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The day we evacuated Tonj 3.5 years ago, we both felt strongly that we would be back there soon. We came back to the States and told everyone that we hoped to go back, and truthfully, we had hoped to go back within the year. We decided that we would live ready. We had to buy my car, but we decided not to make any other financial commitments, take out lengthy contracts (like phones, etc), or do anything else that might otherwise tie us down here in the States. We wanted to live light and ready for the day we were able to go back, so we felt no need to settle in.
And that decision has negatively impacted our lives.
As believers, we should live ready. We should never hang onto our things (houses, cars, jobs, even family) so tightly that we refuse to give them up in favor of going to the mission field or otherwise following the Lord. It’s hard to live like that–ready to give it all up–but that’s what Jesus commands us to do. Blaise and I thought that we were being obedient by living untethered and ready, but in fact, we had been living uncommitted, as well.
Not fully here and not fully there
We finally realized, after many lengthy conversations, that our desire to live ready had actually led us to living not fully here and not fully there. It was an awful feeling, realizing that we’d been wrong. But what it has meant for us is that we’ve viewed nearly everything here as temporary. This job is temporary, these relationships are temporary, our service in the church is temporary. We’ve held ourselves back from fully investing in our community and our church because we felt that we’d be here for only a little while.
It also meant that we rarely did any kind of long-term planning. Why would we need to plan for a life we didn’t intend to live? There was no need to think about moving into a bigger house as our family grows or getting Blaise a desperately-needed new vehicle. We just had to hang in there until we moved back to South Sudan, right?
Coming to terms with this realization has been difficult. We absolutely still hope that someday we will move back to South Sudan, but we have no timeline. We still have some healing to do and we feel that God has been exceptionally gracious in giving us a long season of rest. But since we don’t know how long it will be before we are able to make it back to our beloved South Sudan, we have to settle in here. We have to invest fully in our community, our church, our future. While we’re here, we have to live fully here.
So how does this change things for us?
Well, really a lot of it is just a mindset and vocabulary shift. It changes how we think and talk our life and our future here. It changes how we pray and what we pray for, and it changes how we approach relationships. It also changes some practical things, such as where we live and how we invest in the physical aspects of our lives in the States. We started house shopping at the end of last month, and while we passed on moving into a new house for now, it made us realize that we had also completely stopped dreaming. We had settled into a “this is just until we go back” mentality so much that we never even allowed ourselves to dream about much of anything.
It has been hard to let go of that hope of moving back to South Sudan soon, but it has also been really exciting to refocus and start hoping and dreaming for things right in front of us again. It doesn’t mean that we’ll ignore the Lord’s calling on our lives, whatever that may be, but it does mean that we will live fully present in the life we’re in.
Much love,
Cass
