UKRAINE | L’viv
Its all coming to an end. After 11 months I will finally be coming home. I feel numb. I am not sad nor excited, just indifferent. But, as I sit here writing this, if I allow myself to sit and process the people that I have met or the things that I have seen, I feel my throat closing and the tears begin to well up…but I don’t allow it. Why? Maybe fear that I won’t be able to get it back together? Maybe that the things that I have seen are too difficult to imagine or the people that I have loved that I leave month after month have bigger pieces of me than I am now left with. Its too hard to both imagine the wonderful foods awaiting at home while at the same time knowing that my little boy, Syete, in Rwanda is still going days without eating. My brain can’t fit both my comfy bed, and perfectly cooled house and the trash houses that we have seen in Kenya…India…the Philippines and others. How do I justify it? How is it fair? Why do I get to worry about cars, computers, and which cereal to buy this week and they have to worry in Nepal if their kids will make it home alive after crossing the river 14 times to go to school.
As we come closer to leaving, I have begun to fill up my mind with other thoughts. With planning birthdays, and getting to see my family. I have told myself that I don’t need to process, that going home will be just as easy as when I came home from college. I mean its home right, where you feel the most like yourself and the most comfortable. But, if I allow myself to simply come home and push down all my feelings about these nations and people what was the point? So I have some good stories to tell? So I can brag every time it is hot, that I have felt hotter? So I can make everyone at home feel bad about all their STUFF?
I want to use these emotions and feelings to foster change. I want my love for these people not to tear myself down emotionally but to fuel me to keep going. I can’t go home and be the same person doing the same things because I am not that person anymore. I am not just another American working her way up the food chain. I am a daughter of the King who knows her identity in Christ and the authority God has given me. So I have a duty to follow God’s will to make disciples of all nations, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and help the orphan and the widow. Because these aren’t just commands that God gives us but people that I have met along my journey. It is Lina…Syete…Bin…Mollity…Gisele. I can’t forget because they have pieces of me I can’t suppress because I have pieces of them.
I guess I have no real point to this blog, only to speak the thoughts that I have been suppressing and hope that from them comes transformation.
