Minute one,
Time for some real talk.
These past few days have been pretty rough. Four days before I was scheduled to fly home my phone was stolen. Then two days before I was scheduled to fly home a monsoon hit, causing power outages in most of Bangalore.
These things, in and of themselves, weren't life altering or unsurvivable. But they were, in a way, the straw that broke the Camel's back. Like when you've bottled everything up for so long and you think you're okay, but then something mundane like wet socks or not being able to untangle your headphones sends you into a conplete mental collapse. My concerns about my phone and the storms and my upcoming journey home all had logical solutions, but they became the bridges into my mind which all the emotions I'd been pushing down were free to cross. All the stress and exhaustion and homesickness and anxiety came flooding in and I started to drown in them.
The day before my flight home, my anxiety pushed me from homesickness to real sickenss. I missed my last Sunday in India because I couldn't get out of bed without vomiting. I felt useless for not being able to do more and I felt selfish for causing so much stress and trouble to those around me. In my head I started questioning why I ever came. I wanted to know why all of this had happened. Why hadn't God given me more work to do so I could feel more useful? Why didn’t he stop the storms so that I could go outside and play with the kids and feel some peace of mind? Why didn't He find my phone for me? Didn't He know how much I was relying on that phone?
But that's the thing, isn't it?
God is perfectly capable of opperating without my phone. I put everything I had into that sturdy, new iPhone with the fancy settings and all-powerful hard drive, and I'd only left a sliver for the God who sent me here in the first place. So God gave me a tiny, ancient, broken, completely miraculous Samsung and said, "Things come and go, can you praise me anyway?"
I was sick and alone in the dark for a day and a night, and when I felt well enough to walk downstairs Ruth sat beside me and patted my arm.
"I don't want you to feel stress," She told me. "I don't want you to think that there is no purpose - that you have no purpose in this. This is just another part of the story. Everything happens for a reason, and you should not forget how many people you have blessed by coming here. Everything will be alright."
And God smiled and said, "I told you so."
Minute two,
A collection of small blessings from the journey home.
1. The Barista at the cafe in Dheli who gave me coffee anyway, even though I was ten rupees short.
2. The British security guard who asked if there was a baby sax in my instrument case and was both thrilled and baffled when I informed him that it was, in fact, a fiddle.
3. The fact that I still act like a five year old when the plane takes off - sitting bolt upright and squashing my nose against the window to watch the Earth shrink.
4. The flight attendants on the plane to Charlotte who were basically just Southern grandmothers. They all wore pink aprons with their names monogrammed across the breast and they called everyone, "Love."
Minute three,
There's no place like home.
There's no place like home.
There's no place like home.
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