Dear West Africa...

Dear West Africa,

Oh, where do I even start...

The beginning, I guess?

I'll confess I wasn't head-over-heels for you at first.  I desperately missed my family.  And...well, frankly, your hot season and cockroaches weren't terribly endearing.  Nor the trash littering the streets and the smells that went along with it.

I guess that's what I saw first.  I looked at you through my neat-freak, perfectionist eyes, and so many things about you just rubbed me raw.  Wore me down.  Constantly.

But you know what?

Underneath my perfectionism, I longed for something more.  Something more than a put-together life in a put-together world.

I wanted authenticity.  Freedom.  Grace.  Life.

Maybe it was that my heart had been starved of all that for so many years.  And though I had started taking my first wobbly grace-steps, I still had so much farther to go.

I needed to see the mess and the raw, so I could see that grace was really enough for all that, so I could see there really was beauty in the messiness.

I needed to see life with all its imperfections laid bare, so that I'd realize I didn't have to be perfect, either.  So I could learn to release my tight hold on impossible ideas and instead, embrace life as it was.

And there you were.

It was such a struggle in the beginning.  But the things that caused me the most sleepless nights, the most tears, the most hair-pulling moments, were actually the things that I learned from the most - and the answers to some of my deepest prayers.

I'm humbled when I think of that...how God must have been smiling down in love, knowing how He was going to answer those prayers, knowing the great big gift hiding for me underneath that oh-so-unlikely wrapping paper.

He's good, you know.

He works miracles.  Not always the big, dazzling kind.  Sometimes I think He prefers the quiet kind that slip in through back door, the kind we don't even see coming.

You see, it's funny how when I think about you now - my life there, the people I knew, the things I learned - or when I see something here that reminds me of you, I get this strange feeling.

It's a lot like...homesickness.

I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to call you home.  Some days I didn't know if I'd ever want to.  But slowly, imperceptibly, you wove your way into my heart.  You became home, a place I loved.  You did more than that, though.  You started to change me.  How I saw the world, the people around me, myself.  What I valued.  What I wanted.  What I loved.

In the end, I came to see you as one of God's most beautiful gifts to me, a gift I'm so very grateful for.

And, West Africa, you know what else?  God's got this crazy amazing plan - for you and me both (and for the whole world!).  He's doing incredible things in you, and I just know He's got many more in mind for the future.

I'm super excited to see Him unfold that plan.

Love always,
Rachel