A version of me wrote this in 2015 after returning from an incredible trip to Sierra Leone, my third, while navigating the sea of emotion and internal whirlwind that surely follows. In reading this back years later I am a little taken aback at how raw it all still feels, how it all still lies there right below surface in my heart, yet it is somehow healing to relive. I'm not sure if it will mean anything to you, friend, but here is a glimpse; for what it's worth:
I am back and I am trying. But if I am quiet, slow to respond, suddenly distant, forgive me - I am slowly unpacking two realities that seem so impossibly different. Each day there are moments my spirit aches and I wonder Where am I? Where is 'home' when everything is equally familiar and foreign? My friend calls it the place in between and I couldn’t say it better. Lately, I feel like a stranger, awkwardly trying to bear the weight of two worlds I barely understand.
I sit at my kitchen table and wonder at the silence of my parents' impossibly daunting house, still listening for the sea of tiny mende voices singing to their Jesus or erupting into laughter at every corner. I wander my neighborhood and try to reconcile what I see against the mud huts and red dirt floors still lingering behind close eyelids. I close my eyes in my soft bed as a song plays that once held back floodgates in a place where hope is something you fight for, sometimes moment by moment. I stare at the TV and wonder at our desperate pursuit and investment in personal happiness, when I have so recently held hands with a community united by self-sacrifice who has faced darkness with a resilience and a love for peace that outshines 'happy.' I swallow back the lump in my throat as I fill my cup from the tap, recalling the shy smile of the girl in red, standing in front of a murky dragonfly-infested ditch that is all the water for an entire village today. Friends ask kindly, some interested, some just being polite, "How was your trip?" and all I can muster is "It was... a lot."
Sometimes I want to run, and I have to wonder: Jesus, did You cry too at the awkward heavy tension, the pull and the burden between two worlds You adore? Did You long for Your home in heaven when You entered this world, did You miss the wonder and closeness of Your creation when You left it? Did Your bones grow weary with an ache to expose another world as we continually ran toward darkness, missed the point, hurt each other, ignored what mattered most? Do Your feet miss walking with us on red earth?
Today, pages of my favorite book still smell like another world. It sounds goofy but I'm completely serious! Chapters left open to the thinning air of distant heat lightning and heavy jungle rain, words brushed with red dusty fingerprints, love letters stained and rippling from my divided, leaky heart have trapped in their pages the distinct ozone of a beloved broken place. A place I love, 4,500 miles from here... and I am afraid to lose the smell. I know I can't but I am desperately trying to trap it there forever. I don't want to forget.
Greater than the fear of losing a scent, deep in me there is a growing fear of watching truths and memories fade away into this odd world I grew up in - into the busyness of the familiar, the easy, the convenient, the American dream I have so long accepted as 'normal'. I don't want to lose this passion to distance, I don't want to give up this urgency to the changing of seasons, I want to keep each uncomfortable detail vivid at the surface because I don't want to lose who I am becoming - who my Father is making me - in the hurt and the messy hope of it all.
Today, pages of my favorite book still smell like another world. It sounds goofy but I'm completely serious! Chapters left open to the thinning air of distant heat lightning and heavy jungle rain, words brushed with red dusty fingerprints, love letters stained and rippling from my divided, leaky heart have trapped in their pages the distinct ozone of a beloved broken place. A place I love, 4,500 miles from here... and I am afraid to lose the smell. I know I can't but I am desperately trying to trap it there forever. I don't want to forget.
Greater than the fear of losing a scent, deep in me there is a growing fear of watching truths and memories fade away into this odd world I grew up in - into the busyness of the familiar, the easy, the convenient, the American dream I have so long accepted as 'normal'. I don't want to lose this passion to distance, I don't want to give up this urgency to the changing of seasons, I want to keep each uncomfortable detail vivid at the surface because I don't want to lose who I am becoming - who my Father is making me - in the hurt and the messy hope of it all.
