WARNING: This is a long one, so have a cup of something hot and delicious (chai, coffee, whatever) ready as you sit down to read!
Have you ever made a decision, got really excited about it, and then freaked out when your life started to change as a result of that decision?!? Please tell me that I’m not alone on this!!
On my last morning in Kampala, I took a boda boda to La Patisserie to spend some time alone reflecting on the summer and thinking about life when I return to the States. It was a very emotional morning, and I distinctly remember feeling like I was in a dream. At some point, I figured, I would wake up and it would only be June and I wouldn’t be leaving the place that had felt so strangely like home to me.
I’m still waiting to wake up from that dream, by the way.
As Blaise and I left Uganda and started the long, arduous journey home, I felt my heart being ripped apart in a way that I have only experienced when people I loved died. We both knew that Uganda was home. Not home in the way our family is home or the way our little house is home; home in a way that comes from God when He plants that love and desire in your heart (Psalm 37:4). We knew our answer before Peter ever asked us the question…we knew we were being called to serve in Uganda and South Sudan.
Fast forward two months to this very week. The decision to GO to Africa has been made, but over the last two months the only thing that has changed in our lives is the decision. Aside from support raising meetings and writing more radio programming, life has continued on as usual in the Ginter household. Sure, we pray and talk about moving daily, but we still go to work (well, he does), we still live in our house, we still drink Starbucks, we still hang out with friends, and we still take walks around our neighborhood. On the surface, nothing much has changed…besides the knowledge that we will be moving to East Africa in the near future.
Well, an idea has been brewing and weighing heavily on our hearts. It started long before we came home from Uganda: sell the house immediately. Let me begin by saying that we absolutely LOVE our house!! It is our very first house, and everything about it suits us and reflects our personalities. It was the perfect little gem found in the perfect little town, and we’ve redecorated it and remodeled it, and it’s almost exactly the way we want it. Because of that, because of how much we love it, because of how attached to things we get, because my dad hand-crafted our kitchen cabinets, and because of how hard I knew it would be, we talked about coming back home and selling the house right away. I can’t explain why, but the idea seemed to make perfect sense to us at the time. We knew then, sitting in Uganda surrounded by life as it plays out in Kampala, that if we came home and stayed in our house until it was time to make the BIG move, it would be far more difficult. I knew that because we never anticipated being missionaries (we had built our entire life around staying in our community), pulling up these deep roots we’ve spent years putting down would be awful. From our vantage point in Uganda, it made perfect sense to get the ball rolling soon after the tires hit the runway in Indy.
It was just an idea.
Then we came home, and within our cultural context, the idea seemed a little extreme. I mean, we don’t even know when we’ll be moving, so we reasoned that we should just stay in our house until we reached a certain point in fundraising and had a moving date set. We reasoned that there was no reason to sell our perfectly fine house and live…where?…for…who knows how long? Why take that kind of leap when we don’t have to? That’s what we reasoned, anyway.
Then time continued to pass and the feeling that we should sell our house didn’t go away. Blaise and I started having conversations about where we would live. Would we rent a small apartment? Would we move in with family? Would we rent a house? Then my aunt (who’s also our support raising accountability person) suggested that we could buy a fifth wheel camper and live in it on their barn property (out in the country by itself). I scoffed at the idea. A camper??!? Are you crazy?!? We’re not vagabonds!
But then that idea didn’t go away, even though I really didn’t like it. Can you imagine two adults and a 100 lb. dog crammed into a tiny camper, surviving the harsh Indiana winter, and trying not to kill each other? I could NOT imagine it…but Blaise could, and he kind of liked the idea. I persisted in ignoring him. However, one afternoon I thought I would just check out campers for sale in the area, and quickly after clicking through the listings I realized that some of those campers are really darn nice! And we could paint the camper walls, right? And we could decorate it, right? It could be our little home for a wee bit of time, right?
It’s funny how one little idea snowballs into something entirely different and next thing you know you’re standing on the edge of a cliff waiting for the courage to jump!
We prayed, prayed, and prayed some more. We asked our prayer team to pray for us, and we asked pretty much everyone else we knew to pray for us as well. This was no small decision…selling our beloved house and living in a camper. However, it is a decision that we have finally made with complete confidence that the Lord is leading us!
We met with our real estate agent this past week, priced the house, got a short list of things to repair/touch up, and decided that we would put our house on the market the first week of November!! EEEK!
THEN, we did something else that was crazy…we BOUGHT A CAMPER!!!
What seems crazy to everyone else is actually very right for us, for this exact point we are at in our lives. Financially, it means that we will get rid of our mortgage (and sell early rather than waiting and hoping it will sell in time for us to leave), pay down my student loans, and otherwise be good financial stewards of what God has given us. Spiritually, it means that we will unclutter our lives and our living space, simplifying our things so that we can focus on the Lord. Emotionally, it means detaching ourselves from permanence here and being freed up to GO whenever we hit that point. It is also just really good training in living with only what we need, learning to live graciously in a tight space, and shedding ourselves of societal expectations and stuff-oriented desires to live in accordance with His will for us.
As I sit down and reflect on how much our life has changed over the last two years, I am BLOWN AWAY by what can happen when you submit your own will to God’s will for you. Now, don’t misunderstand me…there have definitely been moments when I’ve wanted to be a Jonah and run away from this whole thing. I don’t want to leave my house…I’m not really keen on the idea of having to make sewage dump runs in our camper…and I definitely don’t want to miss seeing my nieces grow up while we’re living on another continent. These are things that, if I let them, would strangle me with fear and paralyze me into staying right where I am because it’s comfortable…and let’s face it, most of us really enjoy comfort! However, I know that our HUGE, LOVING God wants His best for us…and I want that, too!
Here’s a bit of Scripture from Hebrews 11: 8-9 that has really encouraged me lately:
By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents…
So, here’s to our AWESOME “living in tents” adventure that we’re on, with God as our guide!
Nhak,
Cass
P.s. We would still appreciate your prayers, because we still have to live with the decisions that we have made! =)
