Recently my team and I have been announcing the daily countdown until we land in our great country, kiss the ground beneath our feet, and hug the family that will undoubtedly be rushing toward us with balloons, posters, squeals, screams, and tears. We all anxiously await that sweet reunion, but I have had another anxiety rising up in me.
I was originally going to write this blog about how I’m scared to go home because, for the past year, I have been in a constant state of adaptation. Adapting from college student to missionary; then from country-to-country, continent-to-continent, and culture-to-culture. Now with home literally around the corner, I fear that I will forget everything that I’ve seen, grown in, and learned about this past year and, instead, will adapt into a new culture. The very culture in which I left; the very culture that I thought was egotistical, greedy, and narrow-minded; the very culture that feeds who I am.
Despite traveling around the world and temporarily being immersed in whatever culture we inhabit, I still am an American. I’m grossed out when people eat fried cockroaches or use year-old newspaper as toilet paper. I’m scared when people weave recklessly through a highway of other reckless cars on their mopeds with no protection whatsoever. I’m deeply saddened that people think that they can only survive on a small portion of rice and beans or that education is a last resort to the pressing matters of their home life.
These emotions, and more, are evoked because my culture, the one that birthed and bred me, told me to be that way. I’m taught that it’s unsanitary to eat cockroaches, that it’s unsafe to ride a moped without a helmet (and without Mom and Dad’s permission), and that I would go far in life with a proper education.
But I purposely left that culture to experience life, and the One who created my life, through different eyes.
And I have.
I have discovered that I can live with the same people for months at a time and not hurt all of them at the end of the day. (OK…maybe only some of them.) I learned that God is not in a small box only making Himself known on Christmas, Easter, and the occasional revival. I realized that I could push myself through sweltering heat, out of demonic dreams, and past any limit that my human mind said I couldn’t pass. I found out that I could literally do anything that I set my mind to. And the only reason that I am able to do any of this is because of the God who created me, the God who sent His Son to die for me, the God who promised to never leave or forsake me. My God!
I have become a new creation.
The old left in July of 2011 and the new is coming back on June 12, 2012!
