Something like an ode to the past:
I found these words as I was scrolling through my documents on my computer this morning. I wish I had posted these last year when they were freshly written, but it seemed so unnecessary at the time. I figured no one should care too much about me being home in America and it all seemed difficult to put in to words anyways, so I left many thoughts and prayers unwritten or left unfinished in files or laying on lines within pages in journals now sitting on my desk.
And yet for some reason I felt I should share this today.
Over a year late.
Long overdue.
Words from around June or July, 2018:
“I’ve been putting this off. I could attribute this putting off to busy-ness or a period of rest as I have been going through such a time of intense transition, or I could be honest. Not that I haven’t been busy or trying to chase after moments of contemplation and rest with the Lord, but more so that I think subconsciously I knew that writing a blog about being home would in a lot of ways complete the finale of this last season of life that I lived and so deeply loved. It would force me to put things into writing like “I’m back in America.” “I’m home.” It would force my subconscious to a very conscious, undeniable truth, the truth that something I loved is over.
So here I am, sitting in my room, typing those exact words out for you to read: Yes, I’m back in America. Yes, I am home.
Being home…where do I begin.
Everything is different, yet entirely the same.
People and places even smell the same. I just keep saying “you smell the same” “your car smells the same” “you smell like you.”
It’s strange how normal it all is.
Something I remember finding to be true early on in the Race was that I wasn’t haunted by homesickness. I wanted to understand myself and why that was the way that it was. As I began figuring myself out, I remember something golden striking my insides. I felt, like a light, airy sheet falling over my body, the truth that I could go anywhere on this whole earth, I could travel to the farthest longitude/latitude away from my Suwanee, Georgia life I’d known for so long, I could climb and scale mountains, I could swim seas and plunge into exotic and terrifying unknowns and all I could ever do is feel at home. Home to me is God. I can be sitting in my room, my warmly lit, highly familiar room, the one I’ve decorated and redecorated, the one where I’ve cried in and laughed in and talked too late on the phone in, the room where I’ve procrastinated studying til the last minute and painted late into the night and tried to scrub splatters out of the carpet before dad saw it…I could be there or I could be in the lushy greens of a Dominican rain forest, full of foreign things, sounds I’d never heard- such as a language I don’t know. The lushy greens that were full of lives I’ve so miraculously been intertwined with for the September of 2017…I could be anywhere in between, and I’d be right at home. God is with me in the crowds of a wonderfully weird music festival in South Africa just the same as He is when I’m visiting my Nana and Papa and calling in the horses to the barn before the plates are set on the table for supper. He’s with me as I’m so overwhelmed by simultaneous misery and mystery while looking down into valleys of Haitian villages full of farmers and families that are bent over backwards just to take care of their loved ones, somehow beating all forces of nature by harvesting a bountiful crop after each and every hurricane that whirls their way- my eyes taking all of this in while hiking up a mountain to pray and enjoy the natural water hole that was springing up crystal blues that seem to be from Heaven itself…I’m at home when I’m walking down the aisles of overflowing shelves of Super Target with her endless rows of canned and packaged candies, cereals, and everything in between, half that will be wasted because she made more than she could ever sell. I’m at home when baking my dad’s 52nd birthday cake with my little brother, icing it purple and dumping an entire bottle of rainbow sprinkles and printing off pictures of Prince and Anchor Man and Napoleon Dynamite to tooth pic into the tie-dye magic of our baking masterpiece. I’m at home when I’m praying some of the most desperate prayers I’ve ever prayed in my life, with clenched fists and tears in my eyes, voice cracking and urgency pounding out of my chest like my body’s never felt before, begging my God to bring little Arvin, our friend who lives at the back of a snack stand to the left of our Filipino front gate, who smiles and laughs and hugs us every afternoon in the pool and on the streets, safely back to his mama and papa as he’s been missing for about a week. And I’m home when that prayer gets answered at 1 am in the middle of the street we lived off of in Cuatro, Manila- running up and down the dirt road with our pjs on, laughing and singing and dancing with some women who had prayed fervently alongside us. I’m at home when I’m sitting in Atlanta traffic. I’m at home while I plunge into ocean waters with wild and naked children holding on to my every limb, from the smile on my face to my chipped toenail polish on my bare feet…I don’t have to miss home because home is everywhere. Home is God. I’m at home, I’m at home!
