Early September of last year, I sat in a hotel room with my team and squad leaders. It was a precious day, our last day in America for what seemed like an eternity. One of the leaders asked what I was most of afraid of and I said getting sick. Not because I had a history of illnesses or because I was in poor health. Because the thought of not being at my physical best away from home and away from western medicine was scary. And because so many had warned to not get sick, to not drink the water, to only eat at nice restaurants.
Six months later I sat on the cold metal roof of the trailer that had been my home in South Africa. The same leader that had once asked me what I was most afraid of sat with me as we discussed my plans to go home, three months early…because I had been sick.
Two weeks after arriving in Thailand I fell ill with the typical traveler’ sickness- vomiting, fever, abdominal pain, you know, all the stuff that comes with eating food that’s not as clean as you’re used to. I blamed it on the change of landscape, took my Cipro, and moved on. However, after three hospital visits in Thailand, my body had still not recovered. As my squad moved to Cambodia, things did not start getting better. After a weekend at a hospital in the city, I was diagnosed with a parasite (on top of the Mono and overworking intestines that the doctor in Thailand claimed over me). And some other things of “unspecified origin,” that the doctors so lovingly write because they’re tired of trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
For the past six months I’ve wrestled. Wrested with sickness, wrestled with myself, wrestled with God. I wrestled with Him as I wondered why I was still sick, wrestled with Him as He told me to go home because I am called first to obey, then to sacrifice. I wrestled with Him at that first doctors appointment back in America because I no longer trusted any doctors opinion or diagnosis.
But then something happened. The doctor told me she contracted the same parasite I had when she was in Mexico last year. She knew everything about it, she knew what it was like to be sick from it, and she told me it was normal to still feel ill from it because it took her a year to get rid of it. And then she prayed over me, a stark contrast to the Buddha figures I was so used to seeing at the doctors.
And that’s when I decided that I was done wrestling with God. Because He works everything out and all I have to do is keep moving forward. Because if there is one thing that I’ve learned about life the past six months, it’s that it goes on, no matter what.
So I’ve been back in the states for about two weeks now. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect, but haven’t really known where to start. As I was talking to one of my best friends she said “not much has changed since you’ve been gone, except I fell in love.” And then I realized I have the exact same story, which means everything has changed. Because you can’t fall in love and come back intact and untouched.
So me and this friend of mine, our stories are the same but so entirely different. She fell in love with the man of her dreams, I fell in love with 25 ex gangsters and substance abusers in South Africa. I fell in love with 12 dirty, bruised orphans in Cambodia. I fell in love with a family in Thailand that welcomed me in as their own and let me run up their air conditioning bill because you don’t know heat and humidity until you’ve lived in Thailand. I fell in love with God, really fell in love with Him, for the first time ever.
And I’ve had the privilege of people falling in love with me these past six months. And during these past six months God answered a prayer that I have been praying since the first time I strapped on a pair of dress up high heels and watched Cinderella. A prayer that so many little girls are taught to pray for, a prayer for true love. And this year I got my true love, but in ways unimagined and unexpected. I got it through a Thai family who bought the expensive American breakfast foods because they knew it made me feel more at home. I got it through a translator who stood outside the mission base at midnight waving down the taxi that I had been stuck in for hours because I couldn’t find the way home. I got it through a high risk gangster who wiped his own tears from his face and then my tears after, because we didn’t want to say goodbye. I got it through a little boy in Cambodia who wept tears of agony into my chest in our last moments together. And I felt it in those final moments in the Cape Town airport, as I hugged the countless people who I had grown to love, the people who made an everlasting impression on my life. And I got it through a God who gives the gift of hard goodbyes.
So for those of you who are asking “how was your trip?” And “what did you learn?”
My trip was enchanting, it was God live in action. I learned that love is a choice. That sometimes love comes in through the window you accidentally left open and sometimes it comes in through the door that you tossed open wide. But either way it’s a decision to wake up daily and love. And when you meet people all over the world who have chosen to love God for eternity, you see how easy it is for them to choose to love you. I learned that when you return home from a journey with God, you don’t remember the landscapes. You remember the faces.
This year I learned that God is constant. When I’m laughing until my belly aches or crying until my eyes swell, He is the same. And He’s the same when my palms are open wide, fingers interlaced with His, and when my fists are clenched tight.
And that’s the beauty of it all. God gives as a choice to love while he remains a source of eternal chosen love.
