My sleep pattern is off, I’ve been feeling a lot of anxiety,
and every time I use a new bathroom I have to remind myself that it’s okay to
flush the toilet paper now. It’s amazing how foreign I feel in my own passport
country. Truth is, I’ve never felt one-hundred percent comfortable here in the
States-a result of having spent nearly half of my life overseas-but this is
just stressful.
The hardest part is the quiet-the loneliness. I am
accustomed to having at least a few (if not more than twenty) 
very familiar
faces around me twenty-four seven. For the last year I haven’t been able to go
out alone, sleep alone, or even just escape to a quiet place without bumping in
to some teammate. Now I drive around in my car with a feeling of complete
liberation, yet complete isolation; I sleep in a room by myself, equipped for
three normal people, but with the space for all of the members of team Ignite;
and I find myself at home alone while my family is out-it’s quiet…too quiet.
I know that this is part of our re-entry process, but it’s
more uncomfortable than I had imagined. Random thoughts pop into my head and I
want to grab Krystle or Megan to tell them, something funny happens and expect
Aaron or Traday to be right there with me; I wake up and feel the need to ask Molly
or Seth what the plan is for the day; I feel frustrated and assume I can just
grab Jeanette to pray over me. I can’t do any of this, though. My teammates are
spread around the country, and over half of them I haven’t even been able to
call yet. This is the greatest “culture shock” I have ever faced.
On Sunday I woke up with huge anxiety. I had to speak at
church, but that was not the root of the feeling. In fact, the speaking was the
easy part-it was just going that was stressing me out. I know many faces from my church, but I don’t
necessarily know the people behind them. I feel like a lot of people have
gotten to know me rather deeply this year, but to me many of them are still strangers. So in a way, I
felt like I was getting thrown into a fishbowl Sunday morning-everyone knew
each other, and they knew I was coming and may have even known things about me,
but I didn’t know them. I have become more introverted this year, and in large
groups have relied heavily on the fact that I can have a teammate nearby.
Eventually, I calmed down and the anxiety wasn’t as heavy, but it was still
hard to not want to just run away from the “chaos”.
This morning I was reading in Oswald Chambers “My Utmost for
his Highest” and a few things really stood out to me. He writes, “What a
revelation it is to know that sorrow, bereavement, and suffering are actually
the clouds that come along with God! ‘The clouds are the dust of His feet’
(Nahum 1:3)…If there were never any clouds in our lives, we would have no
faith.” I know we have gone through a lot of clouds this year, but now I am in
a different type of cloud. This cloud feels like loneliness, and I know I will
need to rely heavily on Christ for companionship. He is the only one that was
with me through the entire race and is still
with me here.