~
I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to think that my time spent helping global organizations is better than or more of a sacrifice than doing similar if not identical work here in the States. It’s strange, the further you get from America, the more the church typically praises the simple service done. To some extent I see where this comes from, I do personally understand the sacrifice it takes to leave the place one calls home for the simple sake of the gospel, especially for extended periods of time, so I’m not saying it’s absurd or far off to feel or think these things, but I do feel so strongly that in glorifying international missions, people can begin to feed themselves plates full of false realities that they then digest and add pounds of lies to their personal walk with Jesus. I have noticed the most disturbing lie that seems to dress itself as truth in the closets of many American minds. This false truth is that missions are only necessary in third world countries, maybe not exclusively third world, but pretty much any place but America. And within that false truth is a belief that God chooses a special few to do crazy things with and through, leaving the vast majority of Christians to simply go to church, pray before supper, and toss extra change into the offering basket along with an occasional raising of the hands to a moving song in church.
This is bull crap.
I truly believe that He wants to do something people can call crazy in each and every single one of His children’s lives, dare I say the entire earth’s life. I believe that the disbelief in God’s desire to take you on an adventure wilder than your wildest dreams is to weaken the God that breathed the galaxies into being and spoke the earth and all of its rich complexities into motion. It is self inflicted defeat to walk around thinking that some are meant for “great” things and others are meant for whatever qualifies as “normal.”
I in absolutely no way put this into writing with condemnation behind these words, in fact, the heart of these words is to simply liberate you from the lies that are choking you from breathing the fresh and exciting truth that God operates in a constant invitation to bring Heaven onto Earth, whether that be in your middle class American suburbia or the rural most part of Botswana. He is breathing and moving and waking the driest, most brittle bones to life in brilliant ways day by day by day.
That’s the truth that rings loud as I sit across from a friend from my old youth group who shares of dreams she’s been having with intense spiritual meaning followed by stories of some of our friends’ moms who have been chasing after Jesus in radical ways. They have all of the sudden been finding themselves feeling that the Lord tells them to talk to a certain stranger or go to a certain place, then find themselves obediently following their sometimes strange inclinations only to then have conversations with people they’ve never seen in their lives that leads to these women seeing physical healings before their eyes in parking lots and offices and every day places all around my county. Mind you, these stories were told at a stereotypical, “post worthy” little restaurant by a normal looking nineteen year old girl including some typical southern mommas from my county- nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary! Normal people living what most would call average middle class American lives. A college going girl and tennis moms by day. Yet something absolutely extraordinary is stirring within them and bringing them into stories they never would’ve thought they’d be able to tell for themselves because they’re all of the sudden taking God at His word. The supernatural is all of the sudden natural for them. And it’s not a third world country that He’s using them or speaking to them or calling them to action, is it?”
^And that’s where I left off.
I could polish up or add to a lot of this, but instead I’ll do this:
It’s been over a year since landing on American soil- since flying from Manila, Philippines to San Francisco, California, and a couple days later landing in Atlanta, Georgia. June 10th was the day, I believe.
I remember so clearly desiring with such a passion to never let the World Race be the greatest thing I ever did with my life. I wanted to continue on living in a way that gave me permission to laugh in nothing but a dumbstruck kind of awe by the time New Years Eve came around year after year after year after year. I wanted, and still want, to say with full confidence, “the best is yet to come” as each new horizon slowly rolls itself in to my gaze as I look back at all of the ways I’ve learned and grown over and over again. I want my life to fulfill the scriptures of God taking His people “from glory to glory.”
