After Action Review on the "Event" - MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL!!!

I've had a day to make some sense of this pretty powerful experience experience. And I've started wondering something - If someone asks "what was it like?" unless they give me time to explain, or are aware that there's more to the experience than what I am able to say, or know that there's more meaning in the words between the words, then it will be hard to get this across. Plus, I'm left wondering, in our fast-paced world, how long do people give you to tell them about the most physically challenging (and as a result, something laden with tremendous emotional content) event I have ever done before they start to get tired and want to disengage and get back to their world?

If you ask me, will you give me time to talk? Will you take the time to listen to the words that I'm unable to say? I don't know that I can express myself well enough to convey be able to get it out in a sound-byte... so will you wait?

But then I wonder about the rest of our communications among ourselves - we talk, and ask each other things, and wait for the sound-byte, or even try and formulate our responses ahead of time so when someone asks we'll be ready. But how often do we listen for the words within the words... or the story within the story? Experiences like this help remind us about two things primarily, One- words cannot always express the significance or meaning of an event. And two- how often do we give people the space to let them process in words what they have experienced? If it's hard to find words to express something, do we give them time to find those words? Do we take the time to enter into the story with them?

You can see how this event has given me many things to think about. We've spent pretty much the day, off and on, making sense of what happened yesterday. We talked about the hard parts, about the people we saw, about what it made us feel (good and bad), about the pain and blessings along the way, about the pain we're feeling today... and will feel tomorrow after we wake up. We toasted our accomplishment, and offered prayers together.

I have no idea who reads this, but even if now one does, I'm glad I did this because it allowed me the chance to make some sense of this. If you've read this, I don't know if for you this was interesting, informative, boring, or what... but thanks for letting me share this with you anyway, it helped me!