I didn't know what God had in store for us this year in Sierra Leone. I didn't know He would expose greater darkness than I have known there in the past, that amidst slow progress and setbacks we would have to fight for hope again and again. I didn't know I would see the heart of my Father in the deep tear-stained rest of a little girl snuggling into my lap, I didn't know how impossible it would be to find a pair of shoes to protect her very small bandaged foot. I didn't know I would glimpse heaven in a long-awaited embrace with one teenage girl who somehow sings as she speaks, who is finally going to school, who calls us best friends, who can finally write her name. I didn't know my Savior would invite me to wash the tiny feet of a broken heart just like mine, being slowly restored, washed clean, and re-named in a sea of profound relentless grace. Do you remember that Man, Jesus? He has washed you clean! I whispered desperately to us both, reaching with all my heart into the painful silence of those heavy eyes. What hurt do those eyes hide, little one? I didn't know He would lead me back to the edge of murky mud puddles in villages I visited one year ago, still waiting for clean water. In the course of a year you tell yourself it must be better now but I didn't know it's not yet. I didn't know I would stare into a wide smile, a scratchy giggle and realize I have so much to learn about joy from the delicate frame of one of my favorite little girls in the universe. I didn't know we'd get to witness hope opening wide the heart of a little boy whose scars seem unfathomable. I didn't know how much I continue to underestimate what hope and family and grace can do to re-write a predictable ending into a symphony of freedom in four short years and eighteen children. I didn't know my heart had more room to hold such polar opposite emotions moment by moment in a jungle where a battle rages - love and anger, desperate hope and searing pain, quiet adoration and tearful despair. I didn't know what new depths He'd hidden a world away and I still don't know what He has planned.
But I know more than I did. I am learning to know the Man of Sorrows the ancients spoke of, the One who endured the full consequence of sin for a greater promise to His children - each and every one of us. I am learning to see Him in every detail of this place. He is here, in the heavy suffering and resilient joy of each fragile frame, for He knows their suffering, in the deepest darkness He has not left their side. I am learning to know the One who walked this earth carrying the full weight of two worlds. That Man is with them in a way I have yet to grasp, and that Man is leading me. Into this dark place He will surely come. I don't want to forget.
But I know more than I did. I am learning to know the Man of Sorrows the ancients spoke of, the One who endured the full consequence of sin for a greater promise to His children - each and every one of us. I am learning to see Him in every detail of this place. He is here, in the heavy suffering and resilient joy of each fragile frame, for He knows their suffering, in the deepest darkness He has not left their side. I am learning to know the One who walked this earth carrying the full weight of two worlds. That Man is with them in a way I have yet to grasp, and that Man is leading me. Into this dark place He will surely come. I don't want to forget.
He meets me here. He brings spring rains, a long awaited promise, truths yet unspoken in a well watered place. He stoops down to wash dirty feet, and His steady love draws us in to know Him deeper for He is there in every fear, every scar. He will teach my heart to patiently know a world I can call home - an already/not-yet Kingdom whose burden is Light. He is coming again to bind up the broken and I am just trying to follow, leaning in for His whisper.
So forgive me for where I am, clinging desperately to the discomfort that haunts me. I am trying to hold on, to remember, to be near to the Man of Sorrows. I want to keep each uncomfortable detail vivid at the surface because I don't want to lose who I am becoming - who my Father is making me - in the hurt and the messy hope of it all. I am staring out the window, scanning for jungles of palm trees, I am closing my eyes trying still to breathe in red dirt. I am feeling for someone's gentle hand in mine, I am replaying that squeaky smiling voice calling Kadijah! I am trying not to cry at piles of food stocking restaurants and grocery stores, I am standing in the hot shower grieving muddy water holes being used to sustain life. I am searching for a Man who understands the tension better than I, because I need to know Him in this place. I am awkwardly carrying two worlds, as this Man of Sorrows pulls back each finger, fills my empty stained hands with His, and leads me forward. He is my home and even here - where I don't yet understand Him - into this place, too, He will surely come.
“Is this not the fast that I have chosen: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out; when you see the naked, that you cover him, and not hide yourself from your own flesh? If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday.The Lord will guide you continually, and satisfy your soul in drought, and strengthen your bones; you shall be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail." - Isa 58:6-7, 10-11