I remember just aching to live in that way exactly as I felt the plane roughly hit the pavement of San Francisco. I sort of demanded my spirit to come in to alignment with this desire- not wanting to ever waste one single moment or season. I decided my weapon to keep my feet firm on the ground as I re-entered America was gratitude. I told myself that I’d write things I was thankful for every day as I returned. I even asked God to show me rainbows as a promise of saturation and color in a season that I had the potential to believe the lie was meaningless or less purposeful than my last nine months of defined “missions.” I wanted to believe that the term “mission field” was pretty meaningless in the life of a Christian because of the capability we ALL have to live missionally no matter our address or occupation or living situation.
I wanted to believe those sorts of things, but wanting to believe something and actually considering something a personal truth are two very different things.
On the night I landed in SanFran, I wrote lists of contradicting feelings I was experiencing on top of my list of things I was thankful for.
“Conflicting emotions: A common thought here in San Fran: This is meaningless. Guilt for selfish living. Guilt for not giving the homeless more, or anything at all. A desire to leave. Also deep satisfaction…”
I also wrote “A list of things I find strange” and number 16 is especially disturbing even now, a year later. “16. People REALLY mind homeless people…perfect example: A man named Henry living in San Fran said, “I’ve traveled a lot. Been to a lot of places. The worst was [some Indian sounding city], I mean, dang, man. That place was dirty. People were basically piled up on top of one another. And the smell. Some people were so dang dirty I wouldn’t dare touch ’em. I was all like, ‘Damn man, I’m not touchin’ you!’ <– Reminds me of Tandon, also known as “Trash Mountain,” a city built on an actual dump site, a city revolving completely around literal trash, found in the Philippines]. How they’re just people. All they are is dirty. All we all are is dirty. The irony of it all.
Those are some of the things I scribbled in my journal last summer. Things I found worthy of writing down.
I remember much of my energy being spent resisting the temptation to perceive my summer in Georgia as meaningless. I had an ache that was innately a part of my very being that needed to know that my life was bursting with purpose not even in the day to day, but down to the moment by moment. I have memories of always having this desire, but it was enhanced in an exhausting and exhilarating way in my coming home. A way that brought me in to my room in the inbetweens- before momma put supper on the table, my hours prior to sleeping where my brain was alive with “what am I doing with my life?” “God, how are you wanting to use me?” “Why am I unsatisfied?” “What is real rest?” “Was I selfish for coming home and paying for a five dollar coffee when there were people from all over the world that I consider my actual friends who don’t make that much in a single day?” Oh, the list goes on and on. Tormenting, yet the wind that blew me further in to God’s heart.
So, I stumbled over typing out the words I re-discovered only this morning, the ones above. I would type paragraphs and back space them all because nothing felt “right.” It didn’t capture the passion that I was feeling or it was too easy to put off and push to the side because it was draining to write something that somehow summarized nine of the craziest months I had ever lived up until that point while also putting in to words coming home and all that I was trying to figure out and forced me to wonder why on earth I ever came back after seeing real deal poverty and life threatening needs that I knew good and well were plaguing and tormenting the same people, families, schools, towns, provinces, and countries I had been to and lived in and longed for.
Flash forward to now, this morning:
I woke up at 10 am in my room in Georgia to my little brother knocking on my door with a list of things he thinks we should do with the $20 momma gave us last night for icecream after fireworks (shoutout to my momma- how kind of her?!) that never got spent because everything was closed by the time we got out of the parking lot. What a normal, uneventful morning filled with problems of the privileged.
