I’ve been away for 6 weeks and just now getting back into the flow of work related things. It’s generally a battle to settle back at home when I’ve been on the road, but returning to “normal” life after 6 weeks away has proven a bit more to deal with than I expected. What I’m going through is often called “re-entry,” primarily because of our common desire to be astronauts and the burning sensation often associated with traveling to foreign places.. I’m told there is an ointment…
…Don’t google that.
Anyway, the more I reflect on what my actual difficulty is, the more I think it has to do with reorienting myself to a much faster pace of life than that I’d lived while I was gone. For the last two weeks of May, Amy and I were in Hawaii with good friends on vacation. The month of June was then spent at Young Life’s Woodleaf property where I was serving as a leader/mentor to college students who were also there to serve (more thoughts on this, and them, later). Almost everything about my days over the past month and a half was organized around relationships; around people. The pace of life here in my little office is set by the To Do List which currently looks like something Melville might have put together.
All of which harkens back to something a young Ethiopian man told a room full of christian ministers here in California this past May. Reflecting on the un-relational nature of American living and christian ministry in particular, he said
“My people in Ethiopia thought you Americans were the richest people in the world, but then we realized you are poor because you have no time.”
And that afternoon in may the burning sensation was directly related to the sting of being slapped in the face with some African wisdom.
Here’s the thing about re-entry; it’s about the collision of ways to live and in that collision, there is wisdom about each of those ways of life. In my case, the temptation is to consider the slower-paced, relationally-oriented life I lived for the past 44 days something unnatural.. a shadow of reality. Whereas living beyond my own energies, half-awake from chasing my to do list and with little time for the things and people I actually care about is what is truly real. But lying on my deathbed, I’m pretty convinced I won’t want to take one last look at all the crap I checked off my list. I’m going to want my peeps around me. I am probably, at that time, going to wonder what the hell kept me from organizing more of my life around those very people, slowing down enough to hear what they were saying and enjoy them.
We challenged our Summer Staff to remember what it was about their month that made it special, enjoyable and good; to commit to taking some of those patterns home and implementing them. It looks as if this is my challenge; slow down and be with the people I love.
![[Digg]](http://www.justinmcroberts.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.justinmcroberts.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[MySpace]](http://www.justinmcroberts.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/myspace.png)
![[Twitter]](http://www.justinmcroberts.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
Well said Justin. I dread re-entry the way you dread a mystery meal with friends of unknown tastes. The other side of re-entry is the seeming inability to take off again . . . its like we can’t find a clear runway. The truth is, its the lies we believe as our Ethiopian friend said, “you are poor because you have no time.” Its a lie, but its one we too often believe and it progressively steals bits of our humanity away and one day it becomes a truth.
great wisdom. thanks. perhaps you can re-define what you are re-entering.
God is good
jpu
The inbetween place of “no longer there” yet “not quite here” — I too am trying to absorb it all and i realize different things are important to me. Im praying I do not get sucked into old ways that keep me poor in spirit, but find new ways where I will be living in the “here” yet fully alive.
that’s the hope.