Homesickness

“Our Father will refresh us with many pleasant inns on the journey, but he would not encourage us to mistake them for home.”
                                                          C.S. Lewis

I’ve been feeling homesick lately. It always seems to happen around this time of year. You’d think that the holidays would be the most difficult time to be away from home, but I’ve found that it’s the months following Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s that hit me hardest.

This homesickness is something that I have yet to fully understand, although I feel like God has recently given me some insight on the matter.

It’s a strange thing, because the feeling of homesickness doesn't go away when I’m “at home” in Ohio. There’s still always something missing. But what is it?

In Ohio I’ve got a big, amazing family, great friends, an awesome church, history, the privilege of enjoying four distinctly beautiful seasons, so many comforts, so many opportunities. Why shouldn’t I feel at home there?

Here in Costa Rica I really have no reason to feel so homesick either. I have been blessed to be able to meet and get to know so many wonderful people, many of whom have come to feel like family. I have an amazing boyfriend. I daily get to see the awesome works of God’s creation in ways that I would never see in Ohio. God’s allowed me to form a very small part of an effective ministry. Why shouldn’t I feel perfectly at home here?

Would anyone like to tell me?

Some might call it discontentment. Or maybe it’s just a “missionary problem”. Sometimes I feel like I’m just flat out crazy. Or maybe I’m not so crazy. Maybe this feeling is something normal, something people have been feeling for thousands of years.

"Each one of these people of faith died not yet having in hand what was promised, but still believing. How did they do it? They saw if way off in the distance, waved their greeting, and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home. If they were homesick for the old country, they could have gone back any time they wanted. But they were after a far better country than that--heaven country. You can see why God is so proud of them, and has a city waiting for them."

                                                   Hebrews 11:13-16 MSG

Could this be something we’re all born with? Maybe whether we realize it or not, there’s something deeply ingrained in our souls that tells us there’s something more, something so much better than this.

Naturally we’re all looking for that unknown thing. We look for it in money, possessions, and power. We think we’ll find it when we finally have our “other half”. We search in seemingly good and fulfilling things like having a successful ministry, being active members in a good church, and surrounding ourselves with wholesome things and people. Well, let me be the first to tell you that it’s in none of those things. 

“They desire a better country…a heavenly one.”

I've come to the conclusion that this homesickness will be sticking around for a while (at least I hope it will!), and honestly I’m okay with that. But I know that someday it will end. Someday I’ll no longer be an exile in a strange land, but a permanent resident of that heavenly country. Someday I’ll be home. I long for that day, but if God still has me here then it must be for a good reason, and I fully intend to make the best of every moment that He allows me to walk this foreign land.

God Doesn't Call the Equipped, He Equips the Called

After spending six great weeks at home I'm so glad to have been back in Costa Rica for the last month.

Sunday marked the beginning of a new "school year" for Vida220. We received 12 new students: 4 from northern Ohio, 2 from Mexico, and 6 from here in Costa Rica, 3 of which are from the indigenous reserve in Talamanca. It's a huge blessing to have such a diverse group of four very distinct cultures come together with the same goal: to walk in a more intimate relationship with God.

I was reminded recently of a phrase the I heard years ago: God doesn't call the equipped, He equips the called. That's actually a phrase that I am quite often reminded of because of the fact that I frequently feel completely unequipped to do the things that God calls me to do. So I sat down a few days ago to search for stories from the Bible that demonstrate the truth of this phrase and I came up with a good list of them, which is by no means, extensive.

Moses—A Hebrew boy born in Egypt during a time of great oppression against the Hebrew people. According to Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, Moses should’ve been thrown into the Nile River moments after being born. But God had a different plan. Moses was hidden for the first three months of his life, and then when he could no longer be hidden he was set afloat in a basket on the river to meet his fate. Who finds him and picks him up? Pharaoh’s daughter, of all people. Now, you would probably think that the daughter of the very man who commanded that the lives of all Hebrew baby boys be taken at birth would be the first to follow that command. But she doesn’t. Instead, she sends Moses back to his own mother (whether or not she was aware of the fact that she’d sent him back to his birth-mother we don’t know) to be nursed until he can go and live with Pharaoh’s daughter, becoming her son…Pharaoh’s grandson. Years down the road Moses is watching his people, the Hebrews, suffer as slaves to Pharaoh and out of anger he murders an Egyptian (little did he know, God would later use him give us the commandment “Do not murder”). So Moses runs away and hides, and God soon appears to him, speaking from the burning bush. God asks Moses to go back to Egypt, the place he ran from, to lead the Hebrews out of slavery. What was Moses’ response? “Who am I to go back to these people? They’ll never listen to me. I can’t speak well. Please, send someone else.” But God doesn’t let him off the hook. So Moses goes and with the help of his brother, Aaron, he confronts Pharaoh. Through Moses, God performs many miracles and signs. He sends ten terrible plagues, showing His great power and authority over all of creation. Pharaoh finally lets God’s people go, but not without putting up a fight and in the process loses his entire army in the Red Sea which God’s people crossed through on dry land, with the sea forming walls on both sides of them. All the while they’re being led by Moses, this man who should’ve been killed in the first hours of his life. His story goes on from there as he leads the Israelites in the desert. He gives us many great examples of leadership, though he was far from perfect. His story is just one of many stories which show us how God equips the people He calls.

