Wanderlust

I’ve always been a little bit restless.

I blame this on my youthful (right?!) zeal to “do something big” for God.

But I had a dream the other night that I ran away from it all.

Like off-the-grid, nobody-knows-where-I-am away.

Because it would be super-easy to raise kids in the middle of the woods with no electricity and only a hatchet and a cooking pot to my name.

But anyway.

I know this is part of the restlessness too.

Sometimes I just want to run away.

Away from all of the roles that I mostly love but struggle to reconcile with each other: mom.  foster mom.  teacher.  friend.  writer.  advocate.

Their collision feels both too hard and too ordinary.

I dream of rocking babies in an orphanage, of teaching at a school in the middle of nowhere, of delivering vaccines to remote villages on horseback, of making a ton of money to invest in microenterprise.

I like to try to divide up the moments, the experiences in my life.  You know, the ones where I am “on mission” for Jesus.  And then all the rest.

And then I see my babies with their toes dangling in the water.

A spontaneous stop after an errand I’d written off as a failure.

Babies who, today, are my mission.

My hard, ordinary mission.

The justice system tells me that one of them is “mine” and the other one is not.

But I cannot not love.  I cannot not pour every bit of my heart and soul into giving them every chance to know how family feels.

And so

Tonight I will sing and pray and tuck them in.  Again.

Tomorrow I will feed them and read them stories and put up with their ridiculous shenanigans.  Again.

Maybe I will dream again about running away.

But I will wake up and do the hard, ordinary thing.  And then I will do it again.

And so

If you are feeling restless.

Tired, unappreciated, emotionally frazzled.

It does not mean that you are in the wrong place.

It does not mean that you are not “on mission.”

Get some sleep.  Dream a little.

And wake up to do the hard, ordinary thing.

Because it matters too.