Realization (Inevitably the first of many).

My heart is darn near broken tonight as I sit down to write.  Blaise and I are officially in the process of making our semi-permanent move to the camper this week while I’m on Spring Break.  We’ve been talking about this timing for the last few weeks…pretty much since we decided to rent versus sell.  This is the perfect time because we’re both off work for the whole week, the weather is great, and we know it’s now or forever stay with our roots firmly planted in Indiana.

It isn’t that I mind being at the camper, in fact, we have been out there all day hanging pictures, painting (it is a small space, but the painting is endless), and generally enjoying ourselves.  The camper is really starting to feel like home, and we even had a cook-out this evening with my aunt and uncle…a preview of the entire warm season spent out there on their property.  It was an excellent day!

The issue was when we returned home (I’m going to use that term for as long as I can).  Where pictures used to hang, walls are void.  Where my books used to sit, shelves are empty.  Where I once found comfort, I now feel a little bit empty.  As I sit in my office, I am surrounded by pictures from my previous three trips into Sudan–on my desk, on my walls, on my shelves, and even on my computer desktop.  The smiling, and even sometime solemn, faces remind me of the land and the people I love so much and the reason why I am willing to leave all of this (yes, I know, it is truly to serve our amazing God no matter where He leads…but for now, this is my tangible reminder).

Tonight, however, I realized a curious thing.  As I glanced around at the empty spaces, spaces that were only hours before filled with parts of my life and my heart, I realized that the people whom we are leaving all of this for will never ever even begin to understand the magnitude of what we will have left behind to get to them, to live with them, and to serve them.  It’s really never crossed my mind before, and perhaps only because I hadn’t yet sacrificed beyond the idea of going; however, as my house empties of the memories we’ve collected and filled it with, I am starting to feel the magnitude of the sacrifice.

For five years, we have called this house our home.  We have gone through some tremendous life-changing experiences within these four walls, and I still remember with absolute clarity the very first night that we brought a truckload of stuff to move here.  It was the most exciting night I can remember…our first night in our first house!

Beyond the house, though, are our families.  We have four nieces, and in just a few more months we will be welcoming a nephew into the world, as well.  He may not even know us…or at least not remember us, really, because he’ll probably still be so small when we leave.  We have aging grandparents, too, and I remember how painful it was last summer to lose both of my surviving great-grandparents only a few weeks into my time in Uganda, and not be able to get home to grieve with the family.  It was a very odd experience coming home three months later and only then grieving for real for the first time.  And the list goes on.

We will have all of that pain that accompanies goodbyes fresh in our hearts when we land in East Africa and begin forging relationships.  But they won’t know what we have left behind to get to them.  They won’t know the anguish that our parents experience even now at the thought of us leaving.  They won’t understand how hard it was to turn the keys of our first house together over to strangers.  They won’t know our journey and our hurt.  And it isn’t because they haven’t experienced loss or felt the pain of goodbyes–South Sudan is a land wrought with pain and goodbyes.  It’s that this life here and that life there will be so far apart–the chasm too great to bridge–that our hearts will pour onto them without us ever revealing the sacrifices we’ve made to be there and love them.

And that’s okay, really, because that’s what God wants.  It’s not about us.  Not now.  Not when we get there.  It’s just that tonight the pain is fresh, the first step of leaving eminent, and the realization so new.  This is what it means to be a missionary, and for me, already knowing that our entire life here will never really be understood there is a novel feeling.