My trip to DC was good but it really shook me. I had a good 17 or so hours to process all the events and conversations that had been crammed into a week and I was finding myself unhinged.
I've lived and travelled so many places and I haven't lived in the same house for more than 2 years, nor the same city for more than 4 since I was 17. For me I've gotten used to change and lots of it. I'm no stranger to returning someplace where I used to live and realizing how different everything is. I've had the epiphany that nothing stays the same, everything changes and the thing that you once longed for is no more except in your memories.
However, despite knowing this, I wasn't prepared for the shock to my system in reflecting on my week in DC. I don't know if it was because I was busy with work and didn't even count down to my trip until the day before I left or if it was trying to cram so many things into one week and catch up with so many people, but I hadn't prepped or reminded myself to be ready to acknowledge how different things are in a very transient DC that has continued to change while I've been gone.
The morning I left I took a walk to the store located on a main and highly trafficked street. I'd done it many times before with not a care in the world at night and by myself but I found myself praying for my safety-in broad daylight amidst many pedestrians and cars!!
Somewhere between leaving my current home to return there and leaving there to return to my current home I found myself vividly aware of 1½ years of change and having the oh-so-familiar feeling that yet another place I’d once called home is home no longer. While I was happy and content to return to my life here, I couldn’t shake a sense of loss and sadness over the reminder that as friends I've made in my time here prepare to leave and get excited about returning home, I don't have that feeling of connection to, familiarity with or longing for any place I call home and there’s always a part of me, wherever I go, that feels like I don’t really belong and am an stranger even in my own country.
How thankful and happy am I that in the midst of my super-sensitive and jet-lagged reflection, I was quickly reminded that I can take comfort in the truths that yes, with everything on this earth, including me, change is a certainty, but I have a relationship with someone who will never change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever and my home and foundation can be established only in Him. What peace and joy I’ve found in knowing that this strong sense that there is nowhere on the planet that feels like home to me anymore should and can bring me eager anticipation and rejoicing in the hope and truth that I personally know Him who loves me and always does what is good, right and best for me and that means being a foreigner everywhere because my real home is not behind, but ahead!
Here's a quote I read from William Carey that I found encouraging. Though I have been provided for immensely in terms of friendship and fellowship, I think the exhortation to find my comfort in the One remains the same:
“I am in a strange land, alone, no Christian friend, a large family and nothing to supply their wants. But now all my friends are but one, I rejoice, however, that he is all-sufficient and can supply all my wants, spiritual and temporal.”
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