đź“Ś February 2014
Flying back home from Hong Kong to Surabaya, I felt differently.
Have you ever felt—as you were on your way home from something you’d enjoyed—a creeping sadness or gloom, a dread of returning to the monotonous routine of everyday life?
That’s how I would’ve usually felt. Looking out the car window in the evening dark, the sinking feeling of heaviness in my heart. Remembering that tomorrow I would have to wake up early for school, that I would have to start washing dishes again at night, and that the rest of my days were going to be filled with chores and homework. The time of adventure and freedom was over, and all the future had in store was tedium and wearisomeness.
But that’s not how I felt today.
Instead of dread, I felt unexpectedly okay. Hopeful even. Not really an excited kind of hopeful, but rather just a hint of hopefulness—that the future may have something worth looking forward to.
In Hong Kong, I had met others my age who I felt I could relate with, who’d experienced similar things to me. Their parents had also made the decision to go on to serve God full-time in church ministry, radically changing their family’s lives. Some had to move with their parents to different countries, or had to live with less. But more than that, like me, all had to face the question: “Is my parent’s God real?”
Each was at a different place in his or her answer. Some had just come to know this God while others had known Him for a long time already. Some were still struggling to understand and follow Him while others had already taken the path of following in their parents’ footsteps, serving and working in church.
As I listened to these friends, their thoughts and experiences, I came to realize that the world was in fact much bigger than I’d imagined and the possibilities for my future more than I had thought. There was much beyond what I had thought I had known, and my fears and worries were challenged.
Who was God?
Could I come to know God like them also?
On that plane ride home, I didn’t yet know whether God was real or not. But I felt that something worth looking forward to was yet to come.
I felt that there was something to hope for.
