I am home in Oregon for the present. It has been a fast ride of meeting with people daily and trying to capture for them in little five minute conversations everything that has happened in the past year and a half. I might have a better time trying to fit the entire rotating cast of Walking Dead into a Ford Fiesta.
God has taken me to some magnificent looking places. He has allowed me to sit with some incredible people. He has brought me into contact with brokenness and suffering as well as hope and change. I couldn’t even recount all of them if I tried, but in many ways they have left their indelible sharpie stains on me.
I am not exactly the same person I was when I left, and I blame Jesus. He knew that bringing me here to Nicaragua would shake me up; that it would tear me away from safety and reorganize my life completely in tender fury.
Now I am totally ruined for the american dream. I will never be able to settle any more for whatever weird fantasies I had of a meek and mild life lived in quiet suburban tranquility. I don’t even know if I can go to the movies anymore.
Because as I was slowly weened off of my facebook addiction and phantom texts, I realized how much time God had given me for real, living people. Now I kind of want to spend the rest of my life letting Jesus love them through me. I want to show people the path that I found and leave them at the trailhead to show the next traveler. It’s the purpose of my life, wherever I go.
If we sit across the table over coffee, and you ask my how my trip went, I might stare off blankly into space like some war survivor. There is no real way to tell you in words until you come visit me.
Bilbo: Can you promise that I will come back?
Gandalf: No. And if you do… you will not be the same.
United Pursuit- Never Going Back
