I want to believe that at some point, I’ll be 100% ready to go home, 100% prepared to land on American soil and know that I’m home. But I’m realizing that going home, like every other day of the last year, will be a process, that each day will be different because I won’t ever be fully home again.
Home has become this idealistic dream that isn’t actually something that exists anymore. I want to go back to the life I left, but realized talking with my team this week that I’m different. I can’t go back to the life that I had before because the girl who left 11 months ago isn’t the girl who’s getting on the plane in just a few weeks. That’s been a tough pill to swallow.
You haven’t met James and Peter, or the girls in the bars in Chiang Mai; that is tough for me. You didn’t get on a bus down and travel the western coast of South America, or fight 13 hours of jet lag. The fact that you haven’t had the chance to stare poverty in the face is something that I don’t know how to grasp myself. You haven’t had to look at a child who is dying and make sense of the God you thought you once understood or sat down to prepare a sermon about the God you once understood for people who don’t know who he is and have never heard his name before. You haven’t had the unsettling of knowing that you shared the gospel with a college student who lives in a communist country and could have you killed for the very one you claim to live for.
It is hard to understand because I want to know how to better relate to you when I return back to the states. It’s hard for me to grasp because there is some parts of me that have changed this year so much that I don’t remember the person I was in January. I don’t know sometimes how to makes sense of this year because I don’t know how you even begin to explain it to people who don’t have any concept of understanding this life outside of America.
One of the biggest prayers that I have going into this year as I attempt to transition home is that grace will abound. That you’ll have grace with me and I’ll have grace with you. That I’ll have grace as I walk into the Christmas season, after confronting poverty that I’ll never be able to fully explain to you—a poverty of food, money, family, and Jesus. My prayer is that I will begin to make sense of the
I can’t wait to share these stories with you in person.
That aside, I am looking forward to home! See you soon, America.
