I Want to be Found Faithful...: No news is... patience in waiting for God's timing.

It is true. I am STILL in the season of waiting... waiting for a job, waiting to find out when and where I will be moving, waiting to sell one of my cars... lots and lots of waiting. While I generally categorize myself as a flexible person able to "go with the flow" quite easily, even I am wearing thin in this waiting game... you can only "go with the flow" when you have at least one "flow" going... I have none of the above, so in Bemidji I stay. :)

Don't get me wrong, it has been WONDERFUL to be at home and spend more time connecting with old friends, teachers, and family. In fact, because I have stayed I was able to attend a friend's wedding and fully enjoy the Minnesota Autumn (my favorite season) which I didn't think I would be able to do. My parents are so wonderful and generous to let me keep staying with them with my boxes and piles of stuff here and there throughout there house as I unpack boxes, organize, and re-pack to prepare for whenever I get my travel assignment.

However, I will be honest and say that I didn't want my life to slow down to this extent, because now in this time of rest and recooperation a lot of post-Africa and post-Harriman lodge processing has been coming forward in my mind and heart. Faces, situations, emotions, tears... a lot has been pushing its way out of the little cubbies where I've kept pushing them as I've hurried here and there after coming home in May from Togo only to fly out to NY for the summer. They peek their little heads into the light and wait to be recognized and fully looked at as I desperately glance behind me, hoping they will just disappear or find their way back to the dark corners. (I don' t try and avoid things at all, do I?) :)

Questions like:

1) What are you suppose to be doing with your life?

2) What do you want? More importantly, what does God want?

3) Are you living, actively remembering what you saw and what God taught you in Togo?

4) Are you living purposefully each day, obedient to God no matter what the situation?

5) Where is your joy? Where is your thanksgiving?

6) What does it look like to live in community when your community is so rapidly changing?

7) Will I ever feel at home again?
All of these questions and more flood my mind, asking for answers and bringing me before God in prayer.

One of the phenomena that I didn't quite expect coming home, is that I feel like I'm not home. I see the familiar faces, familiar places, things and people that hold years of memories and love, and yet it's different. I feel like something is missing. When I was in Togo, I felt like my family and friends and my Bemidji community was not there, so it was not home. I went to Harriman Lodge and now neither my Bemidji family or my Mercy Ships family was there, so it never quite felt like home. Now, I am physically "home", but my heart keeps wandering to Togo, Ghana, New York, the UK, so many other places... so many people; missing.
I am left wondering if I will ever feel at home again.

II Corinthians 5:1 puts it well;

"Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands."

As I remember my dear friend Erin once telling me, when you go and invest your heart in places and journey through life with people in those places, there is no place in which you feel like you are whole, because there is no place, apart from the promise of heaven, that we can be in all of those places with all of those people at the same time. You are just always left longing; longing to feel whole again. I never thought I would be in a place where I could so deeply relate to those words, but at this moment, I find myself staring intently into the eyes of that reality. Oh, how sweet heaven will be.

On the upside, please enjoy these couple of pictures from my time in MN! :) I have loved being so close to my little nieces and my family. :) PG Tips anyone? :)