Reentry

It's been exactly 3 months since I boarded a plane leaving Nairobi...

3 months since we worried about an exploding volcano that might strand us in London or Amsterdam...

3 months since I gave the Witt's and Germo's goodbye hugs and prayed it wasn't forever...

3 months since I sat in the Detroit airport with a gazillion bags hoping my family would find me because I couldn't find them...

3 months since I walked into Wendy's and asked the cashier for he best burger they'd ever made in their lives...

3 months since every little experience felt so intense and overwhelmingly new that I was constantly fighting back tears...

3 months has felt like a lifetime, and yet I can't believe there are only a few weeks of summer left to enjoy with my classmates and prepare for the next step.  I'm so grateful for the time I've had on Bethany campus to process and reenter American culture slowly.  It would have been a much bumpier ride if I'd been thrown into the 'real world' right away.  

Things I thought would be horribly difficult haven't been so bad, but other things have totally caught me off guard and made this transition rough.  I never expected to have a hard time getting back into worship, for example.  I thought it would be a huge relief to be back in the style I was used to, with a big band, expressive and emotional songs, and all the rest.  But for some reason it was really hard for me to connect with God that way and it was almost painful at times to force myself to worship God in a big group setting with all the noise.  I suppose I had become accustomed to sitting in a room by myself or with my team at the most, praying and worshiping with just a guitar or no instruments at all.  That was an adjustment I wasn't ready for.  

One thing I'm glad wasn't as I was expecting was the food!  Lots of people warned me that after they'd gone without certain foods for a long time, they built them up to this awesome thing, then when they actually tasted them again, they weren't quite as awesome as they'd remembered.  Thankfully, everything I'd missed tasted just as amazing as I remembered! haha!

When I first returned from Kenya, I dealt with some disappointment over what I could have done during internship and how things could have gone if I'd pushed myself a bit harder.  We made collages for our reentry class, and mine was definitely tipped towards the regret side just because that was the stage I was in at the time.  Since then, I've been able to let go of those regrets and thank God for all of the incredible experiences and opportunities I had in Kenya.  I think I'm swinging back towards the center of the pendulum now- not feeling romantically blinded to the hard things of internship, and not being emo and ignoring the goods things just because they were good.  

I'm taking the next steps to return to Kenya sometime in the near future; I've applied with Bethany International Ministries and I'm working on finding a place to stay in Minneapolis for a couple of months after graduation so that I can hang out at SALT and get some training on how to duplicate the program in Kenya.  I'm still really intimidated by the idea of starting up something from the ground level, but I trust that God will use the next few months to equip me with what I need.  He wouldn't have called me if I were incapable.  

If you think of it, please pray over this next transition of life, saying goodbye to my team and classmates, and leaving the comparative safety of Bethany to prepare for Kenya.  Thanks!