Home and left Alone. . . with our thoughts

With a rather abrupt but sensible decision we have returned home from our "journey for peace." We left Asia about two weeks ago and we have since been running about in classic busy-life fashion looking for work and seeing family and friends and getting organized but it has not been an altogether harsh come back. Almost always after trips like these you come to expect a certain degree of reverse culture shock. Sometimes it takes a week and other times it can take a month to get used to your new-old climate, to get re-acclimated with the pace, the people, the food, the culture, the politics-the life that it just so happens was not so far removed. Well this time around, probably not much unlike other times around, we find an integral part of this experience of returning home to be about asking questions. Questions like: what now? what purpose is/was there? and what does the future hold? all are seemingly relevant whether connected to our recent chapter or not. The Questions are important. It is all part of the process of 'stumbling towards the light together.' Our experiences were too incredibly rich to list and the lessons that we have gathered will probably take years to fully extrapolate and surely we would not have it any other way. We encountered a people within the Asian context so wholly oriented towards grace and hospitality that I feel this too will take years to grasp in all of its theological gravity. Beautiful people; so ransoming your heart that I have learnt to explain their stories in exactly that tense: when you go abroad to a place like Sri Lanka, Peru, South Africa or Uganda you will certainly leave a fragment of your heart in that place with those people and it is right that it should be this way. Because as one of our great forefathers, Henri Nouwen, urges, our only hope is to open the doors of our hearts and allow others in.

Ultimately we worked between two non-profit organizations. The one-a church so highly involved in social development and so intimately sympathetic to the subversive message of the Gospel that the shame of the widow and the cold felt by the orphan is made real. The second-a youth movement for peace and reconciliation where young children who have grown up knowing war and carnage and vengeance, stopped for a moment and collectively (both sides of the ethnic divide) agreed that there futures would no longer be determined by hatred and such things. In short, it was a hopeful message all around. We can testify that you should not be dismayed for as surely as power is being used in all places right now to promulgate violence there is a more powerful and more transcendent power that is being used to spread true messages of hope. It is alive and well . . .in the love advocate from northern africa, in the peace advocate from Sri Lanka, in the Gospel monger from South Korea, and in the Christian revolutionary from South America. Well, our chapter was very much to do with all of this, we were challenged and pushed and yet we grew closer still-closer to one another and our God in ways that we definitely could not imagine. We thought that we might be in Sri Lanka for a longer time but as it turns out God had different plans from our own, HIS were/are right of course. But it was very hard to except that notion when we had already been so determined in explaining to our supporters that we would be gone for a year on our journey. We spoke at length about what God had meant to do for our lives in that decisive moment and we came away with several things.

If there was one thing we had gathered during our deliberation about a rather abrupt exit it was this: it was premature for us to tell people that we would be gone a year altogether. We found that that timeline had become wholly artificial because in telling people this was our goal it was as if to say, "we have determined the time necessary for us to experience whatever it is that God has in store for us" rather than committing to a posture that says, "we are going to see what God has in store for us." What an amazing banner right? What if that was posted ahead of all of our decisions and deliberations in life from the extraordinary to the completely mundane? We have to wonder.