This Is My Awakening

I’m not a nature or outdoorsy person by any means. But the World Race has made me a sucker for a good sunset. I have fallen in love with those rare blissful moments when you catch the perfect the sunset, standing from the perfect point of view, looking around and watching the earth light up in golden oranges, faint pinks, and mesmerizing reds. Sunsets end our days on earth, but in those moments I’m caught in an exceptionally beautiful one, I find myself feeling a new beginning stirring deep in my bones.

It rained for a while yesterday here in Serbia. It finally stopped right at golden hour as the sun was setting. The perfect combination of the peace that comes after a rainstorm, and the beauty of a sunset. “Thanks God, this is just for me,” I closed my eyes and thought to myself. To be clear, we’ve been in Serbia two weeks now and have seen the sun only a handful of times. 

Last month, we were in the middle of a peaceful and small, but still busy, city in Fier, Albania. This made the transition coming from Asia a little easier. But, this month in Cacak, Serbia, for whatever reason it’s really hitting me that less than two months ago I was in Siem Reap, Cambodia, the exact opposite in so many ways of the culture, climate, way of life, and headspace I’m sitting in today.

In Cambodia, it was upwards of 90 degrees every single day, and we spent our days counting down the hours until the dark of night, and our nights struggling to sleep in the heat. The boiling, cruel sun and mosquitoes were our enemies, but the Cambodian people our dearest friends and what made the hard things worth it.

Here in Serbia, it’s cloudy and raining, or just about to, most days, and I’m kicking myself for only having one thin sweatshirt in this 50 degree cold. When we aren’t doing ministry, my teammates and I can be found crowded around a fire trying to regain feeling in our fingers. We’re serving with our hosts, Karl and Julie, missionaries from the States who have lived in Serbia for eighteen years. They run a summer camp here for kids in the community. This month we are cleaning and doing lots of manual labor, helping in any way we can to get the campgrounds ready to open next month. Being out in the country, we haven’t seen or interacted with too many other people since being here, another stark contrast to our ministries and time spent in Cambodia and Albania the last two months. 

Months four and five in Vietnam and Cambodia, I wrote quite a bit about how much I was struggling. I was angry with the Lord. I was angry with myself. I couldn’t see or understand how I was here on the Race, yet asking questions of my faith I had never asked before. I knew God is good, and I claimed it everyday. But I couldn’t fully feel or believe it anymore after all we had seen and experienced on the Race. So much suffering around the world, injustice, violence, poverty…the list and the brokenness goes on. Because of this, I felt inadequate. I felt empty and so broken myself. 

In this time, the Lord kept telling me to simply talk about it. Easier said than done because inviting the world and all of their opinions into the broken and hurting mess inside my heart and mind was the last thing I wanted to do. But I did it anyway. I talked about it a lot with my teammates. I blogged about it. I shattered the illusion of “perfect” missionary life and got really raw and real on my social media. I spent much of last month, month six, waiting for the end. Waiting for the one big thing that was going to heal my heart and restore every confusion and broken piece in me.

It didn’t necessarily come in the way I imagined or hoped. I don’t have a black and white answer to pinpoint the exact change in my spirit, but I can tell you it was instead a lot of little things. It was time. It was pressing in and sitting in my brokenness, wrestling with God and with myself. It was releasing my feelings and laying them at the foot of the cross. It was dying to self and allowing Him to change my perspective.  

The word I received for this month is awakening. I received this during our debrief at the beginning of the month, and have been patiently waiting for a dramatic and noticeable spiritual revival everyday since. Instead, this word quietly hit me last night, standing in the after-rain fog, watching the sunset through the trees in the woods of our home for the month in Cacak, Serbia. Waking up this morning felt like waking up for the first time in months. It was a slow build, but here I am recognizing and relishing in the beauty and deliverance of so many answered prayers. 

He’s good. He’s always been good. And there’s always been a rainbow hanging over my head.