It's hard to say exactly what goes through your mind when returning from such a life-changing adventure. It's also hard to adjust to normal life, to relate to people and to really continue living out the change that happened deep beneath your skin, in the depths of your soul. Just as I left everything I knew to go to YWAM, I also left everything I had come to know when returning from YWAM. There were aches in my heart that could never be replaced. Bitterness had many opportunities to sink in to my heart, and I let it. I jumped right in to work when I got home (literally three days after I returned), and I continued to work until February. During those months, I did a lot of soul searching. I processed, thought over, and studied my heart and my thoughts. What was I feeling? I didn't know, so I held it all in until, finally, I broke down in late January after a time of depression and let it all out. I admitted that I felt like I had no purpose, that I was just drifting through my meaningless life. Life… My life… what was I doing with it?
It takes time to get back into the swing of normal life, to process your feelings and emotions, to become okay with yourself again. You go though withdrawals and you go through wondrous times of reminiscing and finally you come to terms with your new reality. It also takes time to become adjusted to full time life and part time missions. After being a missionary full time for 3-6 months you develop this mind set (some people do and some don't) of "If I'm not doing mission work God isn't pleased with me." I was one of the "do" people. I thought God would be disappointed in me because I wasn't doing works when I got home. Now, not to say you shouldn't evangelize at all but I began to develop the mind set that if I didn't, God wouldn't love me as much. Which is a complete lie. Jesus loves the full time missionary just as much as He loves the full time mom or the full time business person, but my mind went back to thinking I could earn God's love. Old habits I guess. But as time went on I began to learn more and more about grace.
True grace, the grace that saved me says, "There is nothing you can do to earn my love, I just give it to you because I'm good and because it's who I am." If there was nothing you could do to gain complete righteousness before Christ, would there not be a negative continuum of nothing to be done after his death? Nothing, except to just accept Him and let Him make you worthy and let Him make you whole. Christ's death and resurrection was final. There was nothing anyone could do to gain God's approval, to make themselves Holy and blameless… NOTHING, so Jesus fixed that problem eternally. All I had to do was accept Him, just accept Him… and I had forgotten, but that moment when I remembered, was the most freeing moment I had had in a long time.
It takes time to get back into the swing of normal life, to process your feelings and emotions, to become okay with yourself again. You go though withdrawals and you go through wondrous times of reminiscing and finally you come to terms with your new reality. It also takes time to become adjusted to full time life and part time missions. After being a missionary full time for 3-6 months you develop this mind set (some people do and some don't) of "If I'm not doing mission work God isn't pleased with me." I was one of the "do" people. I thought God would be disappointed in me because I wasn't doing works when I got home. Now, not to say you shouldn't evangelize at all but I began to develop the mind set that if I didn't, God wouldn't love me as much. Which is a complete lie. Jesus loves the full time missionary just as much as He loves the full time mom or the full time business person, but my mind went back to thinking I could earn God's love. Old habits I guess. But as time went on I began to learn more and more about grace.
True grace, the grace that saved me says, "There is nothing you can do to earn my love, I just give it to you because I'm good and because it's who I am." If there was nothing you could do to gain complete righteousness before Christ, would there not be a negative continuum of nothing to be done after his death? Nothing, except to just accept Him and let Him make you worthy and let Him make you whole. Christ's death and resurrection was final. There was nothing anyone could do to gain God's approval, to make themselves Holy and blameless… NOTHING, so Jesus fixed that problem eternally. All I had to do was accept Him, just accept Him… and I had forgotten, but that moment when I remembered, was the most freeing moment I had had in a long time.
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