Tomorrows

I haven’t written for a while. I’ve tried, but I haven’t really known how to express what has been going on in my heart. I think sometimes that the hardest times in life are the times you realize how truly small you are without Him and how foolish it is to try to do anything apart from Him. I know this in my head, but I live it anyway and I don’t realize it until my heart lets me know that something is wrong, that I’m not ok inside. These past few weeks I’ve found that I’ve been barely functioning and that I’ve been ok with that. I haven’t gone out, haven’t been intentional with relationships, haven’t been myself. I’ve felt sad without knowing why. My heart just hurts. And I find myself living in the future, living in the states instead of in Mali. My heart isn’t here and I don’t know how to bring it back. I thought it would be bigger for Mali, that it would be broken and deepened by this country and its people. Instead, I haven’t wanted to engage or feel for these people, this place. I’ve been trying to maintain composure, trying to not think too much so that I don’t have to be honest with myself. But that doesn’t work very well when you spend time with a God who knows your heart, knows your weaknesses and cover ups. And he hasn’t let me off the hook. He’s stirred me up inside with confusion and bewilderment. He’s unsettled and troubled me, but still I am stubborn. It’s like I am fighting against that part of me where He resides and in doing so I’m only furthering the inner turmoil. So I lay in bed promising myself that tomorrow I’ll care and tomorrow I’ll find the kids in the street with my bubbles. Tomorrow I’ll make them smile, make myself smile. Tomorrow I will be happy to be here. I’ve gone through a lot of tomorrows, a lot of justifications. I’ve been sick, tired, busy, gone. But the pain is still there. The knowledge that I’m not living fully alive, that I’m not embracing life in the moment.
I didn’t think that I would be like this here, that I would reach this point. I think I had that grand illusion that here it would be easier to be on fire for God, easier to live only for Him. Where does that thought come from? Here where I’m away from the people who know me best, know my faith best, know how to encourage and challenge me best. Here without my language and my family and the safeness of familiarity. Here where I can’t even stand without Him, can’t love without His heart, can’t see without His eyes. I can’t think of anything easy about here besides the way that I can draw into myself and close off the parts of me that need to be most open. I think back to all the songs that we sing and the prayers that we pray about God humbling and breaking us and I have to wince a little. Do we really know what we are asking for? And when that time comes in our lives do we really understand the gravity of those moments? It’s times like these when even though everything seems so far away I can still feel Him waiting on me patiently, prodding me along, supporting me. Because of that I’m glad to be here. I’m glad to be with Him. I’m glad to be where I’m at emotionally, spiritually, mentally. It’s good to feel. It’s good to know that your heart isn’t too calloused. So I may not fully and joyfully embrace Mali and I may not always have the perfect attitude about life, but I will always be changing and moving towards where He is. The more I cling to Him, the better I will be at loving what He loves.

Side note: This week we had the opportunity to go to an All African Tent-Makers Conference. There were 17 countries in Africa represented. We stayed at a Catholic retreat center that was right by the river. The accommodations were simple, but we each had our own rooms and bathroom so I was in heaven. I spent a lot of time in thought, a lot of time talking with God by the river. There’s something inspiring about being in a place with people you’ve never met, probably have not even heard the name of their country, but still having that feeling of being at home with them. Our common bond in Him is so strong. I underestimate it too often. It reminded me of what heaven must be like- with people from every tribe joining together to honor the God that they all share.

“Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call ‘our own life’ remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make our own life less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible source of false happiness? Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest propserity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. He makes that life less sweet to them. It is here, where God’s providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise. If God were proud, He would hardly have us on such terms; but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer. He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is nothing better to be had. It is hardly complimentary fo God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. ”
C.S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain”