Just by reading these, you probably think, “This girl freaks out a lot.” Your impression isn’t completely absurd, but in my defense I was half asleep last night. I had fallen asleep on the couch watching season 4 of Friends when my mom came in and woke me up around 11. She was in the kitchen when she asked me about my malaria medication appointment I had had earlier in the day. She told me this morning that as soon as she asked me about it, I got up, and started to pace through the apartment, saying ” I just don’t know.”
I continued to travel from training camp for an additional three weeks, I was up by the bay area visiting friends, to come home for 6ish hours to shower, sleep, and throw the clothes from my pack to a smaller bag to drive with my two older brothers and mom to see the rest of my older siblings up north. –Side note, anyone who has a large family like mine, you can probably remember how much fun it was to drive 15 hrs with your siblings when you were a kid, and now imagine that except you are all in your 20’s. You’d think our family roadtrip manners would mature. But nonetheless, as the trip came to a close, and my mom and I started the drive back down California, I got sad after having to say goodbye to each of my siblings. A verse I have always struggled with, maybe because I didn’t understand or because I didn’t want to, is Luke 14:26-27. Jesus talks about what it will cost one in order to be a disciple; in the passage it uses the word hate, and I think it was this word that blurred the meaning of these verses for me. How could I possibly hate my family, sure they bug me every once in a while, but I love each sibling. You have a lot of time to think driving from Medford Oregon to Yucaipa Ca, and I realized somewhere in the cow farms and almond orchards that Luke is saying that God has to come first, I have to be willing to let go of everything, including my family, in order to be his disciple.
I wasn’t prepared for two things coming home for a week before I would leave again.
#1 I didn’t think saying goodbye was going to be this hard. Stupid to think about it like that, I know. Being home, I realized how many people I am surrounded by that I love dearly. There are realationships here that I’m having trouble saying bye to. I didn’t think that there was a lot keeping me in my city, sure I’ll miss things here and there, I’ll miss the Rabbit (a local coffee shop where my youth girls and I always studied Jesus over italian sodas), I’m going to miss our mountian, it has always been a land mark to know where home was, Oak Glen, I am for sure going to miss, it has been my thinking place for years now because it has terrible cell service. But I am truly going to miss the people.
#2 I also wasn’t prepared to feel almost alien to my city. I am scared to leave and enter into the world, it’s pretty big. But the more that I am in my city, the more I understand that I can not stay here. I can not pick up my life where I left it, sinking back into the known and continuing on with what I have been doing, I have to leave and follow Jesus.
I think there was truth to my pacing thoughts last night. I don’t know what will happen at home while I’m gone, I don’t know what waits for me, I don’t know how I will adapt to the newness that the world is about to throw at me or if I will like the food, or if I will get sick. I can’t know this yet. I don’t know how God will change me and who I will be when I come back. But this I do know, Peter was given a new name, heart, identity, and purpose when he claimed that Jesus was the Son of God. The same happened to me 5 years ago, and there are people who are waiting to receive a new name, heart, identity, and purpose. This I do know.
