#6: Connecting at Your Church

I’m pretty sure I’ll lose my man card over this story.

It was May of 2010.  I had been back from the field for just over 2 months, and Joelle was set to go to New Mexico for the Summer.  She had stopped in California on her way back from Australia 2 weeks prior, and during that time I had proposed to her.  She was going home to report back to her church and reconnect with family, and we likely wouldn’t see each other for another three months or so.

The night before she left, we took a walk in the park.  We got to talking about what we planned on doing over the Summer, and before we could get a lot of talking done I started bawling like a baby.

Here was a grown man, crying his eyes out on a park bench.

There were a lot of strong emotions involved in that particular evening–I was going to miss my fiancee and I didn’t want her to go–but oddly enough, the thing that got me whimpering wasn’t her.  It was my church.

#4: When Your World Becomes Very Small

Shakespeare once quipped, “All the world’s a stage.”  How true these words ring when your stage is literally the whole world while in missions.  You may never know which country you’ll add next to your list, or where the person you speak to next is from.  Your life, your world, feels so big, like anywhere and anyone is within your reach (at least with a plane ride).

I remember being a young 22-year-old and realizing that the entire world was at my doorstep.  Then several years later, I transitioned back into the “real world” and suddenly my world became so… small.  I no longer had daily interactions with individuals from over 15 different countries. In fact, some days, I’m lucky if I even see another adult before 5 pm.  It became significantly less likely that I would be asked to go on an outreach in a few weeks to some location I couldn’t pronounce.