I just returned home from a missions trip.  While there, I met some amazing people and saw God in the faces of people in all the places we went.  His Grace and Face are there to meet us all over this great big world in the faces of people from every nation.  I have read and heard so many talk about “reverse culture shock” after coming home from being on a missions trip.  While I didn’t experience it from my trip, I can certainly understand how true it must be.  It is amazing to have that “broadening experience” of participating in God’s grace through immersion into another culture.  It gives us a deeper and more multi-dimensional look into the heart of God, to see Him at work in the lives of people who don’t speak your language (or maybe speak it with such an accent that it is hardly distinguishable as your own).  It is exciting to see those in the poorest of countries, with so much less materially than we have here in the States, glorifying and praising God in their hearts for the things they DO have and for what He has done for them.  It is amazing to see the contrast between what we take for granted and what they go without daily.  I can understand why it would be hard to come home after such a meaningful and broadening experience.

Nevertheless, it is important to come home and be able at some point to continue to see God’s Grace and Face in the familiar.  He has sovereignly placed us wherever we are for a reason.  Whether in an affluent home in the United States or in a desperately poor corner of India.  He has a plan and a purpose even for that.  Our purpose for being placed where we are is known solely by Him, but rest assured that there is a purpose.  Those people you were able to touch on the mission field — wherever you went — are no more or less important than those people with whom you come into contact every day at home.  While those at home may look at life from a much more materialistic point of view, that doesn’t make them any less important to God or any less in need of His grace and salvation.

So, if you are experiencing “reverse culture shock” from a recent missions trip, remember that your life is no less filled with purpose in your “familiar” surroundings than it was wherever you had the privilege of going.  It may be hard to feel the “feelings” of purpose in these familiar surroundings, while remembering the exciting, beautiful, heart-wrenching, emotion-filled times you had while you were far from home.  But our faith is not about the feelings; rather, it is about God’s truth being implemented in our lives wherever we are.  “Therefore we also have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him.” – 2 Corinthians 5:9