have learned to listen and pay attention better. And if I get too complacent with where I’m at I look for ways to challenge myself, to quit doubting and take a risk. Some people know their path from a young age and some of us bloom later, but it is a lifelong challenge to listen for the ways we are being called to serve. But oh the joys it will bring. . . . My life is nothing as I imagined it would be 20 years ago, but I do not regret a minute of it. I pray I can say the same 20 and 40 years from now and that you may also. For each and every one of you is uniquely special and especially unique – live that out for your sake and the world’s!