In retrospect…

So in debrief of our semester, the last week of Uganda, we were given tips as to how to re-enter into America. That week, I remember laughing out loud at most of the tips, as I thought to myself-

Self, that certainly won’t be me. I’m self-aware. I’m ready to take on this re-entry business. I can conquer anything that this transition may throw at me, because, well… I assimilate.

So, I do normally assimilate well to new situations, but the rest of that paragraph proved entirely untrue. If I’m being honest with myself, I thought that I had prepared myself enough for re-entry. If I’m being, again, TOTALLY honest with myself, I didn’t even realize I was having the thoughts in the prior paragraph until I arrived back in the states. I think the best explanation of the processing that has been happening over the last few months is as follows: I am on a teeter totter, balancing in the middle at the top… trying to hold it steady with the tips of my feet, so it never touches the ground. I am failing miserably. It touched the ground… on both ends… several times now.

That teeter totter can be a lot of different things, but I’ll try to explain as best I can.

I spent my first week trying to balance my thoughts between these two things:

Teeter:

“Wow I can’t believe I’m actually here…hot water, and {relatively} endless chocolate, and ice, and clothes that I haven’t worn in 4 months…”

and then the Totter:

“Wow I can’t believe I’m actually here… why the HECK do I have more clothes than I can even figure out how to wear… I’m NOT spending that amount of money on food… why doesn’t anybody understand Luganda… and why are the roads so quiet…”

And then the more serious things started to hit me, and I started teeter-tottering in other ways.

Teeter:

“What am I supposed to do with my life? I mean, I just spent time in Uganda, loved it… I would LOVE working internationally. Absolutely. I love learning about other cultures, and love learning more about God.”

And Totter:

“We learned so much about local influence, I think I need to stay home. REALLY. home. After all, that’s the context I understand the most, and that’s probably where I can make the most influence… so … I can’t leave…ever..”

And then there are the emotional teeter totters, which might be my least favorite. One day, I couldn’t be happier about being with my family, and friends… and then the next, I break down in my car by myself… for no really great reason, or for lots of reasons. Tears of process are pretty common these days. I miss the girls at Mirembe House pretty intensely sometimes. I get frustrated when I realize that I’ll probably never find out what happens to them. I also can’t stand the fact that I can’t appropriately put words to my experience. Once or twice, I’ve talk for hours with friends about the experience, and I thought that would make me feel better, but it doesn’t. (For those who have listened to those rants, THANK YOU. It means so so much to me.)

Don’t get me wrong; I’m enjoying the whole-figuring out how to apply this to real life-thing. I guess it’s just that sometimes, I just want people to be able to re-experience what I just did.

I want them to see the look on a pregnant teenager’s face after she has her baby and finally realizes that she needs to act 24 now, even though she’s 14.

I want them to feel the red dirt in their toes, and taste the fresh pineapple from the campus fruit stand.

I really want someone to hear my rural host father’s voice as he tells me how America is, or for someone to feel the Rwandan woman’s hug, and realize that she MEANS forgiveness… that she truly loves the person who murdered her husband, because that’s how God’s love works.

Those are the things that get lost in the big picture, but they’re also the things that are necessary to create the big picture… and it’s crazy to think that the picture of the last 4 months (4 measly months) is so big.

So I guess I want to share with you some of the big picture things that I’ve realized during the unwinding process of the last 4 months…

-God is SO unbelievably mysterious. But what we do know is that He loves people SO much.

-He does the impossible every single day; we just need to look a little closer at the things that at first glance appear to be mundane.

-He loves to show us how grace works via our own sinful selves, so that we can use it on other people.

-He is beyond any understanding, but so very very real.

-He is master over witchcraft, and every other dark power of this world.

-He makes things and people that are SO BEAUTIFUL—and when you realize just how beautiful He's  made them, you might just explode.

I also have this list of questions that I started forming… things that I want to ask him. Things that I understand less, because in Uganda I was starting to explore these topics more.

I become frustrated when thinking about all of this… about all the unknowns, all the things that are more confusing because of the experience I had in Uganda. We talked in Uganda about the tension that we experienced while we were there—in everything, tension was the theme. We felt tension when trying to get to know someone that we couldn’t speak to because of the language barrier. There was tension we felt when trying to balance our own values with the cultural norms in Uganda. We experienced tension  when trying to explain that America was definitely not the same as Uganda, but it wasn’t what other people imagined either; it certainly isn’t perfect.

What I underestimated is the new tension of reconciling this experience with home. But perhaps, I’m more sensitive now to tension that exists anywhere. Tension doesn’t just exist sometimes; it exists in every situation.

I’ve realized after coming home that really, tension in our lives will never cease to exist… until Jesus comes again. I guess I’m reminded of 1 Corinthians 13:12… “Now we see in a mirror daily, then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Earlier it talks about the time when tongues will cease and knowledge will pass away. “When the perfect comes, the partial will pass away” (v 10). For those of you who haven’t given up on my novel of a blog post by now, think with me for a minute. Those passages sure sound like we’ll never leave tension behind at any stage in this life. Because we are followers of Christ, we will always have that feeling that we belong somewhere else. Because we do: we belong (eventually), in a place without brokenness, in a place close to Jesus, a place where we see face to face what the tension was all about this whole time.

I guess now I’m trying to, in the spirit of my Faith and Action class, “embrace the tension,” as a certain professor might say. I’m trying to embrace the awkward, even here… reminding myself that it’s all growth, and it’s all there because we do not yet see face to face. In the big picture, I’ll never leave the tension, because there are always questions left unanswered and mysteries about God left unknown.

So, friends, (this sounds really cheesy, but) let’s embrace this tension together. Let’s let our experiences; no matter how large or small, sink into our beings and let’s let God use them how He will. That’s what it’s all about right? Remaining open to HIS timing and HIS purpose? This partial understanding drives me crazy sometimes, but it also reminds me how small I am. It reminds me that the words I say, or the things I do won’t ever matter unless they’re anointed by God’s Holy Spirit working in me and through me. I’m praying now that He just works as He sees fit. In my life to come, and in my time in Uganda, and in every other part of my life that is in the past or present or future. I’m praying that God makes Acts 20:24 true in my heart. “However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace.”