On the Move

Last week, I accepted an invitation to move to Charlotte, North Carolina, to work among the refugee community there.

Come August, I'll be living in an apartment complex where they resettle refugees and, essentially, loving on people as we all live our normal lives. 

That part sounds awesome. 

However, loving people is always messy.  Throw in cultural, religious, generational and social differences, language barriers, and the effects of physical/emotional trauma, and it gets even more complicated.  I am very aware of my inadequacy to navigate these things on my own, and to meet the staggering needs I will encounter.  Part of me is afraid that I will go and invest my heart only to have it battered and exhausted.  Part of me is afraid that my heart will be battered and my presence there won't even be helpful, or that I will make things worse somehow.

Yet, despite those fears, I'm in one of those odd (blessed) places where even in my fear I have a confidence outside of myself that this is where I'm supposed to go, and that—although I am small and fragile—God is great and inexhaustible.  His love and grace will be the only source of any good that comes of this, anyway, and there is great comfort in that.  I am afraid, but I don't feel afraid.  (Usually.)

So, yeah.  Here's to the next stage of life's adventure.  May God do with it, and me, what He will.