It’s been one week since we landed in the United States. Seven days. And it’s been the strangest seven days of my life. (Note: I started this post on Saturday.)
I’ve been wanting to blog all week. I have all of these thoughts tumbling around in my head and emotions weighing heavy on my heart; I’ve wanted to share, I just haven’t known how. And truthfully, I still don’t know how to put into words everything we’ve been experiencing, but I figured I would at least get something written down and maybe I can start to process things from there.
I think the best way to summarize the first week of re-entry is to say it’s been hard.
I am trying to remind myself that grieving is normal and healthy, and in order to fully heal, I must hurt for a while.
I’m still pretty heavy in the grieving phase. I am grieving everything from such an abrupt departure from Tonj to missing the sound of far-off drumming as I laid down to sleep at night. I feel homesick for a place that is as familiar to me now as are the cornfields in Indiana. I miss our friends, I miss our team, I miss our little mud house, I miss the dusty drives to town, and I miss the cows. The mind is funny, though, because being back here and facing the hard things of starting over makes me forget the even harder things of life in Tonj. I remember the good parts and I am grieving them, but I don’t want to forget the hard parts. They were the reality of life on the mission field. The hard parts were where life rubbed up against my faith–challenged me, stretched me, and changed me.
It’s been so wonderful to be reunited with friends and family after nearly two years away. It’s been so sweet to hug people, to meet their new-to-me babies, to introduce everyone to Clark, and to eat lots and lots of amazing pizza. But even these reunions are hard. It’s hard to sit with people we love so deeply, who’ve been a part of our lives for years (or forever), and to know that in the two years we were away SO.MUCH.HAPPENED. They’ve changed jobs, moved, had babies, gone on vacations, lost loved ones, battled cancer, and on and on. We weren’t here for any of that.
And on the other side, we have lived a life so far removed and different from anything they’ve ever experienced that there’s no way to ever reconcile that massive chasm of the memories running through my head and the experiences of the people sitting in front of me. Every time we’re together with other people, they say something that sparks a memory of South Sudan. I open my mouth to share the memory, but I’m quickly silenced by the realization that there’s no way to explain it well enough for them to understand. So I say nothing. And that hurts so much, because these are people we love. We want them to know and understand where we’ve been, what we’ve experienced, and how it’s changed us. But how can we tell them? And do they even want to know?
Over the last week, we’ve also been forced out of our little house–our safe haven–and into a couple of stores. We had to get new SIM cards for our cell phones and outlet covers for the house (but what an amazing place that we CAN cover the outlets!!) and some other random, but necessary items. So naturally, the first place we ventured was Target. Oh.My.Word. We went about it all wrong. I was so excited to finally be in Target again (by the way, I think the Super Target is about the size of our entire compound in Tonj) that I wanted to browse. We had a really specific shopping list, but instead of going straight for those items, we started down the aisles to look at the pretty things. We didn’t even get halfway through the store before we just started shutting down. It was too much to look at, too much to take in, and we needed to go. The problem was, we hadn’t gotten to everything we needed. We decided to split up. Blaise went for the outlet covers and I went to pick up a few grocery items. We came straight home and took naps.
Our second trip out was to Kroger, and it didn’t go much better. We actually just got inside the doors into the produce section and started freaking out. Look at the size of these apples…they’re HUGE! or They call this an avocado?? This thing is tiny! I’m pretty sure people thought we were nuts!
Probably the hardest thing for us right now, though, is that we feel so lonely and isolated. We lived in community in South Sudan. We were on a compound with at least four other adults who were our family there and we had two years of shared experiences with them. We met for prayer every morning, we lived on the compound together, we ate meals together, and we debriefed pretty much every experience with each other. We were in each other’s houses for large portions of each day, talking about shared frustrations, shared fears, shared hopes, shared prayers, and shared laughs. Some of our teammates even went into doctor’s appointments together, because when you’re going to give everyone the full report anyway, you might as well just save time and share a visit.
Our teammates know us better than most people do–they know our sin, they know our ugliness, they know what we’ve struggled with most, but they also know our passions, our senses of humor, our deepest prayers, our hopes and our dreams. Without them we feel lost. We sit down to eat supper, just the three of use, and we miss the conversations we had as a team. We want to tell them everything we’re going through, to debrief fully as we have for the last two years, but we can’t do that either. So here we are, living in this highly individualistic society and craving nothing but fellowship and community.
There are a number of other things that are rather strange…it’s strange how familiar and foreign Indiana feels, it’s strange having carpet and a house that closes up completely, it’s strange not using adapters to plug in our electronic devices, it’s strange using credit card machines, and it’s strange driving on the right-hand side of the road.
We know that eventually the strangeness will wear off and life will settle into a normal and familiar rhythm. But for now, everything feels out of place, surreal, and uncomfortable. We are incredibly thankful for the people who have surrounded us and loved us so well as we’ve gone through this process (I’ll actually be blogging about them soon.). We left our community in Tonj, and while it looks a lot different, we have a community here, too. Without them it would have been a MUCH bumpier landing!
I think it’s safe to say that Clark is really loving America, though…
