“How was the race?” “How was your last year?” “When can I see you?” “What are you doing now that you are back?” “How are you adjusting to being back home?” -A few of the good intentioned questions asked with, oftentimes, a five minute maximum time frame to respond. A few minutes to scramble and stutter out a sad attempt at conveying an answer that accurately shares even a part of the journey.
How do you began to encompass in five minutes the mass chaos of thoughts that cross your mind? The hundreds of thoughts, questions, fears, insecurities, passions, and beautiful moments that have happened since you’ve come home? How do you begin to describe how many moments you have felt completely overwhelmed as you try to sort out how to make this transition back into “normal life?” And besides, what is normal life and why do I, even for a second, start to think I want it?
On the outside, my life looks similar to what it was before this year of perspective shifts. I came back to my hometown, I am staying in the same house, back in the same community, taking a similar job. But in some ways, that’s the hardest part. Subconsciously, even if ultimately I knew that’s not what I truly wanted long term, I expected things to be exactly how they were before. Being back in the same environment, subconscious expectations have come up. There is tension rising as old habits conflict with truth as I know it. A daily battle rising as everything I have known, a particular way of living, of living out my faith, of ways I interact in relationship both with God and with my community combat what felt truer and more healthy this past year.
Every day brings a new challenge and question of how do you really want to live your life? What is of highest priority? What is succumbing to American culture or what is comfortable, versus what is just the natural order of how life is in the States, and is no better or worse than you have gotten used to living? How do you live in the world, but not of it? If you would adapt to different cultures around the world to better minister to them, what does that look like as you make that transition into being an American missionary? (being mission minded with the intent of being proactive in showing Christ’s love in how you live your life and interact with others.)
I am back in my old house again, but my roommates and the entire environment is different. The sounds of laughter and chaos have been replaced mostly with the echoes of empty rooms bouncing back at me.
I am back in my church community, but so many faces, dynamics, priorities, and direction are different than I remembered, as is my concept of what church “should” look like.
I physically look the same as I did before, my body, skin, hair, and style morphing back into “American Kelsie”, but internally, my soul feels like I have aged decades and feels so different from that girl that I knew 12 short months ago. My heart, mind, and spirit feel as though a lifetime has passed since passing through these familiar streets.
e last six weeks since returning to the states, I have felt both a restlessness in my soul from questions and pain pushed down out of being overwhelmed, and simultaneously, a passion to reach the unreached and the unloved here in Kansas City, leaving me frozen out of fear of acting out of the “wrong motivation”.
I am back home, back in Kansas City, but the moments I feel “at home” now include passing a man on the sidewalk who is speaking a different language and the familiar feelings of shared humanity that consume my thoughts and heart in that moment. I feel at home when I am seeing a movie in theaters, and tear up when one of the scenes include clips of people of multiple nationalities, including from India and some country in Africa dancing, and I get a flashback to that one time in Swaziland..
My room is now adorned with small reminders of the rich beauty of places I have been able to temporarily refer to as home over the last year. How do you begin to explain that while I am back home, I have a deeper longing to someday be home in heaven with the thousands upon thousands of believers I have met and shared a piece of life with, worshipping our Creator together for eternity? How does it make any sense that you can (if only in the smallest way) empathize with immigrants, and be hit with how strange American culture truly is?
I have had to come to the surprising realization that it has become somehow easier for me to interact with strangers in bus stations, talking about life and praying with them, than it is to figure out how to start over again with so many friendships in my life. Fighting so many internal battles have left me absolutely exhausted when it comes to interacting with others, and having to fight misplaced resentments and unfair expectations of those that I love most. As a result, everything in me wants to isolate, to run away in hopes that I will be able to somehow avoid hurting them in the process, or risk being rejected when my inconstant, unpredictable, and irrational emotions make relationships rougher than usual.
That’s not the end of the story though.
As many questions have been raised through this whole process, as frustrating as it can be, as much as some days I wonder if it would just be easier to say, “Screw it. I’ll just live life as it comes,” I have no doubt that God has had me covered through this whole process. I have been blessed in so many ways, whether it be through being physically taken care of, with food/shelter/transportation/finances constantly being provided for, for my family being incredibly supportive, my church community loving on me, the prayer and fellow mission minded brothers and sisters from my race fighting this same battle scattered throughout the states, or the many times I have been able to cry out to others and them letting me just be, God has shown himself every single day. Through conversations, shared passion, prayer, comfort for my overwhelmed heart, and the next steps slowly being revealed, in His timing, his faithfulness has continued to prevail as the cloud of confusion slowly starts to disperse and truth rings out louder and louder.
