Well, my year in Liberia is now over, and I have returned to California.
For those of you who are from my sponsoring churches, thank you for your love and support. For those of you who have followed my emails, passed on to you from someone else, thank you for reading. Writing these updates has been a time of reflection for me each month, and I'm glad that so many of you found them meaningful too.
The transition back to "normal" life has been difficult. So thank you for your patience while I re-settle. I hope to start visiting the 8 churches that supported me in November. Hopefully by then I will know what I'm going to be doing next as well.
As I look back over all my emails from this year, one message rings out to me: On the other side of fear is an experience waiting to change your life and other's lives too. I won't call it an adventure, it's just life whether in the forests of West Africa or the suburbs of central California, there is fear and there is the wonder of moving beyond it. When traveling to Liberia I was afraid of what living in a post-war culture meant, I was afraid of failure, of making a fool of myself, of catching some strange illness… But after a while, I was too busy with my every day life to be afraid anymore. Perhaps it was the realization that even failure was better than nothing. And if God can make something wonderful out of all my feeble effort and failure, than maybe I should stop worrying about the outcomes, and concern myself with the doing and living.
For those of you who are from my sponsoring churches, thank you for your love and support. For those of you who have followed my emails, passed on to you from someone else, thank you for reading. Writing these updates has been a time of reflection for me each month, and I'm glad that so many of you found them meaningful too.
The transition back to "normal" life has been difficult. So thank you for your patience while I re-settle. I hope to start visiting the 8 churches that supported me in November. Hopefully by then I will know what I'm going to be doing next as well.
As I look back over all my emails from this year, one message rings out to me: On the other side of fear is an experience waiting to change your life and other's lives too. I won't call it an adventure, it's just life whether in the forests of West Africa or the suburbs of central California, there is fear and there is the wonder of moving beyond it. When traveling to Liberia I was afraid of what living in a post-war culture meant, I was afraid of failure, of making a fool of myself, of catching some strange illness… But after a while, I was too busy with my every day life to be afraid anymore. Perhaps it was the realization that even failure was better than nothing. And if God can make something wonderful out of all my feeble effort and failure, than maybe I should stop worrying about the outcomes, and concern myself with the doing and living.
May God richly bless you in all your struggles, and as you journey, wrap Her arms around you, drawing you ever closer to Her bosom.
No comments:
Post a Comment