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