Joseph—A young boy, sold by his brothers, who has what we might call “bad luck”. But everything that happened to him had to happen so that one day he would be responsible for saving the lives of thousands of people during a famine.

Ruth—A widow who ends up being mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus Christ.

David—A simple, shepherd boy turned into a mighty king.

Esther—A Jewish woman living under exile in Persia, who eventually becomes the wife of the Persian king. She then saves the entire Jewish race from being destroyed by taking some very risky actions.

Jonah—A rebellious prophet who took a life-saving message to a people at the point of being destroyed.

Mary—A simple girl who would become the mother of the Son of God. Can you imagine the pressure she must have felt when the angel Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end,”?

The disciples—They were fishermen, tax-collectors, some of them were probably hated by a lot of people. But Jesus called them to leave everything, follow him, and learn from him. All along the way we see him equipping them to go out and fulfill the calling to go and make disciples, to teach them, baptize them, and do even greater things than Jesus himself had done.

Paul—A man who for years hated and persecuted Christians. But then Jesus got a hold of his life and he became quite possibly the greatest example of a life fully surrendered to Christ, willing to make any sacrifice to see the Kingdom of God furthered and expanded.

I can almost guarantee you that none of these men and women felt equipped to do what they knew God was calling them to do. But God uses them in mighty ways despite their lack of knowledge, strength, power, position, number of friends, eloquence, even despite their lack of willingness. These are just  a few examples of people who never planned to change history, who never imagined that their stories would be written in a book that millions of people read each day, even now, thousands of years later.

As we look at these stories written thousands of years ago it might be easy to think that God used to do that kind of thing, but He would never do that with me. The truth however, is that the God we serve today is the exact same God as these people served, and He’s still surprising normal, simple people with great callings, far beyond their human abilities or knowledge. But God always has and always will equip the people that He calls. 

Who's doing the writing here?

I had a crazy idea a few weeks ago: some day I want to write an autobiography. Maybe once I'm old and have grand-kids I'll make that a project. It seems to me that God has blessed me with a fairly abnormal life, and although many days life has not been easy I have decided that I wouldn't change a single thing about it.

You see, all along God has been writing my story, and it's only just beginning! As He closes each chapter and begins a new one I grow, I get to know the Author's heart and mind a little more, I fall a little more in love with Him with each new page, and He makes me want to keep reading and living out this story to see what comes next.

Now, I can also clearly identify times in my life when I was the one controlling the pen (figuratively speaking of course) and attempting to write my own story. Those pages are a mess and I quickly learned that I am not nearly as good of an author as God is.

I think sometimes we get angry at God, at least I know I do, for writing something in our stories that we don't like. But here's the thing; we can't see the whole story like He can. We live on one page of the book at a time. Sure, we have memories of past pages and chapters and at times we may attempt to live those times out again but in reality that's not possible. And unlike reading a book made of paper and ink we don't have the privilege (though a debatable one) of skipping ahead a few pages or chapters, or sometimes to the very end, to see how everything works out. We have hopes and dreams for the future but no way of really seeing it. Sometimes God will give us a little clue, or even a peak at what is coming, but He also asks us to trust in Him and tells us, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,...For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9

That's pretty reassuring and exciting for me! I love a good book and for some reason that I don't understand the Author of the #1 Best Selling Book in all history (which is a fact by the way) has chosen me to be a character in His continuing story. Like I mentioned earlier, one day I stopped trying to write my own story and handed the pen and paper over to Someone who has the biggest imagination, the most power, and the most beautiful handwriting and way with words. The most exciting part of all of this is that He wants to be the author of all of our stories, though He won't ever force us into doing something, He gives us that choice. I for one though am proud to wear His signature as the Author of my story.

I was reading the last chapters of a book called A Grace Disguised by Jerry Sittser, when the idea to some day write an autobiography came to me. The book talks about "how the soul grows through loss" and it put to words so many things that I had been unable to express, if even to myself, since my mom's death nine years ago. In this book the author describes what he has gone through and learned since a car accident took the lives of his mother, wife, and daughter. I had actually taken a break from reading and was writing in my journal when the majority of what I've just written came to me. When I finished writing I decided that I was going to finish the last chapter or two of the book, and I'll finish with what Jerry Sittser says at the end of the epilogue:

"But I have this sense that the story God has begun to write He will finish. That story will be good. The accident...was and remains a very bad chapter. But the whole of my life appears to be a very good book."