Four and a half months after I stopped work and planned to engage in a sabbatical of sorts, I’m back. I flew in from Kenya a day ago, and am now in Orlando as I prepare to help my parents move cross-country to San Francisco.
In many ways, I’m still recovering from Kenya, and cannot yet distill that complex and amazing experience into a weblog entry. In the coming days, I hope to write a thematic series of articles on the various aspects of my time there, which might be a better way of doing justice to it. For now, it’s just hard to adjust to life in the US, and life away from my friends old and new at Tumaini.
I certainly have a lot to think about and process. Between 3 weeks of touring with the New Frontiers, spending 6 weeks at Schloss Mittersill in Austria, and now living 8 weeks in rural Kenya, I’ve had a number of new experiences, and noticed a lot of things about the world and myself which call for introspection, integration, and response.
As I look forward to my future both near and far, I find that I’m more confused about what I can and should do, not less! In that sense, the sabbatical did not live up to my hopes! But I’m beginning to see that this place is probably right where I should be, despite my desires for easy clarity. I think God and other people gave me so many unlooked-for gifts during this time away, albeit sometimes through hard circumstances, so it has been a slow process of gaining the eyes to see their goodness! I’m sure that process will continue in the next weeks and months.
Now, I must focus on re-inserting myself into the matrix of life here, finding work, and pondering next steps. There’s an exciting freedom in not knowing where I will be in a year, let alone two months! But I hope that the right path, if there is such a thing, will present itself to me in enough time to follow it. It usually does, I guess.
So that’s all for now–please stay tuned for the Kenya series, pictures, and other announcements during the next few weeks!
