“You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you’ll miss the people, but you’ll miss yourself; and you hope to find them both again someday”
When I woke up, I did what most of us do: roll over and grab my phone. Scrolling through the latest updates on social media to delay the inevitable of getting out of bed. As I scrolled through Instagram, I saw it. A friend of mine posted a #tbt of her time in Africa with smiling babies, and my stomach dropped. As it does with most peoples’ mission pictures, I am sent back to a thousand small moments from all around the world that my heart longs for.
My heart starts asking, telling, begging me to get back to that place. To find a dirt road with markets on either side, where people are yelling in a language I don’t understand.
The thing is, all of these places have become a part of me. A part of myself I don’t know what to do with. A part of myself I don’t fully know how to integrate into America.
“You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you’ll miss the people, but you’ll miss yourself; and you hope to find them both again someday”
I understand this fully.
I left a piece of my heart in 11 different places last year. I liked the person I was becoming and who I already was. But to walk and live at my best only when abroad?
It will NOT be my life.
It is easy to walk freely on the mission field. You are in an “alternate reality” that removes your normal responsibilities. It becomes easy to share love when it is your main focus. Because after all, “isn’t acting in love the point? Isn’t that how missionaries act?” Your focus is suppose to be external. To see those less fortunate and do something about it.
BUT WHY
I pray to God that I don’t have to go back to Asia or Africa to find my “true self”.
?Because then we have a serious identity problem.
My freest self is not found in missions, in service, or in a foreign country. It is found in Jesus.
And He is HERE.
He is in my job, the coffee shop I’m currently in, the person I pass walking down the street, the grocer at Krogers, etc. I just have to find him. I don’t need to do missions in order to feel “worthy”; instead, Jesus has allowed me to do it as a blessing.
This season with the Lord has been so sweet. Settling back into life in America is HARD; however, God is just as present here as He was on the dirt road in Africa. He has been speaking to my heart over and over again in my quiet time. Refining me through fire and through grace. Changing my heart, speaking to my sadness, and bringing me joy.
JUST like He did last year.
If we are being honest here, I am just being whiney about the physical place I am at. I know the Lord has sent me here. I have been commissioned and prepared. And if I can keep my eyes on him, I will be the same person I was overseas. I will be the girl I was afraid of losing or leaving behind.
Jesus is the same. I am the same. My identity is the same. I just have to firmly believe it.
“Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful”
Hebrews 10:23
