I feel like I'm leaving home to go home.  Leaving the land that's stolen my heart to go to the land of my birth.

Peering through a curtain of tears at a future that seems very unknown.

And then my brain reminds my heart that I was feeling much this way two years ago.  Only then I was on the flip
-side of this equation.

Going to a land that was not mine, with people I had never met, and a language I could neither speak nor understand, to do work I was completely unqualified for.
And my heart hears the reassuring whisper that my God, who was with me through every minute and second of the last two years, isn't being left behind in Haiti.



See, I have only one certainty about my future right now.  And that's that God will never leave me or forsake me.  That the Jesus that pleaded with his father on our behalf in John seventeen is still interceding for me.

I have a promise that if I pass through the waters, He WILL be with me.  That the rivers will not overflow me, that the fires I face will not burn me, and flames shall not kindle upon me.



And I cling to that knowledge as if it is a lifesaving rope thrown to me as I'm drowning.

Drowning in a sea of memories....so many memories.



Catching my first baby.  Stitching my first wound.  The week that I discovered that I could actually talk to someone and they understood me and I them - I sorta kinda exploded. :o) Delivering my friend's first little boy.  Catching one of my friends' eye as something tickled my funny bone, realizing that they were doing the same thing, and feeling that connection across all the barriers and differences between us.  Having my breathe squeezed out of me by Aline, one of my Haitian "mothers".  Getting a kiss from the incredibly cute little fellow that I just finished bandaging after he took a tumble.  Hearing the dreaded knock at two in the morning and draaaagging my body out of bed to go find out what emergency we were going to be facing.  My cherished depot roof devotional time.  The crazy conversations to be had on our late nights at the clinic as we waited on some balky baby to make an appearance.  My co-workers/second-family.



Good memories.  Some not-so-good memories.

But all a part of the life that I've lived since I became a part of the team here in Aleg.  A time in my life to which I am now in the process of bidding farewell.

I'm not even bothering to try to sort out the emotions about that right now.

I'm going home.  To stay.


SUCH an odd thought.

I'm gonna get to hug my mom and my dad, and kiss my little sisters.  Be there when my latest nephew makes his arrival in March.  Play with my dog.  Celebrate spring in Tennessee (something worth celebrating, trust me).  Sleep through the night.  Have dinner conversations that do not revolve around maggots, laboring women, or someone else's bowel habits.

I think that at this point, I am too numb and tired to even feel, after all of the feeling that I've done over the last few weeks.

I am sitting in my seat, somewhere above the Caribbean; somewhere between these two worlds that mean so much to me.  Gone from home, but not yet really home.  Sipping my cranberry apple concentrate, and allowing my fogged brain to attempt to ponder life.

I told Mali last night, as I sat on the floor in my room with tears running down my face, that I don't even have a heart anymore.  As so many of our friends came to see Whit and I before we left, I stood and watched them walk away and felt a small part of my heart break loose and leave with each one, until I was sure there must be nothing left to break.

It is not a painless process, this heartbreaking.  It hurts until you think you cannot hurt anymore, and then it only gets worse.  And I wonder how Jesus' heart must have ached as he bid adieu to His father before descending to spend those forty years here on earth, then again when telling his disciples goodbye before He ascended back to heaven.



And then my mind drifts to another Home, to which I've not yet arrived.  To the journey, that we're all on.  How for some of us, that journey may not be the length we had envisioned, or in the company we had planned.  It may not follow the path that we wish.  In fact, the path we are on may not look like much of a path at all, as we trek up the steep and stony way.  But, if you are following God's calling in your life, you'll be able to look closely and see your Savior's footprints from where He's gone before you.

I don't know yet what the next step will be in my life.  To be honest, I've been allowing myself to stress out about it a bit the last while.

And that was very wrong of me.



I was praying the other morning, and begging for answers to my questions about what's coming next, and I felt God remind me that He HAS shown me my next step.  It's to go home to be with my family right now.  To serve Him to the very utmost of my ability, in whatever place He puts me.  And when the time comes for me to take another step in my life, He will make it clear to me which route to take.



So, as a good friend of mine reminded me to do the other day, until God opens the next door for me, I will praise Him in the hallway.



Because He alone is worthy.