Unexpected

It must be the call to prayer that rouses me from my sleep.

The damp air seeps through the glassless-but-shuttered window inches away from my head.  I shift on the thin foam mattress, my foot brushing against the mosquito net.  Trucks clatter up the road past the house on their way to the market - which I can smell from where I lay.

I have never lived here before, and yet my mind has been imagining Africa for the better part of two decades.  I have read so many stories, seen a thousand pictures.

It's astonishing, when I stop to think, just how little of Senegal surprises me in these early days.

The way the heat feels oppressive - positively smothering in the middle of the day - and the way my skin is sticky with the sweat that never fully dries.  I have a prickly heat rash everywhere and it doesn't go away for weeks.

I see the children's faces, the bare feet of the ones who are begging.

The ladies balancing buckets on their heads.

Meat with flies swirling around.  Colorful vegetables in piles on sheets of tarp.  Fish.  So much fish.  Fresh, dried, smoked, salted, rotting.

Mortars pound, shoppers barter, buses screech, horse hooves clip-clop.

I have heard it all, seen it all, in my mind before.

What of this have I not expected?

What is different than how I imagined it to be?

Me.

I have been dreaming of doing great things for God, of being a missionary hero, ever since I was six or so and read Missionary Stories with the Millers.  How I would learn a language and befriend people and share Jesus.

And here I am.

I can't even talk to people.  I am bumbling and stupid and scared - too small in the face of the task before me.

Somehow I never imagined this in all my missionary dreams.  I was always the hero, strong and capable.

There is a depth of emptiness that I've never experienced before, a crushing sense of my not-enough-ness.

It's as suffocating as the blazing equatorial sun at mid-afternoon.

Here, in this place where my identity and expectations of myself unravel with frightful speed, God shows up yet again with His relentlessly extravagant grace.

I should expect that by now, and yet it still catches me by surprise.