Home sick

We left Dulles at around 4 a.m.

That is, July 3.

Home from a gloriously exhausting trip. The team and I had to ride for an hour or so back to Fredericksburg, and many ended up snoozing.

I did plenty of that in contorted positions all over Kori mostly on the flights from Lima to San Salvador and from there to DC. So I was good on that front.

Instead I flipped through old pictures on my iPhone. Things like pictures Katie took of me whilst ill during exam week and Noelle helping "fix" Katie's bed as I tried to study despite myself. Others like going skating with Emily or a sweet "I love you, babe" note Luke wrote to Steph on their new refrigerator that I stole a shot of for my memory. There are a few pictures of Deirdre playing airplane with Peterso while Dina laughs on. A favorite of mine is mom cracking up with Dad at IHop because he just introduced her to the "smack talk" application. (It's exactly what it sounds like-- just picture a dog mocking your every word). I like the one of Claire making Amadeus wear the scary cat mask. I have some great shots of my coworkers and of various children.

There are 700 in total.

Because, you see, I like this life.

Staci sat beside me on the bus trip and, knowing that I still had another 36 hours or so before I got to be back home, she asked, "are you just trying to make yourself homesick?"

I'm fairly certain it was a nice way of asking me to turn the friggin' bright screen light off and go to sleep already. But my response was, "I'm trying to make myself not Peru sick." The people and places and memories in the pictures were my way of convincing myself that I wanted it all back. I love home.

Both of them.

And they were worth getting back to. I have 100 more pictures on my iPhone since returning to speak to that sentiment. After all, Noelle came for a visit and I had a great camp to get to and HELLO?! Truett is coming! A year of school is inevitably upon me, which means graduation will be approximately tomorrow and thus the pressure mounts to find an acceptable answer to the "what will you do after you graduate?" question (Is it me, or is there more and more emphasis on the "will," as in "what will you do," as the real world nears?). There are loans to pay off, people. Turns out dreams cost.

But.

They (you're familiar?) assure me it costs more not to. I bet they had excellent scholarships and aced their hyper-AP courses (or whatever the highest rank of classes are these days).

All of this is to say that I got home to Virginia and then went on home to Arkansas and I accept, fake bitterness aside, the responsibility involved in honoring the commitments I've made to academia. I do my best not to take for granted a family that supports me, even loves to have me home, while I do.

(as an aside: I used to always watch those trauma shows that wrapped the story up in a bow at the end with the accident victim talking about how they have a totally new appreciation for life and won't take another day for granted and began to wonder why I needed to wait for a car crash to be grateful but I guess it's true that you can't fully appreciate what you have in life until a trauma threatens to take it away. I'll do my best given my trauma-free life, I suppose. But I'm often missing the mark on expressing appreciation).

When I'm away from home (either of them), there is plenty to be sick for. Mom's TLC, Dad's stupid (albeit identical to mine) humor, the company of my siblings (all of them) or Noelle's completely different but similarly quirky family, my apartments hilarities, the glorious day-to-day college living, and my church home there.

Still, when I am home (either of them), there is little to be sick for.

Get it? There is a dilemma for me in there somewhere. It's this daily, average life where little upsets me except for that which upsets me. So limited and me. And so many days that pass when I'm hardly aware just how many days are passing that are so limited and me. I don't do much to change it and, given my commitment to paying off my school and living independently, there is a lot of me doing what I have to do coming up in the near future.

Beyond then, though, I'm going to be putting a lot of thought towards where my commitments are made and how much of that will be about myself again. The truth is that it is me making my life about myself and only me that can make it any different. Well, me and the One who gives the motivation to make it any different in the first place.

I went to Peru in His name. But my life at home is in His name, too. Limited and me is not what God's about. I can proclaim His name to Peruvians all I want. For fun, I can do it at home, too. But plenty of people do plenty of different things for fun.

Drinking is the drunkards thing. Sex is the harlots thing. Being gay is the homosexuals' thing. Partying is the college students' thing. Studying is the "serious" students thing. Proclaiming Jesus and the sin of the world is the Christians' thing (if we can even say that's fun for us, because, if you're like me when I'm being honest with myself, it's pretty uncomfortable to up and start a conversation about faith, which makes me feel pretty lame).

But a good deal of the aforementioned people believe we sit around and think about or talk about their sin for fun and then make Jesus and our extreme devotion to him the explained reason for our safety, wealth and comfort.

In many ways it is absolutely true that, in an eternal sense, Jesus provides for us those three things. Isn't that the reason to abandon these things in a temporary sense? In order to love people for fun rather than condemn. Wouldn't that be real devotion to Jesus?

For me it comes down to the fact that I can preach the name of Jesus in a foreign country all summer long. But if my home life, the day to day slip away, preaches "limited" and "me"-- even if it reads "safe, rich, and comfortable"-- I am hardly preaching Jesus himself.

And to find that out for myself, about myself makes me sick.

I am home sick.

I am sick for the opportunities that seemed to come much freer and abundantly in a country with a poverty level of 34%. In a country with a history of government corruption that meant no one or their way of life was safe. In a country where the people still live with the consequences of that mindset. Where beggars really can't just "go get a job." They just really aren't there.

I'm sick over the fact that there were too many poor street vendors to buy from, but that when I did I haggled the price down "because you can." Sick that I was a part of a group that treated them like a nuisance, when I was there to treat them with hope. Sick that I really believe I saw a trafficked girl and wouldn't know what to do to help her mostly because I never come across such a brutal reality at home.

And I am committing myself to pray for ways to commit myself more in that direction next go 'round. With a little less home and a little more sick.

Not because it's the right thing to do or to get all high and mighty and in peoples face about complacency but because God got all high and mighty and in my face about complacency. Which is His place and certainly not mine. Not to prove myself better than anyone else, but to prove Jesus better with the life that I have in whatever home He'll give me.

By the by, when I say God got all up in my face, I should clarify that I do not mean in the angry, cocky way you might expect of, say, a person like me. He went the nicer route you might expect of a God who gave His Son on a cross to die for us-- He got up in my face with the gentle, humble (sometimes energetic!) faces of these people: