Where am I? What time is it? What am I doing? What has my life become?
These were some of the many questions going through my head the other day at breakfast. Some of the questions were easy to answer. I was in Nairobi, Kenya, eating toast and bananas and mango at some backpacker’s hostel and it was 8:30 in the morning. After that it began to get fuzzy.
The facts are that I have just left Cambodia, traveled on a 10-hour flight from Bangkok to Nairobi and I am now waiting to leave for an 8-hour bus ride to El Doret where we will be spending the month doing ministry. Those are the black and white facts for the moment, but for me there is so much more I can only begin to process.
I feel as if I have been pulled violently from a place where my heart was broken in more ways than one. A place that is screaming my name. My eyes begin to water just thinking about the people I have left behind and the country that needs so much just to be able to stand on its own two feet. A country full of people broken by a genocide that has taken place less than 35 years ago.
Until this point in the race I can honestly say I have done pretty well when it comes to adjusting to new countries but I am unable to say this one is as easy. I am in culture shock and with everything else on my mind it is almost more than I can handle.
I have just left Asia and am now on the great African continent. It is humbling to have the opportunity to return to the place where I felt a call from the Lord on my life a couple years ago. It was during a class trip with Nyack to Southern Africa in January 2009, in a little hut in Swaziland that I heard the Lord calling me to live a life of abandonment, risk, uncomfortableness and brokenness. It has been over this past month that I have really been seeing how this calling is coming to life. And I know that He will only reveal it more as I spend these next months in Africa.
So I am going to be completely honest right now. I want you to know my heart even more and so please don’t be too shocked when I let you guys in. I came on this race not really expecting too much, I mean we were told to come in without expectations so I didn’t. I figured I would travel for 11 months, learn what the Lord wanted me to learn, come back with some stories, make some friends and then I would come home. I expected to return and live the American dream. Man, how wrong was I. At this point that American dream isn’t really calling my name anymore. I have no idea what my life will look like in 4 months when I re-enter the states. I just know its going to be big, something bigger than I could have ever dreamed on my own.
How do I ever return to a life after seeing what is really going on in the world?
How do I return to taking 20 minute showers when people don’t even have clean drinking water?
How do I hop in my very own car and drive to the store when entire villages don’t even own a car.
How do I justify going out to eat and spending $20 dollars on a single meal when that can feed a Khmer family for four days?
How do I return to a closet full of clothes when people have one change of clothes?
How do I return to life as I once knew it when these are no longer just stories from a book but are now personal experiences? When I have faces that flash through my mind every day?
I was going to try to put it into my own words but as I was reading True Religion by Palmer Chinchen I read a part that pretty much put words to the thoughts I have been thinking so here it is. I want to be an expatriate for Christ.
“Expatriate describes an extraordinary life, a life of adventure, a life of uncertainty, a life of exhilaration, a life worth living.
Expatriates are resilient. They have resolve and learn to adapt and improvise. They expect little. They find guilty pleasure in luxuries as simple as an air-conditioned restaurant, a hammock by the beach, an ice-cold Coca-Cola … in a glass bottle.
I have observed something true in practically all expats. Once they have tasted the haphazard, horn-honking, chickens-everywhere, annoying-venders, pungent-odor, soggy-air, crazed-taxi-drivers, drunk policemen, disorienting, take-life-as-it-comes world away from home … they want more.
When expatriates return “home” their souls shrivel. They cringe at chain anything. The suburbs and minivans and strip malls and fast food suck their spirits dry. They can’t wait to board the next plane to somewhere far away.
And maybe life is better like that. This world is not for making home, so live on the go–go and live; really, really live.”
The Lord has been changing me, slowly but surely. Now I don’t even know who I am anymore. My passions, my desires, my heart are all from God. I have always dreamed in life to a certain extent but now the Lord has really been showing me how small my dreams really are. He has replaced them with dreams I know are only from Him because they can only be completed by Him.
Until Next Time
Annalisa
If you want a really good book to read I would highly recommend one of the following:
TrueReligion: Taking pieces of Heaven to places of Hell on Earth.
by Palmer Chinchen PhD
A Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns
