A Reflection Long Overdue

"Break me, Lord, that I might know You and proclaim Your glory throughout all the nations!"

Last summer, as I busy tried to prepare myself for the adventure of a lifetime, that had been my prayer.  I had recognized how frazzled I was feeling and in response, handed it over to the only One who could turn my anxiety into anything productive.
Months later, it is obvious that "frazzled" is a habit of mine, or God is just still in the process of breaking me-honestly, I believe it is a combination of the two-because today I find myself in a very similar state of mind.  I find myself as frazzled as ever, and probably doing a very poor job of pretending not to be so, as I attempt to prepare both myself and my circumstances for the continuing adventure before me.  This time, however, rather than requesting to be any more broken than I already am (out of fear that I may literally snap in half) I find myself fathoming, "Is this real life?"
Is this real life?  I have spent every day since March 5th, when I stepped off that last plane which had carried me all the way back across the pond, trying to answer this question.  And after all this time...the truth is my heart hurts.  It hurts to feel torn between to different (Or are they?) realities as I struggle to find the balance between the two that is normal.  But the more I live, the more of the world I see and experience, the more I doubt that "normal" even exists.  So again, here I find myself asking, "Is this real life?" (For all you YouTube fans-David's next question would be, "Is this gonna last forever? And don't worry, we'll get there at some point, I'm sure.)  The obvious answer is of course, yes! This is real life! All of this is very real.  The further question then is: Which one is reality?  My life here in the U.S. that I call home, or my life in Africa?
When I close my eyes I can see it...

I see little Lucy bound into my arms-her burnt, disfigured hand telling a story too many will never know.
I see precious James blush at the remarks the other boys make when I talk to him and smile.  As a young boy who has Downs Syndrome he is so blessed to have been taken into a home full of people who love in the midst of a world that would call him "cursed" and literally shun his presence in their naiveté.  But sweet James-all his joy knows is he has a new friend!
I see Rosie and her oh-so-silly faces that leave me laughing for hours!
I see absolutely precious Lisabeth in all her innocent joy and her heart-melting grin.
I see shy little Mary who grins whenever I look at her and never wants to let go of my hand for all the world.  I see her very determined as she puts her favorite bracelet around my wrist during church.  I see in her eyes how desperately she wanted me to stay back from the rest of my team so I could go to her birthday party...
I see 17 & 16 year old cousins Margret and Mary as they lead me through their shamba.  I see them proudly and generously prepare a sweet potato dinner for me, giving me a taste of home.  I see Margret's giant heart overflow through her tears as she listens to stories of others' hardships.  I see Mary's contagious joy in her every smile.
I see Esther smiling and laughing, giddy as we run through the jungle she calls home.  I see her cling to my arm and beg me not to leave.  I see her proudly and carefully prepare a chicken to be cooked for my teammates.  I see her find absolute joy in pure silliness! And I cringe at the sad thought of her being left motherless that same night, 14 years old; at the thought that there is nothing more I could've done to comfort her...
I see my Rwandan sister and brothers-giddy little Alice, Geoffrey, Desirée, and Faustine.  I see the power of hope in their eyes.  Oh, the adventures I have been so blessed to share with them!

The list goes on and on.  And then I open my eyes and here I am, home.  Home with my family, my friends, my house, my work...but none of it can ever feel the same because a part of my heart is still somewhere else.  Here, surrounded by people and a world that have watched me grow up over the past 10 years...something's still missing.  I fell in love with the dream of traveling to Africa when I was a a very little girl.  Now Rwanda and it's people have stolen a piece of my heart.  As much as I truly did love my adventures in Kenya and all the people I got to share them with and meet along the way...Rwanda will always be my first love.
Furthermore, as many people have asked me...

Am I going back?  Without a doubt, yes!  You could not keep me away from that red dirt even if you tried; the land of a thousand hills will still be calling my name.
When?  Not yet.  I know that it is not yet time for me to return to the place and the people I love with all my heart.  I have so much respect for the people who have been called to full time missions!  But that is not what I have been called to, especially in this season of my life.  God has put before me responsibilities that to some may seem worldly-responsibilities I have seen many young missionaries led to leave behind, but God is leading me to them.  And this next season of my life is going to enable me to do so much more good than I ever possibly could otherwise!

