Thoughts I wrote at the airport in Johannesburg without wifi to post it. Enjoy. 

At the beginning of my trip, Jesus opened my eyes in a new way to the verse about new wineskins for new wine.

Africa was new wine for this old skin, and I would need a new one to understand all of what was to come to me while I lived there for two months.

I asked God in the first few weeks if I was literally growing new skin…for the growth I was experiencing seemed as painful as a baby’s teething…it was almost physical. I cried many afternoons when I would come home from school or when I felt like I wasn’t enough to teach them, help them. I cried many nights when I just wanted to be with the people I loved the most instead of in a house full of ones I had just met.

I said goodbye to my 6 students, and all 12 kids in our home this weekend.

One of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
We had a picnic and made frames for pictures I printed out of us.

There were tears. There were love notes. There was playing.

I stared out from the balcony, one of my favorite parts about Maseru, and wept. The clouds rolled in and God wept with me. I felt Him say, “Thank you.”

Thank you for coming, for listening. For giving Me your hands and your feet, that I could make them my own and use them. Thank you for blessing people and for serving people. I wanted you to do it. I created a need for you to do it. And you did it. I am so proud of you. Thank you. I love what you have done, why you have done it, and I am captivated with your heart.

We cried together.

And I have realized, just like I felt in the first chapter of this adventure, that I asked to see the greater depths of the Father’s love, the greater needs in this world, the poverty.

So, now, in this airport as I wait, I know I have gotten what I asked for.

I am wine made new, made sweeter, given a better taste, in new wine skins.

I’m a diamond with a new cut, another side.

I’m a well that was dug deeper.

I’m now able to see more, to be more, to hold more, to understand more.

It hurts.

It is a gnawing, sore, piercing growth.

Looking out on the mountains and the valleys as my plane lifts off, realizing that I know what faces are in those little huts. Seeing from memory the patches of begging street kids whose smiles I could never forget, noting the shepherd boys and those on their donkeys, wrapped in mystery. I know what’s there.

I zoom my heart in further and I know which turns down what streets will take me to the gate that hides the house where those I fell in love with are sleeping. I can hear their voices. I can feel their tummies because I tickled them. I can say their names and even spell them because I spend every day with them. I can tell whose laugh is whose because they thought I was funny. The details come into focus and it stabs me in my center to think that I will fly away, above them, to a safe, sound, plentiful, abounding world. It isn’t fair that they play with toys made out of wire and milk carton and my cousins have video games. It isn’t fair that promises are made and kept in the land of opportunity, but my babies’ world is bound tight with unspoken, violent rules that need revolutionary thinking and action to loose.

It is a feeling that churns my stomach like those cement trucks– what is in me will never sit and solidify…it just keeps mulling around and around and around, over and over, staying wet, staying alive, staying usable:

The feeling that I fly in the sky for hours and hours, and when I land, these darling, precious friends of mine will only be as close as my mind can recall the days we had.

The chicken or the egg was first?

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

If I come home and can only remember these children but can’t touch them…did it happen?

Did I really go to Lesotho for weeks and weeks, walk their streets, pick up the small talk and make the people there smile? It’s only alive in memory now.

What of memory?

Memory is beautiful and so unkind all at once.

The conflict of longing for home head to head against a desire to do everything I can to make those kids know they’re loved and brilliant and that they’re going to change their world someday.

The confusion of wanting to leave and wanting to stay.
It is like nothing I have felt before.

I want to explain everything but I don’t think this love has a verbal language yet…
I feel like a newborn in my mind and my heart.These are rooms that have just been built in me, and I don’t know my way around yet.

All I know to do is say “Thank You” to the God who has made hundreds of my dreams and hopes come true in only handfuls of weeks.
All I do is say thank you again and again and again. That He would bring me here and think of them and me and us. We helped each other, me and my students, Lesotho and me. That He would ask of me something, and have it in His other hand to give me to give them. The grace, the ease, the pain, the hard and the easy. He is so good.

I am asking the Holy Spirit to take what has been done in me, and what has been felt by me in these last days– and to make those things into a change that sticks all the way down to the bottom. That He would do whatever He wants with all this newness, nothing more and nothing less. (If I try on my own, I will become desperate and broken or numb and shallow.)

He has given me peace.
He has promised an anointing to come, and one to also leave.
He has told me that this isn’t the end, but the beginning.
He has even thanked me. How gracious, this all giving God, to thank me…how humbling…

What I will continue to give Him, is my diligence. My responsibility.
What to do with these names and faces? These relationships?
What to pray? What to give?
What is next?
I have new skin and new sides and new depths, thanks to the Master Artist.

Because this is not the end,
but the beginning. Teary and sweet and gentle and grainy.