I love rhythms and routines. I’m a planner. It’s important to me for things to be ordered and organized in the midst of a sometimes chaotic life. Making lists, journaling, dreaming, and preparing. They are all things that make my nomadic world feel stable. But I also love change, adventure, exploring, and get restless when things stay the same for too long! The paradox of stability and changeability!
Many years ago, I came across this comic strip, and it just resonated with me.
Life is made up of so many detours, and I’ve been thinking a lot about them when staying is my default. While I live in the in-between worlds of wanting to stay and wanting to leave, it’s the detours that can often derail me. I don’t love deviations from a journey, unexpected changes of direction, or having plans disrupted. Because of my culture and my faith, my default is often to stay through hardships. The capacity for endurance through challenging times as cross-cultural workers cannot be underestimated! But sometimes, I have had to give myself permission to release myself for a season from a place and a people. Even if it meant leaving behind the preciousness of a commission and a call.
I’ve experienced the in-between journeys of furlough and fundraising, and the waiting to get to or back to a destination. Some detours were chosen for me, and some were chosen by me.
There were times when a detour was necessary for my mental and physical health, and to continue in the place I was and in the condition I was in would have been more detrimental. I realise, looking back now, that rest, healing, and recuperation from the weight of cross-cultural work was nothing to be ashamed of. Because sometimes staying is harder.
Looking back, I see now how some detours were actually better than my original plan. To stay would be to stop in a place with no way forward. I try to remind myself that I am not irreplaceable. Someone will come, do what I do, maybe not in the same way, but the work will continue, and in my leaving, I release someone else to do what they have been commissioned to do.
If I’m being honest, there have been many a time when my detours mirrored this windchime that fell and smashed recently. Broken, painful, yet still part of my story.
Like the comic strip says, what if the detours are the real path of life? What if they are, in fact, the significant milestones and mile-markers that connect the other parts of my journey? A part of a bigger plan and a bigger purpose. Pieces of a mosaic that only seem to fit and connect when the whole picture is complete.
Maybe it is in the detours of life that the real lessons of life are learned. I’m working on seeing purpose in these detours instead of being frustrated and impatient to get to where I really think I need or want to be. In this new year, I am releasing the detour that I find myself in right now, knowing it is another piece in my mosaic of sojourning.
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