"How Was Your Trip?!"

She smiles at me from across the hall, 28 shiny faced kindergardners in tow.  She asks across the table over doughnuts at church and on the phone and in a text. 

The question is posed by people I love the most in my life.  Their genuine desire to hear my answer ~ unquestionable, to be sure; but how do I answer it ~ enough ~ when our expected interaction in the halls of school or the doughnut line at church or in that text message is a moment and I just need a lifetime?  How do I answer so that they will see my words not as my mouth forms them but as my heart cries out?

I don't have an adequate answer to their question.  I don't know how to answer any of them the way my brain says I should.  My words seem cold and flat against a warm fiery ember that burns and has always burned but snatches at the wind and catches a spark and feeds a flame.  I went to Peru to find a little girl named Keila.  I went to Peru and found Nicole and Natalia and JammiLuz and Diana and God ~ and then ~ Me.  And I can't wait to go back.  Right now - Today.

My prayer is that over time, words will come fast and God will fill in the blanks, but for today my words are broken and inadequate.  And I am not going back ~ Yet.  I am here in my comfortable home on this fluffy friese and the two inch pad and just wondering at the wonder of it all.  How God can be so big there where their needs are so great and yet here we make Him seem so small.  Yet He is Him.  The great I Am.  He doesn't need us to make Him big or small or anything at all.  He just is.  Why is that?  Why is it that we cling to Him as the plane crashes yet we turn away when the captain turns off the saftey belt sign?

Crazy.  It's a crazy upside down world where I have a heart full of love for my four babies here at home yet I have to fly to Peru to feel my heart swell big enough to fit them all inside.  That's what God did to me on this trip.  He tipped my world upside down and inflated my heart so that I could see His children are my children.

I am startled by the magnitude of His love for us, startled by the love He gave me for my four children here and all the beautiful little ones we met along our paths in Peru.  I am irrationally jarred by His grace and love.  I am so grateful for such a time as this, a time to reflect and narrate and think upon His blessings.

And I answer her.  I answer her with a tear in the corner of this eye and a smile that radiates through both: I am changed.

"How was your trip?" she asks.

"He changed me," I answer.  "And I can never be the same."