I knew this would be a hard transition.

I didn’t know it would this hard. I’d lived overseas before and had no expectation that two months abroad could wreak such havoc on my soul. But it has. This summer marked and married me in ways like nothing I’ve experienced to this point. It’s been a little over a month since the ground touched me at Dulles, most of which has felt dressed in a stranger’s skin, wrestling to reconnect with a distant land, while attempting connection to this foreign land called home—and this ambiguous being called me.

The first time I sat down to write this, I was in the peaceful confines of my home, cooled by the window’s clean breeze and comforted by plush furniture and the scent of a cinnamon candle. I had woken to a hot shower and feasted on a slow, Saturday morning breakfast. This afternoon finds me in a lighted coffee shop, with a floor, a ceiling and even background music to enchant my writing. It’s still perplexing to me that the machine at my fingertips can have me sending, buying, or surfing instantaneously. Or if that feels cumbersome, I can do so with the plastic card in my pocket. People are driving on a road in front of me, laughing at a table beside me, and an elderly man just skateboarded down the sidewalk behind me (granted, this scene might be unique to LA). It’s sunny outside. It’s safe, colorful and progressive. For the most part it seems controllable, such that needing a God today will not make a natural crossing of my mind. I can do, plan, prevent and predict, almost to a tee. The idea of surviving this day is the farthest thing from my attention. A homeless man just walked in. He probably hasn’t showered all week, and maybe hasn’t eaten all day, but chances are, by nightfall, he’ll be covered by a meal and comforted by a roof. Memories reel quite the contrary in Africa, where food, shelter and even survival are never an expectation.

The jury is still out as to whether our life is “better” necessarily, but in terms of ease, life in a first-world country wins without question. My rationales to poverty were shattered this summer. Living with poverty, versus visiting it, has forced me to engaged with some entirely new subjects. I no longer believe, “They don’t know what we have,” and therefore, “are content with what they don’t.” And I no longer assume that one kid’s smile means the whole country must be okay—let alone that kid. There are a few launch pads here, but I’ll make it brief by saying they do know what we have, or at least enough to give them a more desirous and intrinsically covetous spirit than anyone I’ve ever met on this side of the ocean. Furthermore, what kid wouldn’t smile when you ride in on a shiny bus, or even running automobile, carrying candy, polaroids, or presents?

There is no good reason why Africa is seeing, feeling and tasting depravity and death at this very moment. And this one. Most mornings wake me with tears—tears of nostalgia and confusion, tears of conformity and consternation, limitation, inadequacy, intolerability, tolerability, memory, reality, superficiality, sadness, separation, and the list goes on. There’s no telling what my next minutes will unravel, but as I continue to process through these past few months, I continue to grow in belief that there are approximately, and maybe only, two options that make any consoling, and yet logical, sense. Either, the concept of God is an historically massive crux that has killed, marred and masked mankind as a mechanism of power, justifying the true state of humanities depravity and depraved desire—all at the sick cost of “saving” souls. Or, there is a living God who is intrinsically and extrinsically aware and untraceably empathetic toward the cause and causation of what we know as “evil.” Though still impossible to perceive, or conceive, from the limitations of a mind, this God speaks and spoke in such a way that claims His personhood as enough—more than enough—to answer into life’s richest high and poorest low. Furthermore, as one who is gently and justly piecing together a mysterious mosaic that restores, rectifies and saves lost souls.

I’m hoping in the latter.

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