I've been home now for 6 weeks as of tomorrow, and I leave for Africa again in 5 days. It's been a rollercoaster of emotions, busy as expected, and it's passed so quickly, also as expected.
What I wasn't prepared for, though, was how it felt coming home. Don't get me wrong, I expected for it to be different and weird, but as a quote from the brilliant movie The Giver says, "Knowing what something is is not the same as knowing how something feels." Culture shock comes in various forms, and for me, it wasn't like the people who wrote blogs I'd read before, where they'd get home and just cry over the amount of stuff they had, ripping their clothes out of their closets in despair. For me, it was a thousand little things that added up to make me feel overwhelmed. The doorknobs are different, and a lot lower. The eggs are white. The ceilings are lower. The milk cartons are huge. The light switches are different. We drive on the other side of the road. The season is the opposite.
I could go on, but you get the point. When the everyday, ordinary things are constantly catching you off-guard, it's exhausting. I'll admit, the morning after I came back, I laid in my bed awake, waited for my family to leave for church so I wouldn't have to talk, then continued to lay there after they had left, and just cried. I cried because I was alone for the first time in 10 months (living with 7 other people doesn't allow for much alone time), but I didn't really want to see anyone. I wanted to be back in Africa. I wanted my life here to feel normal again. I despaired that I had to wait 6 weeks to go back.
Here's the best way I can think of to describe coming back after 10 months in a foreign country. In South Africa, they do this thing called load shedding. Load shedding is when the city shuts off the power in various sections of the city for varying lengths of time, because their power grid cannot handle having the whole city "on" at once. You never really know when load shedding is going to hit, or how long it will last. Once, the power was off for a couple of days. At that point, we had forgotten which lights were on in our house at the time that the power went out. So when the power came back on, random lights in various rooms of our house came on. The funny thing about it is, those lights being on once fit exactly where we were and what we were doing. But after being gone from our house and after we had moved on to doing different things in different rooms, those lights being on didn't fit our situation anymore.
Coming back from Africa, it feels like I am such a different person now, that my life here just doesn't fit who I am now. In a way, it's true. But I have realized that I can and should utilize the tools and knowledge I learned there, and apply it to my life here.
I had to realize that I had spent the last year seeing things most people here have never seen before, and learning things no one here has ever thought about before. I have gained an urgency for the Gospel that most people here have never experienced before. And as much as I wanted to just run back to Africa, I couldn't. Partially because I didn't have a plane ticket (heehee), but also because I know that someone has to be the voice that calls people here to awake. If a missionary's job is to equip and empower a nation to reach their own people, then that's what I'm called to do here, in my own country. If God uses me to show just one person how they can be involved in missions wherever they are, it will be worth it.
