Well, there hasn't been an awful lot of activity here at Ideas From the North of late, primarily because I've been quite frantically trying to finish up the somewhat implausible amount of marking that I've had piling up throughout the term. The deadline? Flying back to Malaysia tomorrow morning for a two week return to the place I called home for half of last year.
Apart from being flat out tying up loose ends in Melbourne (I haven't succeeded; many ends are still loose), there's naturally a lot of conflicting emotions in me in the lead up to my return. Now, I'm not going to go into the details here as to why exactly I feel mixed about it, but suffice to say that my experience of life in Malaysia involved some of the greatest joy and some of the greatest pain of my short life so far. Returning to the place where it all coalesced bizarrely and indescribably - well, you can imagine that I'm not exactly sure what to feel.
Fortunately, unlike John Denver, I'm fairly sure of when I will be back again, but have less idea what to expect when I get there. I may have a chance to report some of it here, but make no promises. I remember once hearing something along the lines that, when you've been overseas for a week, you think you can write a novel about the experience, after six months you think you can write a short story, and after a year you think you can manage a sentence. I wasn't there for the full year, but I think enough got crammed into that year to have a similar effect. I may have coherent thoughts about it all. I may not. But I suspect it will be worthwhile.
One of the biggest challenges that I face right now is entrusting the whole situation to God. I'm not sure why. I know He can be trusted with everything, and has been trustworthy so far. But for some reason I feel that nutting things out on my own, in my own incompetent style, is better by far than being humble enough to accept that God's plans might be better than my own. Yes, the humbling part of the process seems to be the hardest.
The good news is that God is still likely to look after me, however immature and untrusting I am. The Bible makes it quite clear that God provides for His creation constantly, regardless of what it does or does not deserve. This morning, for instance, I read Psalm 50, which begins with these wonderful words:
"The Mighty One, God, the Lord,
speaks and summons the earth
from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets."
The rising and setting of the sun each day should serve as reminders of God's sustaining goodness. I can trust in Him because He is powerful, and because He is good. Those are two things that I am certainly not, and this is a very good reason to trust Him and not me.
Tomorrow I will leave as the sun rises. I will return when the sun has set. In the middle - the goodness and faithfulness of God.
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