Weeks Six and Seven | HOME & PEACE

I don’t know if I’ll ever finish processing all that God is doing this summer.

The past two weeks have been almost like a whirlwind of emotions, but sort of in a good way.  There are a lot of things bottled up inside that I hadn’t started to deal with yet.  A lot of homesickness, really.

Apparently, being homesick can actually affect a person physically.  I did not feel well for about a week and a half because I was in such a rut of missing home, missing my family.  It’s just been these last few days that I’ve started feeling better, physically and emotionally.

I guess it’s time for a bit of real honesty: I let my homesickness take over.  That was all I focused on, all I thought about it.  There were a couple nights I found myself completely sobbing in my bed because I wanted to be home with my family so badly.  And that’s when I started to get physically sick.

But God’s love surpasses all of that; His peace transcends anything I could ever understand.  He holds my heart in His hands and dries all my tears.  He knows all that’s going on, and He understands it all.  God gets that I’ve been homesick, and He welcomes me back to His arms every time I choose to focus on that instead of Him.

He’s been pouring this truth into my life: I have an earthly family here on earth, and I have a building to live in both here and in the states.  But none of those things are really my home.  God is my home.

{ “God is our refuge and strength, and ever-present help in trouble.  Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.”  Psalm 46:1-3 }

Sometimes, the homesickness would feel like everything was crashing down.  I believed Satan’s lies that my hurt was all I could focus on, and I let it control me to the point that I became physically sick.  But there is hope.  There is always hope!  God will never leave.  He is my refuge – He wants to be my refuge.  He wants me to run to His arms and make my home in Him.  Because He is home.

The saying goes, “Home is where the heart is.”  I’ve also heard, “Home is where your family is.”  To me, home is security.  It’s trusting your surroundings and being comfortable being yourself.  It’s not necessarily being comfortable with your surroundings, but it’s where I can run both for celebrations and sadness.  For a long, long time, I attributed that to my family, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  My earthly home is with my family, wherever that may be.  But my true home is in Jesus’s arms.  With Him, I can be who I really am.  He doesn’t promise comfort or total safety, but He does promise to be my refuge and never to leave my side.  He will only take me where He can, and that may be far away from my earthly home, but He will never stop being my true home.

Phil Wickham’s Heaven Song says, “My soul is getting restless for the place where I belong.”  I think that’s where I’ve been at for the past few weeks.  I hadn’t been doing very well about spending time with Jesus and really drawing in to Him.  So my heart started to ache to be at my earthly home with my family.  But really, my soul was yearning, yearning, to spend time with Jesus, to spend time learning more about Him and drawing near to Him.

These past couple of weeks have been a huge time of learning for me.  God has been doing so freaking much in my heart, and I don’t think I’ve even started processing a lot of it much deeper than the surface.  My prayer right now is that He teaches me what it looks like for me to truly draw near to Him.  Right now, He’s teaching me a lot about having peace with the uncertainty of the future.

For a long, long time, I felt specifically called to overseas missions.  Now, He’s starting to change that – He’s broadening my view of what missions really is.  I’m not saying He’s not calling me overseas, but He’s teaching me that mission fields are everywhere.  My own backyard, my own dorm hallway is a mission field.  The people around me in the states and at school need Jesus just as much as the people here.  So maybe He is still calling me overseas, and maybe He’s calling me to my own backyard.  Either way, I’ve been called to missions – we all have.  I’m just not so sure anymore what exactly that will look like for my life, and I’m actually okay with that.  God is teaching me to be okay with the unknown, and it’s actually a really freeing feeling.  I don’t have to worry about planning tomorrow; He already has it planned, and He will reveal it all in His timing.

Home.  Peace in the unknown.  God is doing a ton, y’all.  A TON.  I wish I could tell you all about it, but I honestly don’t know if I understand it all yet.  For now, I can’t wait to see what the next five weeks hold here and then what next semester and year hold back at school.  

God is good, guys!  He’s doing amazing things here!