Fully Known

One of my biggest struggles of moving overseas later in life is that I never feel fully known.  I feel like I have lived two separate lives.

There was the Jack and Angie who married young, fully invested in each other’s family, served our churches well, fostered, adopted, led a recovery ministry and then buried a daughter.

Now there is the Jack and Angie who learned about a great need on the other side of the world, sold our house and all of our possessions to move to a land we had never seen before.

We have our America life and we have our Indonesia life.  Not one person besides the five people who live in the walls of this house fully know our story.  That’s a struggle for me.

I recently went through a traumatic experience here in Indonesia and I’m trying to process through it.  My friends here don’t fully know the trauma that we have experienced in the past, and the process that it took to “recover” from that.  Just like my friends in America can’t fully understand the trauma that I am feeling now.

My friends here never met Laila or saw the Angie that was exhausted sitting in a hospital room night after night wondering if my child was going to live.  They never sat in a recovery meeting with me and listened to me feel like a failure as an adoptive parent as I poured out the enemies lies that we’re building up in my head so they could help me heal from them. My America friends know that Angie and have always loved her well.

My friends in America will never fully understand living in Indonesia.  They will not know the trauma of watching a man on a motorbike cut you off in “rules but no rules” Asia driving and watch he and his motorbike bike slide across the pavement and barely escape death.  My Indonesia friends know that Angie and are loving her well.

As I write these words and get them out, I feel thankful.  That’s not where I had thought this was going but as I see it all in print I see how loved and well cared for we have been in every season of life that the Lord has brought us to.  What I also see is that there is One who is the only one who fully knows any of us.  Jesus.

I am fully known, loved and cherished by a God who has never, ever left my side.  While I long to be fully known and understood, I have to rest in the fact that  already am.  By the One who cares so much that He was willing to die for me.