Back in Boston... I should probably feel more excited about the prospects of returning home, but to be honest, it feels more bittersweet than I expected. I think some of that is due to the fact that my trip is coming to a close earlier than I had planned. There have been several moments this past week where I've been near tears as pangs of wanderlust hit me and I realized that my nomadic fantasy is, at least for the moment, dead. God has been revealing to me over the past couple of days some of the reasons behind why he allowed things to transpire the way they have, and it's been a painful process to try and come to grips with it. Let me try to rewind and recap...

Way back last December, I felt led to pledge a certain amount of giving to my church every month. I intentionally made it a high enough amount that it would cause me some inconvenience and necessitate forgoing a few luxuries. There's nothing special in doing that; personally, I believe that if it doesn't hurt you to give, then you're not giving enough. Anyways, God was good, and I was able (through spartan living, a frugal budget, and learning to enjoy life's simple pleasures) to meet my commitments each and every month, as well as save some money aside for this summer. But spending a summer serving overseas meant that my income would drop to zero, which would make meeting my financial commitments to my church nearly impossible.

I was concerned about this before I left, and spent quite a bit of time praying that God would provide the "extra" money that I would need to be able to keep my promise. I even asked a couple of people to pray specifically about that aspect of my trip. And then I forgot all about that whole dilemma over the business of the summer... until a couple of days ago, when it suddenly dawned on me that, since my travels are over for the time being, I won't be "needing" some of the cash I had saved aside for my post-Europe travels. Thus, once I get back, I'll be in a position where I can meet that financial commitment I made. It's going to put me pretty close to the felt, and it means that once again I'm going to be in a spot where I'll have to totally trust God to provide enough for rent (assuming I can find a place), food, pretty much everything. I thought I might have a bit of a cushion for a change, but evidently that's not how it's going to work.

I'm not about to assign a 100% probability rate to this line of reasoning, or automatically rule out any other possible reasons or causes... but it seems like the Word has been practically screaming at my soul these past few days that this is why, this is how, this is what I need to do. After I crashed and burned and had started to walk back to the hostel, I was extremely mad at God for letting something like that happen in the first place. How could he possibly let me suffer harm, experience this kind of pain, and throw all my plans into tumult when I knew I had literally dozens of people praying for me? Then yesterday, the realization dawned that perhaps God brought this whole sequence of events about precisely because people were praying for me.

Yikes.

Maybe this was the only way God saw that he could pry those few dollars from my greedy little hands, and use them for his Kingdom instead if my travel plans. I guess what hurts the most is that I thought that my dream was His dream, too. Who knows, maybe it was... I don't feel the kind of conviction that comes from being confronted with hidden sin, but instead the kind that comes from knowing what you have to do, and being resigned to your fate even if you're not particularly thrilled with the idea. If I know what I have to do and still don't do it, though, that's definitely sin. Perhaps this is God's way of taking me to an even deeper level of trust and dependency, which I definitely want... sometime later. Specifically, not right now.

When I was reading through the Sermon on the Mount yesterday, I was hit between the eyes for the umpteenth time by the section on not worrying, trusting, and asking. God's made it clear that he wants all of me, especially my wallet. Anyways, at the moment I'm looking forward to getting home, relaxing for a few days, and trying to sort out some of these thoughts as well as look back on and process everything that's happened this summer. In the meantime, I need to start ferrying my luggage out to the bus stop. I'm quite hungry, but I draw the line at paying high prices for crappy airport food when I know that some good (and free!) home cooking is just a couple of hours away. But boy, I could sure go for a can of Moxie right now...