From the kettle I slowly pour a cup of hot water into a bucket and swoosh it with my finger. Not boiling but hot enough to do the trick. I add some cold water until I have an inch covering the bottom of my bucket and I step into it in hopes of getting clean.
Though I’ve scrubbed and shaved and painted my nails, it’s still been 6 days since I’ve washed my hair. Between minimal water and a nasty cold that left me too exhausted to bathe, I dream for the moment I’ll step into a shower and have hot water pour from the sky.
My team are such troopers. Weeks of “showering” at the lake, I usually say your antsy feeling peaks at 4 weeks but after that, you get used to not being fully clean.
Well I don’t know how this happened, but I blinked and the shower count down is at a week! What?! Less than 10 days and I will be back with my love and some dear friends, eating salads and laughing about how clean and fresh we are.
I’m still processing this amazing past season in Africa. Papa is too kind. I literally step back and my jaw drops. Between incredible, mind blowing times with the chiefs and leaders of our village, to watching our leadership league boys be transformed and rocked to their core, to African weddings and incredible visitors… I feel like I’m leaving on such a high.
My thoughts are now directed to my drastic season shift.
A couple years ago, I would have seen it differently. You’re leaving the nations?! Wait, what?!
To this I now smile. Everyone is so different, so this is by no means what is right for everyone. But after years of already living overseas, my fiancé and I talked about legacy. How our life and marriage will effect hundreds, through having children and then them having children, and their children’s children. We sit and discuss heritage and missionaries who boldly went before us and what it looks like to put family before ministry.
We felt the whisperings of papa and for us, knew that meant our first season together would be a season of learning how to put each other first. In the west.
To be honest, even though I knew it was right, it sometimes took my breath away. My neighbors would not be soldiers, my bedtime stories would not be told to the rhythm of rats scurrying around the walls, and my morning schedule would not include being bombarded by dozens of our children holding their thumbs up to greet me.
But pursuing normal is not just pursuing war. Or more the peace to end war. “Pursuing normal” is what heaven whispered to a young girl sitting at the end of her bed years ago, calling her to make “laying down your life for love” a daily occurrence. The love that leaves you slightly uncomfortable. To remember the poor and search out the pure religion of caring for the orphan and widow. Normal.
So though my “normal” on the outside is shifting, my core stays true.
10 days and things will shift. 10 days and my life will not involve motor biking over volcanic rock but rather a Prius.
But more than just a Prius and Pilates classes, our war zone team has been dreaming….
Are you ready? For the next year or so, we’re revamping our world. We’ll be cultivating family and office life for Justice Rising developments in the west.
Watching the wars break out all around the world, we feel this is all so timely and have been calling team members from around the globe to gather for this very intentional season.
Graphic designers, creative developers, curriculum writers, prayer house squatters, and administrators.
Our team is gearing up to be able to run with precision into the ends of the earth.
We’ll be balancing office work and more training with skid row and basing teams near the downtown streets with working girls and homeless men.
After our strategic year some will stay in the west while others run with us into the war zones of the earth.
As you can imagine, we are excited. And busy.
10 days! 10 days and my whole world shifts. 10 days and I go from war zones back to wedding planning, to planning for war zones.
I wish I could freeze this moment in time and hold onto it a little bit tighter.
But rather because I can’t, sorry if it becomes a little redundant on blog posts. :)
