Life back in the not-so-fast lane

Two weeks yesterday. Two weeks of “being back” that are entirely difficult to try and summarize or explain, aside to say that it’s been very good, but very surreal. What we didn’t expect when we stepped out of LAX was for everything to be so normal. Like we’d never left. Like you feel when you’ve been engrossed in a movie and then walk back out of the theatre – just an eight month movie. Fiji was a real gift from God as it was basically our de-brief week. We didn’t do much of anything. We talked, reflected, prayed, cried (okay, I think that was just me and not Jason), and worked through the emotions and anticipation of this chapter ending and preparing to turn the page of the next.

I can tell you this, though. We feel called to this culture. That has drastically changed the way we see things. When we turned our cell phones on, it certainly didn’t feel good to sign a contract obligating us to pay more each month for cell phone usage than food and lodging would have cost for weeks in Vietnam. But in a culture that communicates and relates and connects via instant cellular connection, we can honestly say we are choosing that expense as a means of ministering in this society. It’s interesting, actually, to be using those words, because I think when for eight months you’ve been looking and analyzing what you see as a culture around you, you do the same when you return – you recognize things that you didn’t before, and you recognize them as cultural distinctions – “normal life” for Southern California, maybe, but not necessarily “normal life” around the world.

One of those cultural distinctions is just how fast everything and everyone moves here. Like everything is a frenetic race. There is such a fast-paced-production-driven mentality in this home culture of ours, and seeing it again in action has helped cement some things about what we came to understand about how America is perceived around the world – in politics, in missions, etc. Somewhere along the journey we slowed down internally and we don’t want to race back into the fast lane, but to live at a pace where we can breathe.

Mark 5:19 is a treasured directive to us right now … “Go home to your friends and family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” The mercies and things He’s done for us this year are abundant, so we’re processing and praying and taking whatever doors open to share it, whether from behind a microphone or across a coffee table.