Having talked with several people since being home in one-on-one situations about this past year, I’m coming up against a very common question: “I bet you’re glad to be free from all that, huh?”
It’s a hard question to answer. Am I glad I don’t have team leader responsibilities anymore? Absolutely. Am I glad I can pick my own schedule and ministry tasks? Of course. Am I glad I no longer have to sit in a room with my teammates and hear everything I have to work on in my life? Well, yeah. I can come and go when I please. I can eat whatever is in the house because nobody has put their name on it. I no longer have to live in community if I so choose.
But am I really glad to be “free from all that”? Honestly, not really.
Leading my peers gave me almost no opportunity for self-pity. My thoughts and feelings needed to be put aside in a lot of situations so that team schedules and responsibilities could be figured out. I didn’t have to sit in my own thoughts and wonder where all my motivation and passion went. I’m actually discovering how hard it is to set a decent schedule with work and family and ministry, and be accountable to that schedule without someone here to question me when I deviate. I don’t have loving teammates telling me areas of my life that I can work on to become more like Christ; I have to do it on my own. I loved the commute times with others, just talking about random thoughts. I can’t make fun of my teammates for all the random food they would bring home to eat. I wanted to have people there constantly, so I couldn’t ever stop working to be a better person.
Here is the real question: If I’m so “free”, why am I feeling so trapped?
There are so many possibilities of what I can do, and I’m trying to make decisions. There is such an immense amount of life and information, and just going, going, going, that I feel stifled. I just want to retreat from everything and disappear into the covers of my bed and sleep for hours. I don’t feel like I’ve made any progress in making decisions because as soon as I eliminate one possibility, another shows its face. I feel like I am going nowhere so fast my feet can’t keep up, and I face plant onto a gravel road, just making the pain sharp and immediate.
However, I always get back up. It’s not fun relearning how to be in a culture I thought I knew, but it’s not the end of the world. God’s still here, even when I don’t feel as free as people think I should be.
