As the title of this blog says, I am home. After six and a half months on the mission field I am back in the States and back in Texas. I have been back in the States for a week now, and back in Texas for two days, and to be honest it is weird.
I know that the transition would’ve been hard even if the Race had ended as planned, and I would still have needed time to process being back home. But with the Race ending the way it did I must also process with God the sudden and unexpected nature of my return home. 500+ people, including myself, have returned to their homes much sooner then any of us expected, and have come home to the craziness of the COVID-19 virus.
Right now I am going through a storm of conflicting thoughts and feelings. While I’m glad I didn’t get stuck on the other side of the world, I am also sad I didn’t get to finish all nine months. I am sad about the distance now between me and my teammates/squad mates, and at the same time I am joyful that I will soon be hugging and talking face-to-face with people I’ve been missing these past six and a half months. That is, after my self quarantine is over and things calm down. I am excited to begin the next season of life that God has for me, and hurt that the last one ended so suddenly.
But through all of this I am still in God’s hands. The image God gave me to best communicate this is a hurricane. God is holding me in the eye of the storm, so while I can still feel what’s going on around me, I’m not going to be destroyed by it. Yes, somethings in my life are being broken down, but after the storm God is going to help me. Help me to rebuild what needs to be rebuilt. Help me to leave behind the things He never meant for me to have. And help me to replace those things with what He had planned for me since the beginning of time. I have no idea what my life will look like after all this is over. I have planned with God the bare-bones of what I’ll do, but the details are still in His hands, and that is exactly the way it should be.
My prayer during this time of transitional chaos is that God will continue to reveal what He has for me as I continue to cling to and press into Him. I don’t need to know all the details of His plan, I just need to remember He is good and trustworthy.
