I came back a few months ago from spending 7 months in Africa to a familiar place that made it seem like I had never left. Everything seemed the same, and I found it so easy to slip right back into the life I knew. My house, car, these streets, coffee shops, grocery stores, church, friends, family, neighbors. It seemed like I had been gone for a weekend. I found myself waking up and wondering if the last 7 months had even happened at all, or if it had been some kind of dream.
It did happen, I told myself often. It was real. In an attempt to be intentional about reminding myself, I spread my quilt made from colorful pagne fabric on my bed. The one I had made with a friend on her porch, ironing the folds with a coal-heated iron and sewed with her foot-powered sewing machine. I printed out pictures and hung them on my walls to remind myself of the people I had lived in community with for so many months, the relationships I had formed, the laughs and hugs we had shared, the little hands I held. I painted a bible verse in French on my bulletin board to remind myself that 7 months ago I wouldn’t have been able to understand what it said.
Oddly I felt like my life was being reversed. Like I was right back where I started before I went. During the waiting period before I went thought, at least I knew where I was going. I knew what was next. I looked around my room with the pictures and pagne and memories of Africa but I couldn’t stop the thoughts of the unknown future ahead of me.
Now what?
I knew just like before that I wasn’t going to come back and spend the rest of my life working a “normal” job in America. But where do I go from here?
I am thankful for babysitting jobs and people who have “hired” me for nutrition help as I try to figure out what is next, praying for God to show me the way and what to do now. And in the past few months that I have been in this place, He is teaching me once again the contentment that comes with just knowing I am His. Joy that makes tears fall knowing I belong to Jesus and that He is enough even though I have no idea what I am doing and what lies ahead. Hope in this unknown, knowing only that as I keep knocking, seeking, asking, that my Father will show me the way as He has done so many times before. I write these words to convince my heart what I know in my head to be true. And I am finding that there is sweet comfort in knowing that Jesus meets us at the end of ourselves.
