So it's been over two years since I have posted on this blog. Two....long...years. So much has happened and changed in my life that I couldn't begin to go back and summarize it all (well I could, but it would be awfully boring and completely long winded...so I'll spare you!). Anyway, I have been thinking about taking up blogging again for a while now. I miss being able to share my thoughts, faith journey, and general life with a larger portion of the world and so I have wanted to do it, but I haven't actually come back to it until now. Basically....it's cause I still care way too much about what other people think about me, and I have let that worry hold me back. And that is so unbelievably ridiculous! I love to write...it's one of my passions! And while for a while there, the desire to do anything I had previously enjoyed in life was stripped away from me, finding my way back to the bloggisphere is actually a good thing (I think), so throwing care to the wind...here we go!
Now I said I would spare you the details of everything that's happened in the past two plus years (although I am sure much of that will probably make it's way out anyway in the bits and portions that I write from here on out), but one thing I do have to share is that these past two years my relationship with God has been a sh*tshow (for lack of a better word) and it's affected EVERY OTHER AREA of my life...every relationship, every activity, every interaction, in every moment of every day. THANK GOD, that some how, some way, He is finally drawing me back to himself. But for all intents and purposes, I feel like I've spent the better part of the past two and a half to three years being tossed back and forth by the waves of a violent storm....eventually being thrown onto the rugged rocks of a dried up beach. And now...only in the past six months have I begun to get my barrings back and begin to put some semblance of a life back together.
It's funny (in that ironically sad kind of way), I just spent some time reading back some of my old posts from my time in Ecuador and I cannot help but think...HOLY CRAP, am I that much of a liar, or am I really just that good at seeing the positive side of things (I'm NOT an optimist person in any sense of the word by the way, so you figure out the part of that which is true!). I mean, the reality is, everything I wrote in my previous blog posts from years ago were as true and real for me in that moment as these thoughts are now, but there was so much more I didn't say and didn't share that it almost seems like by the end of my last few months of posting, I clearly was putting on the Christian mask and wording things with enough care as not to show the battle that was really raging on in my heart.
Now if I go back and look at my journal entries from during that time (the time of my last blog posts here), and I will be honest that there are not a lot because at that point I was so angry and frustrated and flat out mad at God and myself that I couldn't bring myself to write, the truth is there is a stark difference between what I was writing on here and what was going on in my heart. I think part of it was I was living with people I was serving with and I was just too dang self-conscious to admit how badly I was struggling. Plus I really wanted to believe that God was still speaking to me and I really wanted the comfort from knowing I was still loved by him. So in a way I pretended I knew what I was struggling to hold onto, and in a way I just shared only what I knew would be acceptable to others. (Pre-warning: I am sure that I will still do that at times now, but hopefully I won't take me another 2 years to turn it all around!).
The truth is that about about half way through my second year in Ecuador I everything started to fall apart. I started getting really depressed and felt like in so many ways God had sent me to this rural country just to abandon me and nobody else seemed to care (of course they didn't know, so how could they care?!). It's sad how now that I can compare both my journal entries and my blog and see how fake I was actually being and how much hurt that would eventually end up causing me (a lesson that I seem to have to learn over and over again).
Anyway, when I left Ecuador (a few weeks earlier than planned) I felt like I was crawling my way back over the USA border and that I was beyond empty, but I truly believed that if I could just get home everything would be right with the world again. BOY WAS I WRONG! I cannot tell you how hard it has been to come back "home". Yes, there is the comfort of having a warm shower that I know won't run out of water or turn ice cold on me on the drop of a dime. Yes, there is the comfort of being able to get in a car and drive whenever and where ever I want to get whatever I want. And yes, there is even comfort in being so close to my family that I can actually get annoyed them (it sounds weird but it's true). But so much of my life is not at all what I thought I was coming back to. In the past two years I have struggled with anxiety and depression, I have lost and let go of friendships I thought I would have forever, I have felt so hurt by God that I have lashed out at him and all things associated with, and I have questioned so much about about faith and Christianity in general that it has been scary at times. And yet...here I stand (the key word there being STAND), over two years removed from my time as a "missionary", coming back to the realization that God still loves me and always has (God, that sounds so cheesy). The God I thought had abandoned me and rejected me, and yet for some reason I still felt the need to pretend and fake it for, has always been God and has always been by my side (just maybe not in the way I tried to frame it to the world, or even to myself).
So back to the main point... I'm gonna start blogging again...cause it's something I love and because maybe, just maybe, there is someone out there that can relate to or feel encouraged by my words. But mostly I am gonna start blogging because more than ever I realize that my life really is "a glorious unfolding" and it is a privilege to be able to share it with the world around me. So here we go again....jump in with me... learn and grow with me....and hopefully two years from now I will look back on this an see just how real my life and my God have become...
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