Six months.

I’ve been home six months now. Nearly to the day, I realized just now.

That’s really hard to believe. Six months is a lot of time. And there’s no small distance between Oglesby and Lopit, either. But they still hit me—the waves, I mean, of missing it and feeling that burden for the Lopit, my friends, my kids to know Christ, to experience freedom in Him.

We watched a video at church tonight, about a radical, Jihad-bent Muslim who came to Christ, and about the life he left behind in the West Bank. There was some B-roll of a little kid hoisted up on his gun-toting father’s shoulders. And the toddler was carrying a purple plastic machine gun. And my mind, my heart went straight back to our Grasshopper, and how, if things get really bad again in Sudan, he could be made to be a child soldier, or would be fleeing into the mountain caves to hide from Antonov bombings. (It doesn’t take much to get my mind and heart back to Sudan.)

I felt afresh that that would just crush me. That it will perhaps crush me more, not being there, not knowing. Not even being able to be there to do my best to make sure he and little Ellen and Franco make it through malaria season.

Sigh. Six months. Unbelievable.

Now I’m here. In such a different place than I ever imagined.

I know the Lord has me here. It’s where I’m supposed to be.

As I took communion this past weekend at Grace Bible Fellowship—Eric and my church in Peru—I was able to thank God for a lot of things. First, that I’m so blessed to share this new church home with Eric. It’s hard, leaving behind your local church full of familiar faces and people who’ve battled beside you for years. I miss it. I’ve had to mourn the loss in that. But the transition is certainly easier when I see how the Lord is using Eric at Grace, how he can use us both there, and how exalted he is by the teaching and fellowship.

And, second, I was able to thank God simply in remembering what we are celebrating in the Lord’s Supper—that God is such a gracious God that he sent his Son to die for my sins, that I may have eternal life in him. And that I might approach his throne with confidence, even in my prayers for the lost in the dark hills of Lopit. And that I can trust his Holy Spirit not only for my own ongoing sanctification and final salvation, but for those of his sheep in the mountains, of which perhaps Grasshopper is a number.

Six months have gone by. And with the seasons, a lot of things have changed.

But Jesus is still the same—Lord of my life, Lord of my path and Lord of his effectual grace.

Wow.