For anyone who has ever spent an extended period of time overseas, they know what it is like to come home. Your life has moved on around you... without you. And nobody seems to want to really know what it was like for you. It is never easy, but you always seem to find your place again. I guess my circumstances are a bit different, or maybe its just me, but I am having a hard time finding my place again. Most people come home to the place they left, back to school and classes, or work, or whatever. Its a little different with me. I came, but back to my parents house, back to Lewisville, a place I haven't really called home in over four years. Sure, I lived here during the summers, but its different then. I'm not living in Greensboro, where my life has been for the last four years. I have also, for all intensive purposes, graduated from college. Yet I am not out finding a job, or working like a typical graduate would, because I am leaving again in August (hopefully) to go back to Russia.
I am finding myself in this... hole. Im not quite in the work force, yet not in college, I'm not close to many people in Lewisville, and my friends in Greensboro are going on with their lives, without me. I don't feel like I really fit anywhere. And nobody around me understands what I have been through. I've had the same problem at church. I don't really belong in the college class, yet I don't think I belong in the singles class. It seems like I am on the outskirts of everything, not really finding my place right now.
I see myself compartmentalizing my life. Putting everything in neat little boxes so that nothing overlaps, and so that I can live in the present and not miss what is behind me. I have only been home for a little over two months, yet I can barely remember some of the things that happened in Kazan. It feels like it is years behind me, not months. I find myself asking, how can I integrate my lives? My life overseas with my life in Greensboro, with my life at home, with my life at Church. It seems like in each compartment the people there only know that side of me, I haven't opened up myself wholy to anyone, and that is what is so difficult to do. I come to find myself longing for the internship to start just so I would feel like I finally fit somewhere, I could devote my self wholly to the internship, and not have to worry about sections of my life overlapping, like I have to now. It is one of the most difficult times in my life to date.
The only real comfort I find in all of this is that this is God's plan for me right now, and in that I can find comfort.
"Somewhere between the hot and the cold
Somewhere between the new and the old
Somewhere between who I am and who I used to be
Somewhere in the middle, You'll find me
Somewhere between the wrong and the right
Somewhere between the darkness and the light
Somewhere between who I was and who You're making me
Somewhere in the middle, You'll find me
Lord, I feel You in this place and I know You're by my side
Loving me even on these nights when I'm caught in the middle"
-Casting Crowns, "Somewhere in the Middle"
