Home Again

I played a lot of video games growing up.  Some of those games had a world map, with a little dot that showed where your character was in the world.  In a way, the distance between your little dot and your home town was a measure of how far ahead you were in the game, how much you'd grown, the challenges and monsters that you now had the power to overcome.

One day last summer, sitting at the kitchen table in the mission-office apartment, I happened to open Google Maps on my iPad.  I zoomed all the way out to look at the world.  I saw the Great Salt Lake, and the cities and valleys next to it that had been my home for almost a decade.  And then, all the way on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, I saw that dot.

In that mind-blowing moment, I realized I could go anywhere in the world.

I've been home for two weeks now.  (Two weeks exactly, now that I think about it...)  I wanted to write this post a few days after I got back, but it took me a little longer than I expected to get things together.  It wasn't until I started pulling boxes out and unpacking them that I realized how much stuff I left at home.  I wiped my computer and I've been using a new email address, and I got a new phone a couple days ago, so it's been a fresh start in a number of ways.  

But, home is home.  Most of everything is right where I left it.  The biggest change is inside myself.  Even though I'm basically going back to doing the same thing as before my mission (college and work), I feel like I can do it better now.  Like my capacity has grown.  A lot.

It seems like there was a bit of an eruption of noise and controversy right when I got back, with some uproar about an updated Church policy, and terrorist attacks in France, and maybe something else.  (Something's telling me there was a third thing, but I can't remember what it was.)  I feel peace, though.  Direct experience from my mission tells me that God is still firmly in charge, and thus everything will work out fine in the end (however much it hurts in the meantime).

Right now I'm planning on setting up a new blog, though I'm not quite sure when exactly I'll be doing that.  I may also keep this blog up as a place for Gospel-related thoughts directed towards members of the Church.  We'll see.

^_____^