What Am I Supposed to Feel?

There are many journal entries and stories written over the past couple weeks that I will post soon, but right now I am currently sitting in the airport in South Africa, on my way back home after 14 weeks away … and I am speechless, and honestly a mess. I am so overwhelmed I can’t quite decide what it is that I am feeling at a given moment and it leaves me numb to what is going on, like the world is going on while I’m at a standstill. I guess I pictured myself feeling different. I didn’t see this coming…

I can’t believe it’s over, just like that! All the kids I have bonded with in both countries, the amazing people I have lived life with from both missions, and the months of “Just Gaby and God time”… it’s over. I am sitting at a really nice airport drinking coffee with Wi-fi and automatic flushing toilets, in a matter of hours the adjustment is already in action… I’m on my way home!

The oddest part about this is that I feel TOTALLY out of place. I am so uncomfortable. My life as I knew it for 3 months is beginning it’s dramatic shift to something so incredibly different. I fear the change in some ways, because I found myself in a different way in Africa. I got to know a completely new side of me, one I really like, and that finally feels right! I was uncomfortable at many times through the trip, but the feeling of knowing I was EXACTLY where God wanted me is a feeling that is truly incomparable. Just when I was getting comfortable with living a totally different way, I’m thrown into another huge change!

There’s beauty in this though, over the course of the last 3 months I have been able to truly see how God uses my uncertainty, my instability, and even my fear to bring so much beauty out of it. I am confident that this is not the end of the good, but another beginning of exciting change! I may not feel it at this moment (I literally feel like I am dreaming), but I have learned just how close God is, just how much He cares, and just how intimately and intricately formed His plans are for my life. I thought I knew that before this trip, but I’m continuing to find out so much more.

I am not sure what I am feeling. I have no idea how to act on it, I  don’t even know what it will be like in 20 minutes, but I know I can put my faith, my hope, and my life in the hands of God, He will make the way clear… regardless of my feelings.

Just some thoughts at the moment…

(As I sit here next to a man who I fear may cough up a lung and blow a hole through his handkerchief and wonder why he chose to sit RIGHT next to me when there are 8 completely open benches at the gate)