To my Oregon:
Hi, sweet babe.
It’s a little ridiculous how much I’ve missed you this year. You have been on my mind constantly; being away from home for a long time truly makes one appreciate it in hundreds of new ways, especially when the homesickness is really strong.
I’ve missed you so hard for so long, it doesn’t even seem real that I’ll be back with you so soon.
How deeply I have longed for your rivers, pristine and full of life. Clear, sweet-tasting. I thought of them constantly when I was in India and Nepal, and the rivers there were full of garbage and animal carcasses, dark and thick as mud puddles. These rivers were the ones that people swam in, and played in. The ones that communities built their lives around.
How often I have dreamed of your restorative, healing rainfalls that cause the Evergreen trees to grow proud and tall as towers. The soothing rain that causes every Oregon hillside to be blanketed in an endless sea of rolling, lush green. I thought of those distant rainfalls every single day in Botswana and Swaziland, when those countries were both experiencing the most life-threatening droughts in recent memory. When the dirt was dry and unyielding. When the hills were brown and scarce with life. Crops were dying. Livestock were dying. Children were dying.
How I yearned for your coastlands- your marvelous, awe-inspiring, carefully preserved beaches that draw so many tourists and locals alike. Your oceans still team with life, with a healthy variety of species that still thrive because of protective measures taken every year. I thought of these oceans every day in Vietnam when I walked their beaches and saw a country that desperately needed teeming waters to provide for countless communities in rural areas, but that have sadly overdrawn from the limited resources available, and now, time after time the fishermen returned empty handed. Empty hearted. There are no more fish. I pictured your vast supply and I thought, what will these villages do?
I remembered and pined for your city streets, so clean and sweet smelling, every day in Chile and Bolivia, when we lived in red-zone towns where trash littered every corner and the weakly filtering Winter sun *still* baked the stinking scent of human urine and dog waste that caked the sidewalks and caused us to feel a constant state of nausea as we walked…. and it left me in awe as I remembered the clean streets I left behind at home, and I realized that for most other people in the world, this filth is normal. Even in downtown streets and higher income areas, this filth is normal. This broke my heart as I watched small children playing along these garbage- lined avenues.
All of these things have changed me. I wished constantly this year that every place around the world could have what you have, Oregon. You are blessed beyond your knowledge of the beauty which surrounds you constantly.
You know what was strange, though? I was even reminded of the less pleasant parts of you while I was gone. Even the parts that few seem to acknowledge.
One month, I was forced to consider the one blaring reality that most of us are ashamed to talk about back home in Oregon; the stark reality that racism still exists even in the Pacific Northwest and how we all tend to live in this abstract world where we pleasantly pretend that the brokenness and sin of our nation’s history hasn’t reached us in the top western corner. That we champion equality for all and rights for all and yet pretend like the stories we hear from other parts of the country can’t and don’t affect us.
I thought of this every single day that I lived in a mental institution in South Africa. I couldn’t escape those thoughts when I lived in a place where mentally challenged people were literally thrown out of their homes and abandoned by their families for their disabilities, and on top of that, they are even refused medical attention based on the color of their skin. I thought of it when I watched every single day as I watched black South Africans and white South Africans live their entire lives pretending like the other didn’t exist.
I felt the staggering weight of this reality when I had to break up physical fights between residents with different colored skin. I was horribly confronted with it when one of my residents was refused immediate emergency medical attention at the local hospital based on the color of her skin, even though she was elderly and had a fractured hip.
I learned the depth of this reality when I was prejudiced against daily as a young white girl in a country that has been ravaged by apartheid and I wasn’t even upset by the way I was treated… Mostly I just wanted to fall on my knees and beg for forgiveness on behalf of everyone who had ever wronged another person in this country, no matter what they look like. And I thought of you, my sweet, proudly progressive, “urbanly equal” city- and oh, I cried for you. I cried for myself and for the complete lack of awareness I lived my previous 22 years in.
I cried for the fact that we all still live in blind ignorance and outright refusal in this day and age to acknowledge the fact that even in our beloved city, people with different faces live in different neighborhoods and go to different churches and live very different lives than we do.
Home, I thought of you so much this year, as I have met and lived life with displaced people. Refugees. Run-aways. The mentally ill. The Homeless. Prison inmates. People against whom the world has turned its’ back… And then I began to pray.
Oh, I began to pray that you would become a city with open doors and open arms to people who have nowhere else to go. People who had no other choice but to be ripped out of their beloved homes, their beloved and familiar lives because their own countries turned against them.
I prayed that you would become a loving home for so many new wanderers the way you have always been a sturdy home for me.
Home, war and grief and famine and governments have destroyed so many lives all over the world and there is so much hurt and so many lives left in the balance, reeling from the trauma of it all.
Home, I pray we all begin to understand. I pray the scales are continually lifted from all of our eyes. I pray we all actively loose our ignorance and gain more global perspective. I pray we all practice learning to see the whole world as Jesus sees it: broken, waiting for redemption.
Home, I pray that we can all turn to our neighbors and truly begin to serve them- no matter where they are, what they’ve done, how they look, where they’ve come from.
Home, I know times are difficult right now, I have heard some of the stories- I have seen the headlines I never thought could come from our local media…. But please, home, don’t give up on this world. Don’t give up on serving this world and don’t give up on loving those whom are different from us. Jesus wants us to be His hands and feet; don’t get jaded just yet. I pray we all learn to see that we are the instruments and tools He has planned to use to bring redemption, to bring restoring rains to the dry deserts and the even drier hearts all over this world.
Please, home, as I return to you after so many months living in 3rd world countries for the past 11 months understand that things must be different from now on.
I am different. You are also different. Everything is so different.
I beg your patience with me. Your forgiveness. Your empathy.
For God has shown me much hurt, much injustice and much trauma this year- and I am still wrestling with all of it in my heart. I am still wrestling with all of it in my soul. It’s going to take a lot more time before I get to a place where I can resolve all of this unrest and all of these questions within me.
I may explode in fear, frustration, anger, sadness, confusion, or an overwhelming sense of loss and non-direction. I don’t know what the next few months will look like for me, but I need you to know I do desire you to walk alongside me. I need your love and I need your help.
Please know that I still need your honesty, and your vulnerability, your questions, your relationships, and your forgiveness constantly.
But also, I beg your understanding that my home is no longer in one solitary place, in one solitary state in the PNW.
My home is now scattered across the entire world. Across the 5 continents I have been blessed to visit in my lifetime so far. My home is in the tiny living rooms and concrete shacks and in the churches and kitchens and backyards of the poorest neighborhoods of the poorest towns in the poorest countries of these continents, and I couldn’t be more richly blessed than the richest man in North America. My true home is in the greater, broader scope of the Kingdom of God, and for this I give endless praise to our good, good Father.
Home, I pray we all see this Kingdom as our home, too. That it would become our shelter, our safe-house, our harbor, that we would all come to see ourselves as displaced wanderers for the greater home of the Kingdom. We are all nomads for the Kingdom.
Counting down the days until we are reunited.
All my love,
Hannah
