I’m going to start this blog by throwing out something I’m sure that at
least ninety percent of the people who followed my World Race journey never ever knew.
That’s because it got lost somewhere in the shuffle of traveling from Uganda to
Ireland, The Awakening, and being deathly ill with malaria (which you can go
back and read about here
and here).
Three years ago in February (almost to the day), I was sitting in one
of the guest bedrooms at the home of our hosts for the week in Palumpa,
impatiently waiting for Skype to load so I could call home and talk to my
family for the first time in a few weeks.
My dad was the one to answer, and along with the cheerful family update
came some more somber news.
Jeremy – a young man from my church community at home who had overcome
a horrific drug addiction, become a Christian, and was back in school working
towards a degree in worship ministry – had fallen back into those addictions,
and things with him were starting to unravel.
I shared with my teammates, sent Jeremy a message with some love and
encouragement and to let him know I and my teammates were praying for him.
His response was hard, but good to read at the same time – he thanked
me for the encouragement and for the prayers.
He also said that he wanted to get back into the program where he had
gone the first time, and that he wanted to get back to serving God, but that
there was just so much evil inside of him that sometimes he fell.
I didn’t understand nearly enough of what was going on (nor could I
have, because I wasn’t around to see it or talk to him) until the end of August
on the day my squad was in Kenya preparing for our travel day to Dublin.
When I jumped on Facebook to catch up on what had been happening in the
three weeks I had been hiking through the mountains of Eastern Uganda, I caught
a few status updates from his aunt and cousin about him – enough to tell me I needed to call home as
soon as possible and find out what was going on.
The news was that about a week or so before, Jeremy had intentionally
overdosed and taken his own life.
And the problem was that in the whirlwind of leaving Africa, of being
in Ireland and being sick in Ireland and recovering from said illness while
doing ministry, I never really dealt with it – other than sharing with my
teammates when we got to Ireland what was going on.
Coming home and walking into church that first Sunday back in Phoenix was
hard because it didn’t completely hit me he was gone until I walked into class
that morning with the same teacher as before and basically the same crew… just
not him.
Everyone’s excitement about my return had me pushing my grief to the
side, though.
So did health issues and family circumstances in the following months.
I’ve been thinking about Jeremy a lot in the last few weeks, honestly,
but not been quite sure of what to say or how to say it.
Then he came up in my father’s sermon during Wednesday night services.
And the straw that broke the camel’s back came Thursday during my lunch
hour, when I stumbled on a blog asking for prayer for a family who had lost a
loved one recently to an overdose.
I knew I needed to share by that point, and yet… still no words.
Not until I found myself back at the beginning of a book I’ve been
reading recently – The Wild of God: A Global Journey by Eric Hanson (a World Race alum
who, funny enough, also went to NAU, and wrote the book about his experiences
overseas).
Near the start, he talks about some of what he saw an experienced in
Mexico in his first month out, and when I went back to it, something literally
jumped off the page at me.
“It was quite a revealing experience
to be invited into peoples’ homes. Strangers welcomed us into their suffering and
shared it with us. The people often would discuss their insecurities and hurts
within a few minutes of our first meeting. It was a level of transparency I
never find with people in America, and it all somehow felt very beautiful,
because for some reason, shared pain is more bearable than lonely pain.”
– Eric Hanson, The Wild of God
It struck me as I read that last line what the problem was – I didn’t
know what to say because I hadn’t said much in the first place.
Despite the levels of transparency with which I blogged during my World Race, sharing
things is a struggle for me.
You can blame it on whatever you choose (because there are a million
and one reasons for it), but the fact remains that opening up and talking –
being transparent – feels like it goes against every cell in my body.
Sharing just doesn’t seem like something is or should be natural to me,
and whenever someone “overshares”, it makes me incredibly uncomfortable.
Yet I can think of instance after instance in the Bible where we are
called upon to walk with each other, to share in each other’s joys and sufferings.
So writing this particular blog today is going against a lot of things
inside of me that want to hold it in-
Because I need to find a way back to letting myself be open and honest
and willing to share my joys and my struggles both –
To share the things that God lays on my heart as He lays them there.
I hope this is a good start.