I need to go to school-college, university, whatever your english word is for it.  I have not been called to give up that opportunity.  However, I will not be going to George Fox University as I had originally planned, and I will not be learning Missions out of a book.  Actually (drumroll-very few people even know this yet), I will not even be staying in Oregon.  Or the Northwest, or even on the west coast.  It is no secret that since I got home I have been looking into various paths of Art Therapy study.  And I have found that here, at home and close to home, there are not very many options-and not one is direct!  There are, however, a few (and I mean very few) Pre-Art Therapy Major programs in the midwest.  One in particular program is far more prevalent, and I have been in contact with this school over the past couple months.
Last Friday, sitting getting pedicures with my mom, aunties, and very dear friend, I finally got the phone call informing me that I have been accepted to Indiana Wesleyan University!  After months of being asked what my next plans were, you have no idea what a relief it is to finally have an answer! There are still a lot of pieces of this puzzle to put into place in the upcoming weeks and months.  But for now I am so in awe of what a huge gift God has given me-when I boarded a plane to Kenya on September 28, 2012 I never dreamed that this is the path I would find myself on after such a crazy adventure in itself.  It really is the biggest blessing, in more ways than one.
So, I am moving to Indiana.  Not tomorrow, not next week.  It has yet to be determined whether this move will be happening 6 months from now, or 13 months from now.  But I know it is happening.  Until then, I am going to continue taking one day at a time.  Until then...

I will continue to watch in awe as God goes before me and levels the mountains, breaks through gates of bronze and cuts through bars of iron. I will watch as He presents treasures in secret places, constantly reminding me that He is God and He has summoned me by name. (Isaiah 45:2-3) I will rejoice as He continues to pick up my broken pieces and make me beautiful.  And when He calls me back to Rwanda, when He calls me to further proclaim His glory in all the nations, I will be ready.

~Chloe Anne

Transitioning Step by Step

As you may know, my team and I have now completed our outreach phase of DTS and are back at base for a few more days until graduation on Friday.  I will then be leaving Kenya on Saturday and will be that much closer to making my way home from Rwanda.  Over the next few days I will be catching up on my posts that are currently very rough journal entries!  But this is Africa, and nothing ever really goes according to planned.  And considering how much packing I have to do...I humbly ask that you and my beautiful mother would be patient with me. I promise updates are coming! And I truly am very much looking forward to sharing with you all what God has been putting on my heart, but it's coming.  Honestly, now that our debrief week has come and gone, I still fee like I am processing a lot.  We saw a lot  during our outreach. A lot of Kenya, of people, of the world...a lot of life. I truly believe there are some things, some experiences, that I will never completely process the full weight of.  And that's okay!  The past five months would have been the craziest, most emotional experience ever if I'd felt the full weight of it all on my shoulders every step of the way.  Any kind of life would be impossible to live that.  And I thank God that part of the beauty of life and the beauty His grace is that life is a very long learning process, so we process things based on their relevance to where we're at in life at that precisely that exact moment in time.
So, all this to say, I am in the process of summarizing what I've been up to in the past weeks and what God has been teaching me through it all.   I also plan to share just how I process all this craziness step by step, through Rwanda and as I transition to finally being back home with all the people, the weather, and yes, admittedly some of the comforts I've been without for so long.  I'm wondering if the coming back from five months in Africa will be filled with more emotional intensity than the 5 months themselves, but we'll see! For now, I'm just glad to be back at the base with a renewed sense of the semi-familiar in my life.  Consistency is not one of the things I plan to keep taking for granted, it's a beautiful thing, no doubt about it!

~Chloe Anne

"God, I come to You as a child."

As we enter into this new year, I feel as if so many things are zooming ahead of me.  So often I'm asked what I'm doing after DTS.  Why does it have to be such a complicated question?  Why can't "going home" simply be an adequate answer?  To me, the question of what I'm going to do is the same as asking whether I'm homesick - to which, the answer is most definitely yes.  I'm sick for wanting to be surrounded by the people who love me most in the world all the time.  Therefore, that's exactly what I'm going to do after DTS!  I'm going to spend as much time as humanly possible with the people I've hated living all these months on the other side of the world from.  

The past week we've been serving at a children's home, painting benches, along with other work they would have otherwise had to hire someone to do.  One of my benches says, "Let the little children come unto me, and do not hinder them.  For the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these" in Swahili.  And right now, I am definitely coming to God as a child!  I am coming to my Heavenly Father, saying things like, "I miss my mommy!!"  And honestly, I don't feel guilty or like I'm whining at all.  Rather, I feel like a child always shares exactly how they feel with their parents, maybe not when they're older, but at least when they're little - and that's the most important time of growth.  When I picture myself in the presence of God, my Heavenly Father, I'm sitting on His lap with my head rested against His chest (if He has one?), and He's stroking my hair in one hand while He envelops my little hands in His other.  He's my Daddy!  He cries when I cry, laughs when I laugh, and has a giant smile on His face while I dance around my room in my pj's.  And no matter how old I get, that's never going to change.  In fact, at the beginning of this new year, with another birthday just over a month away, I feel more like God's little girl than I probably ever have.  I'm secure going wherever God calls me, and just acting like the dork that I am because I know it makes Him smile.  And yes, He probably shakes His head every once in awhile, but always out of pure joy.  My Daddy in heaven thinks I'm adorable - and I've found life is a lot more enjoyable when I choose to believe Him.

