Back to the fog

Not long after I arrived in the States, I poured out my heart about feeling like a stranger in my native land in my journal, and I came to a better understanding of why I felt I didn't belong there: I have often wondered since reentering the United States why I feel such great culture shock. How can I feel such a disconnect with the place I was born, raised, and for eighteen years called home? How can I feel that real home is a place in which I have spent just over a year? I have blamed it on many things.

American extravagance.

The grocery store that almost sends me into panic mode due to the sheer quantity and

variety of foods.

People who build million-dollar homes.

The lack of understanding and a lack of thanksgiving on the part of all of us.

The ease with which we receive medical care.

The amount of stuff that just clutters our lives.

All these things make it difficult to readjust, yes. But what has been the biggest shock to my system, the huge disconnect, is that I have stepped out of my reliance on God to meet my needs. I “miss” Jesus. He hasn't disappeared, of course, but I feel so far from Him because my life is actually functioning without Him. By “functioning,” I mean that if I am sick, I go to the drugstore or to the doctor. If I am hungry, I go to the grocery store. If I need to go somewhere, I get in my car. When I need some advice or guidance, I call my mom or go plop on my roommate's bed. If I want to feel happy, I get Brad, my little brother, or someone else to make me laugh. Katie Davis as quoted in Kisses from Katie

Already a week has gone by since returning home from my cross-continental trip to Africa. When I came in the back door last Monday night around 11:30 p.m., I was feeling the familiar fog of sleep deprivation that accompanies me every time I travel across the seas. It is the small inconvenience one must pay to make trips like that (unless, of course, one has the means to travel Business Class affording you the luxury of practically laying down to sleep while you fly, which I never have.) But unlike returning from Asia when it usually takes me about a week before I feel right again, after laying low on Tuesday by Wednesday morning I was back in the office just as I am most Wednesday mornings of the year.

My first one was one to savor

But there are other fogs to contend with in my return to “normal” life. There is the one of my return to relishing those creature comforts we so easily take for granted – hot showers, drinkable water from the tap, my two mugs of hot coffee I imbibe every morning richly flavored with Irish crème, the softness of my own bed. Thirty minutes into our flight home, I enjoyed my first ice cubes since coming to Africa. Somewhere over northern Uganda I was blessed with one of my favorite drinks – a Diet Coke with ice. It was a moment to savor the instant the sweet, cool drink passed through my lips. I love the fact that I have electricity on demand always (in Uganda it is intermittent at best. Six of the nine days we were in-country we had no electricity at all.) That if I need to make a quick trip to Eau Claire I can jump in my own car and travel rapidly down Highway 53 without having to dodge thousands of other motorists be they taxis, bicycles or Uganda's infamous bodas (not to mention her goats and cows.) And if it's summer outside, I can flip on the AC and enjoy a cool ride in the environmentally controlled space of my car. It is the way of our people, isn't it? We have developed conveniences and services that keep us insulated from just about all of life's uncomfortable feelings, smells and sights. Our trash is picked up once a week, our sewage is carried away safely and in a manner that does not harm the environment, and, in our town, if you let your house go into serious disrepair they will condemn it and forbid you to live there.

There is for so many of us in North America a veil of insulation protecting us from the ugliness that is so much a reality for how so much of the rest of the world lives – crushing poverty, perpetual hunger, dire disease, gross injustice, wonderfully beautiful children who did nothing whatsoever to become infected with HIV. Those in America who want to protest how “the other 99 percent live” maybe need to take a field trip to a developing country like Uganda – or Malawi or Haiti – and see just how precarious life can be. Those things that we take for granted or expect as a right – clean water from the tap, flush toilets in the house – are delights that only the very rich enjoy in a place like Uganda. In my brief stay in Africa, our team encountered some truly desperate situations that at times affected me very emotionally. But now that I am safely back on American terra firma, the fog will settle again and try as I might, it will be easier than I am willing to admit to forget, say, the smell of 40 men at the government hospital in Jinja in a ward the size of a small wing of one of our own local hospitals, with flies buzzing around broken and hurting bodies waiting for someone to examine them. Of course, it's not my intention to forget. In fact, I resolve not to but that fog of protection from All that is Unsettling and Uncomfortable will seek to settle on me like the tide rising.

This is part of daily life for so many Ugandans

There is yet another fog I have returned to: the fog of the routine of my daily life. Appointments to keep, stuff to do, people to see, concerts and ball games and church gatherings to attend and if I'm not careful suddenly my trip to Africa that ended last week will become “last year”, a distant memory kept alive only through my on-line photo albums and the plethora of new Facebook friends I now have (just about everyone I met in Uganda – young, old and inbetween – are on Facebook.) The pace of our life that we set for ourselves is such that at day's end we have no time to reflect, to meditate, to pray, to wait on the Lord. There's a coldness to this fog which has great potency to subtly drain us of spiritual vigor and focus parasitically. I fear this fog most of all.

This bag of food will keep her alive

I don't think the answer is to walk about here feeling guilty of the rich blessings that I enjoy. Nor is it to deny myself of ice cubes as some kind of guilt offering for being North American. But if my response to the Lord's invitation to return to Africa should he do so begin with multiple caveats of “I will so long as You give me a refrigerator with a freezer so I may have my daily allowance of ice cubes or have access to a bona fide Western flushing toilet to use daily” it shows that I am not the spiritual heavyweight that I imagine myself to be but a worldling bound to mere creature comforts and still in need of healing from my spiritual myopia. 

I keep forgetting to ask God first to heal me, to fill me, to guide me, to rejoice with me. I have to set aside “time to pray” in the morning and at night instead of being in constant communication with Him. In Uganda, because I was so physically “poor,” I was completely dependent on God and spiritually as wealthy as ever. As I sit here writing, I am frustrated with my own stupidity, my human willingness to step back into dependence on stuff and these places I swore I detested.

Katie Davis as quoted in Kisses from Katie

Choosing to stay and love which is never sacrifice