When I anticipated coming home, I didn't think I would have any problem readjusting. I mean, it was my home after all. Some people at Harvest School warned us that "reentry" may be difficult because you feel like you have changed so much, then you go home and nobody else has changed with you. That wasn't really the case for me. It seemed like I returned to something completely different from what I had left behind six months earlier. So the home I thought I was coming home to was not the one that welcomed me. That just added to the confusion of feeling like my heart was in a million places and nothing was steady.
So I didn't know exactly where I belonged or what I thought or how I felt. People asked me how my trip was and "Amazing!" seemed to be all that I could muster up because my brain completely froze at the idea of putting six months into a few sentences. Nothing would do it justice; there are no words that could get the point across. It's like I was facing a new language barrier in my own country. One much harder to deal with than all the others.
Between the chaos of change, the disconnect between my heart and my brain, and the inability to express anything going on inside me (mostly because I didn't understand it myself), I felt like my only option was to go on about normal life. I mean what else was I supposed to do? I know that I am in America for a season, I have a job and soon will be back in school. So my days no longer look like "wake up, walk to the student hut, worship for five hours, go out into the village, worship some more" or "wake up, explore Thailand, go to either small groups or worship nights or outreach to the brothels every night". My days now look like, "wake up, go to work, come home, do whatever else is on my to do list, get ready for school, see friends." And that's a pretty drastic change. But God is in everything. Just because I'm not living with 300 other missionaries that are passionately in love with Jesus, doesn't mean that God is any less present in my life. Just because my worship throughout the day is me alone in my room or in my car instead of in a hut in Mozambique with hundreds of missionaries and villagers or in an apartment in Bangkok with fellow Iris family doesn't mean it's any less divine.
Being thrown back to normal life after six months of nonstop tight knit community with like hearted people (and I mean nonstop, I shared a room with six other girls for 10 weeks and then a full sized bed with my roommate for four months, you don't get much more tight knit than that) kind of left me dumbstruck. But I'm slowly learning how to walk in this foreign land (because I really don't think I'll ever feel like I completely fit in in America again) and I'm learning to be okay with the process. God is okay process. Ya know, the whole "He took six days to create the earth" thing.
So whether it's in a mud hut, a apartment in Bangkok, a brothel, or a thrift store and a college campus in Memphis, I want to worship Him with my whole heart. My whole life is His, even the parts that don't seem as exciting and the parts I don't understand.
