Smiles

It is easier for me to write about the day-to-day happenings of our trip, but just this morning, I began to process our trip on a little more personal level. I was happy in Africa…really, really happy. When I look at the pictures of myself holding sweet babies, laughing with kids, and teaching in classrooms there, I see a happiness in myself that is somewhat foreign to me. It’s like when you hear your own voice on a recording. You know that it is you, but it always sounds so different. My smile, it’s just so different.

What makes my happiness in Africa so surprising to me, is that for the past 8 years, but especially the past 6 months, I have struggled in a major way with depression. I am on medication, but even with that, I have slumps. I look at my life, I look at my marriage, my kids, my Jesus, and I know that I should be happy. I know that I am blessed. I just have a really hard time feeling it.  

I went to a counselor last November after I was journaling and sobbing as I wrote about how hopeless I felt and how everything around me just felt so overwhelmingly hard. I was struggling with whether or not I deserve the life that I have because I sure was not enjoying it like I should have been.

I wrote:

“I don’t want to spend my whole life working so hard to find happiness only to realize I was living in it all along unable to recognize or accept it. I don’t want to keep changing what we have, what we do, or how we do it hoping beyond hope that I will finally make the right alteration to our lives that will allow me to enjoy life. I know the dangers of thinking “I will be happy when _____” and yet that is how I am living.”

It makes me sad just to think about those slumps and all of the emotions I feel during those seasons. I do believe that there is something biological/chemical/physical in my body that causes the depression. I do believe that I need medication to keep that negative, critical voice out of my head, but so much of the fuel for that voice is a state of mind where I compare my life to others.

In Africa, I didn’t have to try to be happy. I just was. When I held those kids who wanted nothing more than my loving arms, the whole world felt right. There wasn’t a list of things that needed to get done or a big agenda for the day. Our job was simply to visit orphans and love on them in a big way. What a blessing that was, and continues to be. What a lesson for me about how to live.

The focus of life in Africa, for most, is simply living day to day, which causes people to truly live in the moment. There is purpose in each and every thing that they do. Nothing is wasted…not resources, not time, not energy.

In America, we read books about living in the moment. We write bucket lists so that we can feel like we really lived while we were here. We coin phrases like, “YOLO”, as if it some brand new idea. In Africa, I feel like I was really living; living for the moment, living for the smiles, living for the fun, living on purpose.

Our kids think that they need more because we’ve conditioned them that way, but what if we let them experience a life where everything that they did had purpose? What if we could live in America with purpose? It is hard, and I don’t have the answer to that. There are many distractions in our life. I do have the insight though. I do have the goal. God took me to Africa to help me learn about living.