Brave

Most people would think that moving to Africa was the scary part. The big leap.

But it wasn't. It was the most natural thing in the world. Moving back to America.
This is the scariest thing I've done in a long time.

Here the fears are loud.

Will God provide?
Will I become selfish?
How will I not let God get drowned out by all the noise?

Will I love who I am when someone is not calling me “Mama.”

How to straddle these two worlds with any of me left in between. 

Over there God is in all the crevices of my day.

I'm spilling out all the time. No time to think about me or be ungrateful. Just a constant stream of thinking about others.

It really is true that when you lose your life, you find it. 

You lose yourself in love, you lose yourself in giving, in serving, and you gain a whole life built on connectedness and the pleasure of feeling God move in you and through you.

And yet God is with me here too, but why so much harder to feel it?

To me, it doesn't seem crazy to convince people to move to Africa to serve the poor and the abused. To let emptying yourself out, radically change you.

To me it seems crazy to build a life here in America. I don't know how to do it.

And yet, who are we without our giving? 
Who are we when the spinning stops?

Will we like ourselves enough when Father is asking us to just be? To just be His.

It doesn't feel right to me yet. But I know this is the next painful step in growing.

How to know who we are outside our function. Outside the thing which has defined us for so long.

Over there I live in a constant thrum of being needed.

Of being necessary. Of being vital. It's strange to be outside the urgency. Is there some happy balance between loving others and also loving myself?

Especially when I don't feel so important now.

How to find new ways to connect. New ways to worship.
New ways to hold gratefulness in my hands for what is here. 

I'm like an addict. I miss it so much.

But there's no doubt to me that God is in this. That there is a new lesson for me to learn here, outside the tyranny of the urgent, outside that need to be needed.

God is not out there somewhere. He is here, now. In this moment.

Whether on these dazzled streets of California, or on that red earth I still call home.

Life is where He is, so life can be anywhere.

We just have to stop and feel it. Breathe deep, and let the fears go.

I'm always the impatient one. Always want to know the right answers and the right way to do something. Always want to have it all figured out. But I'm starting to feel normal again. Slowly. Too slowly for my taste.

But trust is not built on knowing. Trust is built in the grey. In the in-between.
When all the while He is coming towards us, but we just can't see it yet. 

When He's asking us to have compassion not just for the hurting ones, but also for ourselves.

Can we be brave enough to take that leap, whatever it might mean for us?

To let ourselves be scared again. 

We judge ourselves by other people's capacities all the time.

But what is brave for me?

What is brave for you?