Lonely

One time, when we were in a village in Ghana, they asked us to pray for them because they had no drinking water.

That memory keeps on coming back to haunt me.

Oftentimes, I feel very lonely, yet I feel right, like where I am and what I'm doing is where I should be, which makes it worth it. Right after Ghana, I remember going to my sister's hockey game, and standing in the lobby. Everyone around me was taking about the stupidest things; where they might go for school, or what they would wear to prom, or who was doing what, and it felt so incredibly petty, stupid, and meaningless. I remember thinking, is this the kind of mediocrity I want to be surrounded by? And I could no longer relate to the people I was surrounded with, because I had seen and experienced something completely different and heart-wrenching that I would never go back to ignorance and selfishness, yet I could not relate to the people that took me on that journey. I realized that I was not the Ghanain people who had impacted me so, and I was not the people around me I had grown up surrounded by. I didn't fit in, yet that was okay.

I pray that I could live out a life of faith that is able to answer that prayer, and not content myself with the hypocrisy to live in complacency and have the nerve to call that a well-lived life.