Those Times

It is a mystery to me that the same times I need to be productive are the times I most need to write out my thoughts...writing usually wins.

I have heard some people searching for a "returning" blog post, but the words are completely lost in my head. I am not even sure how to match words to my feelings, my longings, and my heart. Honestly, it is hard sometimes to find my heart, it just seems like it is content to be hanging out in a distant place with familiar faces. It has been a struggle for me to be back. I absolutely love my school and the friends I have made here, but sometimes I find myself looking around and thinking "so what?" other times I simply think "I am not made for this". It is a great place to be and I am extremely blessed but the something that felt so right in Rwanda feels so out of place here. It is hard to explain, but it is an emptiness, a distance that creeps its way in and slowly humbles me.

I can't even count the number of times I have asked myself or my roommate "what am I doing with my life?" Not just in reference to graduate school, or careers but what am I doing to further my walk with God and serving His people. I feel guilty at how I can come back after seeing and loving those children to finding myself right back into the busy, competitive, selfish and prideful routines of pre-Rwanda. It is terrifyingly easy, how I can be distracted by completely meaningless nonsense that Satan uses against me.

As I read and study about families, their conflicts, their systems, or child development, the normal and the abnormal, I find myself aching with the question "so what?" "what about the orphans?" nothing seems the same, yet everything just comes naturally, as if I am on auto pilot. I have trained myself well...to be American. To be desensitized to the hurting, dying, suffering people of this world and to be consumed by consumerism and wanting. Somewhere my heart and my actions aren't in sync and I find myself drowning in questions daily. What do I make of this? How do I use this?

See what I mean about the questions. I don't even have answers for them now. I just now there is much more to this world than making A's, then social clubs, then intramural games, then drama in relationships, then who is wearing what and where they got it. When will I really get it though? I do feel like I am scratching the surface, but I still have so far to go. I need to be humbled, I need the Lord to dig deep within me and prune me.

It won't be easy, but nothing else will do.