Coming home from Belize has been a difficult adjustment for me. The things I saw there and the things I experienced – in the flesh and in the spirit – were so profound and life-changing, and coming home to such comfort and complacency is difficult. The poverty of the world is such a dramatic contrast to the extreme materialism of life in the United States, and the Christmas season and all of its extravagance amplifies those differences. My greatest fear is forgetting it all. I went to make a difference in this world for Him, but the difference that lingers in my mind is that which appeared inside of myself. I’m shaken somehow. I’m different, and there’s nothing I want more than to never, ever be the same as I was before.
Even so, I am afraid that I will revert back to the same ways of thinking I had before. I am afraid that I will fall back into the comfortable way of life I know here, rather than continuing to live in a shaken, unsettled state of mind. I just don’t want to forget, and my singular prayer has been that God would allow me to remain changed and to never be comfortable with my old way of life again.
As I have struggled to adjust (or rather, to not adjust) to life in the States, I have been struck by the thought that this might, in some small way, be the way the Lord felt about His coming to Earth. When I got on the airplane to go to Belize, I was in one world; when I stepped onto the tarmac in Central America, I was in another. Similarly, when Jesus stepped out of the splendor of heaven and emerged as a tiny baby in a dirty, smelly manger in relatively poverty-stricken Israel, He found Himself in a world that was completely foreign to what He had always known. He chose to come, because He knew that He had to and because He knew that there was something He had to do here; still, though, He had to have felt a bit of culture shock at what He saw and experienced. He lived in the middle of our mess, though, for 33 years, walking our dirty roads and touching our disease and speaking to our deafness and experiencing our painful life just as we did. He felt it all, as a foreigner but yet as a native…..God made flesh, resident of heaven relocated to the depravity of earth.
And when the time came for Him to go, He went. He cried human tears as His human body was drained of life and He left human existence to return to His home alongside God. I am sure that it was a shock to return to the glory and perfection of heaven after seeing and experiencing what He encountered here. I can’t imagine that the adjustment to golden streets and utter peace and undistorted presence of God was a smooth one, and I can’t pretend that He wasn’t at least a little bit glad to get back home, to the place of comfort where He was exalted as He should always be. I can’t pretend either, though, that He was willing to become completely absorbed by that life and to forget about the life He had lived and the people He had met and the things He had experienced while visiting earth.
No, I think He probably felt a little torn, too. I think He probably felt a little conflicted, realizing that yes, He had done what He had come to do, but that we were still living in such horrible conditions. We were still living in a world of sin, and while He had done His part to free us from that, He couldn’t do anything to simply pick us up and remove us from our context. He had to go back, and we had to stay here.
The beautiful thing for me to remember, though, is that though His surroundings changed so dramatically, He did not. He was the same when He was here as when He was in the heavens, and when He returned there, He did not forget what He had seen. He remembered us, and remembers us still. He sees us and feels our pain as clearly today as He did when He walked alongside us in the flesh, and no distance or amount of time can change that. He has not forgotten, and He never will.
That is remarkable to me as I struggle to acclimate myself to a life that once was so comfortable but that now seems so foreign in so many ways. Even if I do someday forget, I am grateful for the experience, and I am grateful for the insight into what the Lord may have felt as He did what He did for us. Any experience that lends insight to the tremendous sacrifice He made for me is well worth it.
Still, though……I don’t want to forget.
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