The past few months I've been in Kenya, I've realized the vitality of a revelation of identity in Christ.  If my identity and self worth were not in tune with that which God sees in me, the past months would have been absolutely miserable!  Because when people don't have a grasp of who they are in the Lord they look for that same sense of security anywhere and everywhere else.  That's when people lose themselves, when we're unable to grasp a Kingdom perspective.  Now, a Kingdom perspective in somewhat of a paradox - it's what allows us to feel so insignificant yet so valuable at the exact same time.  It shows us that no part of life in this world is for our comfort or our glory at all - I'm even less significant than that tiny little dot I watch myself become as the airplane rises higher and higher off the tarmac.  But remarkably, the God of All Creation takes me in as His own daughter!  As little as I am in this big world, there is nothing my Heavenly Father desires more than to have a personal relationship with me, Chloe Anne.  Everyday, He's leading me to become more and more of a woman after His own heart.  Everyday, He throws His arms open wide to comfort His little girl who misses her mommy so terribly and to rejoice in her life.  

I actually love that God sees me as His little girl!  Especially over these past months, it has been such a comfort to me.  I've mentioned before how I can feel so out of place here at times, and truth be told: that was probably an understatement!  For example, to be perfectly frank, Christmas Eve was absolutely miserable.  Apart from the expected severe homesickness and the late night hike to church, were the stares.  I couldn't shake the thought, "I do not belong here," from my mind.  Not one person in that room saw me as Chloe Anne, a daughter of The Most High God.  They saw me as a mzungu who must be really crazy to be out at a midnight Christmas Eve service far out in the bush bush of Africa, a mzungu who was a complete stranger to their doctrine of how loud to sing, when to stand up, when to sit down, when to nod, and when to say, "Amen!"  And probably a million other things I'm not even aware I do wrong (I'm very sure the list goes on and on!).  It was probably one of the most degrading experiences of my life.  And unfortunately, that degrading feeling is something I'm getting used to.  It comes with a lot of constant stares and is not something I ever experienced in Rwanda, but in Kenya all to often.  But as sad as it might be that this is something I'm used to, it's really not that big of a deal.  It becomes a big deal, however, when I'm not in tune with my identity in Christ.  That's why this revelation is so vital!  

If I wasn't so confident that each and every morning my Heavenly Father is waiting for me with open arms to show His little girl this beautiful world He's created and all the unfathomable plans He has ahead of me, I would probably be very unhappy with my current situation.  But, I'm not by any means!  As much as I may have just made it seem I am currently in the midst of a slight depression, I am really not!  Promise!  I am very content, thrilled, and truly thankful to be curled up in bed on this late Kenyan evening watching one of my favorite sisters in Christ play Fruit Ninja on my ipad and feeling the beds we pushed next to each other shake every time the giant pomegranate pops up on the screen.  I'm in the midst of an experience of a lifetime.  And I wouldn't trade one minute of it for anything - each of every second is a part of the experience, even being stared at on Christmas Eve.  It's moments where I exchange pictures with girls my age I will never meet again, make new international friends wherever I go, sit in a circle with my team of sisters laughing and listening to them talk about boys (girls really aren't that different no matter where you go), witness the light of Christ in these kids, and make a lasting mark in someone's life by simply painting a bench that make it all worth it.

We are now coming to the end of our third week of outreach (the second phase of YWAM's Discipleship Training School where students use the knowledge gained during the lecture phase to go out on tangible missions, traveling to partner with various churches and children's homes/orphanages in places of need in order to further make God known).  We're finishing the third of nine STM's (short term missions) all thrown into one big, non-stop adventure.  That means I've had African braids for four weeks now.  And, it means I have eight short weeks before I am officially homeward bound.  After thirteen of some rather long weeks, the remaining time is going to fly by!  As far away as it feels at times, I am going to be home before I know it.  And that's really lucky, because God knows........this little girl misses her mommy!

~ Chloe Anne