Hallelujah

I seem to be in an interesting spot these days as we prepare for a year of home assignment in the States.  I recently read a blog I had written as we were going to be returning back from the States to be long term missionaries.  You may wonder what missionaries think or feel or react when they are preparing for home assignment or furlough.  It’s an interesting place to be and by interesting I mean overwhelming and strange and foreign and exciting and scary all wrapped in to one.  It’s hard to pin point one feeling or reaction or thought because there are just too many.  I’m trying to write this blog to make sense and put in to words what is in my mind and my heart.

The honest truth is that it has taken quite a while to get used to the idea of going back to the States for a year.  We try as missionaries so hard to immerse ourselves in our country of service by learning the language, raising our kids, doing ministry together, learning culture, trying to be accepted and now we go back to our passport country, a place that should feel like home, but seems to be more of distant memory of familiar, things that were comfortable but now feel foreign and overwhelming.

I was listening to a song today, because, well it seems God always seems to touch my heart through melodies and words that seem to express the things my own words can’t.  SO, I’m listening to a song today from when I was younger.  It reminded me how easy it was then to say Hallelujah and to take leaps of faith, giant leaps of faith without thinking.  Then, I always wondered why those who were wiser than me struggled so much with these leaps.  They didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me.  But now, NOW, thinking of those leaps scares me to death sometimes.  It’s harder now.  Maybe it is the life experience from then to now.  Knowing I’m not invincible, knowing that death happens, unfair things happen to good people, I’ve seen it and experienced it.  So, when we say Hallelujah, to me it means that whatever is in front of us, whether we know what it is or not, we will say Hallelujah.  That is SO hard.  We don’t know what tomorrow holds, or a week from now or next year.  As I prepare to step in to the overwhelming unfamiliar, I ask God to help me to say Hallelujah, no matter what the future holds.  I’m learning, I’m trying to choose Christ over the fear.

In good Kim fashion I am posting the song that started this whole thought process.