24 Months

If I were to use a word to describe how I currently feel after 24 months on the mission field, it would be ‘grown-up’. I feel like an adult. The easiest comparison for this journey is to the photographs of fresh-faced youthful celebrities with their rounded cheeks and smooth skin, followed inevitably by that comparison a few years later where the cheeks have lost some roundness, their eyes have seen a few things, and their skin tells a story. That’s how I feel now. Our little family has lost some of its roundness (figuratively) and experienced some very challenging things. Sometimes I can still find beauty in it, but when I do, it’s a wholly different kind of beauty.

These past two years have called things out of us that we didn’t know we had within us. Our marriage has been tested, and our family has been pushed to the edge of what I thought it could withstand, but the hardest part of all has been my relationship with myself. Woah. Unbelievably tough. I can see the beauty in it all when I can see where the threads run. The marriage thing has been hard, but the threads lead to a deeper love and appreciation for each other. The work has taken its toll, but the threads lead to camaraderie within the team and a perseverant spirit that may not have been found any other way.

“There’s a filling that happens because obedience creates space for God to inhabit a person. The heights that can be climbed with that kind of holiness inside of us are dizzying.”

Being obedient to a calling is such a perplexing thing. There’s a filling that happens because obedience creates space for God to inhabit a person. The heights that can be climbed with that kind of holiness inside of us are dizzying. But the lows, God, the lows. They’re of the choking kind, and I’ve never been doubled over with pain like this before. It’s the constant confrontation between the person I thought I was and the person I actually am. And I seem to be coming up lacking all the time.

In a job where we think we’re here to do good and bring God, light, and the gospel, what I’m finding is that there is a concurrent journey of God bringing light to the darkest recesses of my heart, to places that haven’t seen the light of day, and yet here He is with his inescapable truth, finding the deep unspoken things and bringing them to the light. It’s an excavation of the most painful kind.

But isn’t that what we secretly crave? Not just someone that can see all that darkness and hold it well, but also someone capable of helping us fix it.

In 24 months, we’ve seen war, enjoyed deep friendships, lost friends, made headway, lost ground, made mistakes, and built a life. It’s been a wild ride. It’s been hands down the hardest 24 months of my life.

But God continues to call us further in. In that, there’s something really secure about knowing that regardless of any change, even deep change within me, He is constant and will never change, even if my understanding of him does. And though my understanding of missions has been deeply challenged, I know that we’re meant to be here, doing this thing, honoring God with our lives.