I mention that to show how obviously different my life still looks from my months lived internationally, but this I can say with all the honesty within me:
I’ve grown immeasurably, I’ve cried and I’ve laughed and I’ve met insane amounts of new people while managing to keep on loving old and dear friends. I would say that I’ve changed, but I think a more accurate wording would be that I’ve become more myself than ever before. I’ve been pleased in the deepest ways as my inner longings for more of God have never been denied from me. I used to live with this unsettling, quiet fear that there was most likely going to be a day where I had seen all of God that a human could see on this earth. That the songs would get old and I’d annotate every page of my bible. That the only thing that would keep me in love would be the memories of my initial reactions way back when everything was new to me. That I’d have to work out of dry faith and wait til Heaven for any more awe or wonder or mesmeration and I figured this would all be by the time I was thirty or forty plus years in to my relationship with God. Those are things I would of never dreamed of saying out loud for two reasons: fear of judgement, yes, but a deeper fear that if I spoke it out, it would actually be true. But they were quiet and loud and buzzing within me.
What a pitiful way to live with God!!!! It didn’t stop me from wanting more of God or serving Him or living out the Bible, but I just assumed that there’d be some sort of cap one day. A measure of God that each person was given- one that had to end some day, by the time I was old and gray, at least. When I write of growing immeasurably, I speak of the cleansing of false theology that I never wanted to believe anyways, such as the thought that God had to have a limit. I’ve come to the realization time and time again that there are no ceilings in the Kingdom of God, rather only floors. I continually stand before Him with longing and desperation for there to be even more to everything than I could ever fathom and He has never leave me begging. This understanding of His limitlessness has come from a journey of wanting the “more” of God. The “more” that Jesus talks of in John 14: 12-14. “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it.” Jesus himself gives us permission to do EVEN GREATER things than He did!!! To spell out what He did on earth, I’ll bring us to Matthew 10. Jesus’ ministry defined: “heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons, preach the Good News!” And we can do MORE than this?!??! What is greater than raising the dead?! I don’t know, but I intend on my life being the answer. All of this to say, the more I know of God, the more I want of God. The more I know and want, the more radically I live and the more of the bible I see right in front of my actual eyes.
It has been a gorgeous year full of more than I could’ve ever imagined. I spent the majority of it serving through a ministry called Circuit Riders based in Huntington Beach, California where for three months we attend a Discipleship Training School as students and then in January go on the Carry the Love tour. Carry the Love is a tour to college and university as well as high and middle school campuses across America, Canada, and Europe. It’s a grassroots campaign that’s heart beat is to “Save the lost. Revive the saved. Train them all.” I got swept up in all of this in my last months of the Philippines, where I applied and got accepted on our very LAST day of outreach before heading home (How kind of God?! Promising me something right before going home, while never having to be too distracted while serving with Kids International Ministries?! Hallelujah!). I could of never imagined the year ahead of me, the year behind me now.
Oh my, my!
I’ll have to write another blog on this past year and what American revival has tasted like, how we’re swept up in a movement of the Spirit that I’ve never seen before, how I’ve decided to devote another year to Circuit Riders as staff starting this September. It needs more space than I feel should be used on this blog. I’m smiling with anticipation just thinking of all of the stories I’ve lived in this year and how they’ve given me hope for our country of beauty and power and resource, our home sweet home, our Land of the Free, Home of the brave, like I had yet to feel in the 19 years I’ve lived before October of 2018 when it all began. In short, I’ve managed to not simply live on with a mouth full of stories growing older as time flies on, but I’ve been living newer, crazier stories every day! How I’ve always wanted to live. Better with age, never enough to see or hear or feel, ever and always more of God and humanity and everything in between. My dream that the World Race would not be the peak of my existence has come true. It has been my highest privilege, my deepest honor.
As always, I can’t seem to finish a blog or an email or a letter without expressing my insane gratitude to anyone that has found themselves reading this. “Thank you” is too small a statement. The fact that you journeyed with me for months as I was washing the feet of ministries all around the world and that you’re still loving me and wrapping me in encouragement is insane. I do not deserve the care I have received. Your genuine heart to support me, your investment in me, has given me the opportunity to truly give my life to fighting for Heaven on Earth. I would be so far from where I stand today without you.
I wish you peace unfathomable, love extravagant, and wonder immeasurable on this day and every one to come!!
To be continued………………………… 😉
