Between Places

Sometimes I think I want to be a drifter, a wanderer.  I want to travel the world and be in all different places.  I want to live straddled between continents, enriched by peoples and cultures.  But then, but then, I don’t.  I don’t feel known fully.  I feel conflicted on all sides.  Longing, always longing to be with all the people I love and unable to feel ever at home.  I want the home with the wrap around porch that everyone knows and visits.  The one with the tropical sunshine and the beautiful British Columbia forests.  I want the dirt roads and the clear waters.  I want all the experiences for my kids that I had as a child.  Yet, I want different ones.  We chose this, after all.  Didn’t we?  We chose to adopt another land, another reality.

But sometimes it’s hard to stay true to the path you’ve chosen, isn’t it?  To own it?

We are moving back to Malawi, back to our second home (or is it our third?) after ten months of pandemic living.  Mattresses on the floor, stuff still in boxes, using mismatched things and not even minding, that kind of living.  But I miss the weekly visits of people around our table.  I miss feeding people cake, just because they liked eating it.  I miss the reality of lives enmeshed together in everyday stuff.  We’re all missing that, but somehow it feels even more acutely painful because we thought that was waiting for us here in Canada, but it wasn’t fully. 

Now, we go back again.  To what exactly?  It’s not perfectly clear.  We have amazing relationships and some broken ones, we have work that we’ve left undone and dreams yet to be realized.  It’s all the same as here, incomplete and yet what we’ve chosen for now.

Will I miss these misty, dark days here in beautiful wet coast Canada?  Will I miss the ease and comfort of mossy forests thick with ferns and silhouetted mountains against the sky?  Yes.  But I cannot wait to see the rainstorms of Malawi.  I cannot wait to see the weeping Jacaranda trees of August, and the faces and places that define Malawi for us. 

I cannot imagine having never loved Malawi.  I cannot imagine having never added to our life the life we have there.  That’s the beauty of it, isn’t it?  In every season and in every place, we are no longer defined by one single part of our story.  We realize that in every place there is joy, culture, people, love, friendship and adventure waiting.  In every place.  Praise God from whom all blessings flow.