Where will you have me?

waiting for God.

Dec 31, 2025

What started as a home assignment with the intention of returning to Albania has turned into something I still don’t really know how to explain. I trace a lot of it back to a conversation I had with God sitting in a church on Sunday, September 7th.

“Do you want me to do more?”

An invitation I know I should be quick to say yes to. We all should. Yet I can’t help but recognize there is a yielding, a giving up of my own desires (what I think I need), that make me just a tad slow to respond to God with a bold yes.

I have seen many prayers answered since September 7th, and things happen I didn’t even have enough time to pray for. To relay the last four months of happenstance, miracle, and encouragement to you would make this update much longer than necessary, and when all is said and done all amount to no more than an opportunity to be the hands and feet of Christ at opportune times, and receive Christ’s love through my brothers and sisters being His hands and feet for me.

I will not be returning to Albania with GDQ. After many months away I’m back home for the holidays, but in conversation with some spiritual direction I have sought in the last 6 months, I’m noticing an invitation akin to what I sensed when the opportunity to join TeachBeyond in Albania first appeared on my radar- a moment to trust that God has something in store. That my job is just to pray, wait, love others, and trust.

Having grown up in the world I was raised, there is a sense of familiarity, safety, to the mission field I’ve been in for the last few years. I know how to talk the talk of a missionary, and I know how to walk the walk. With that, though, there’s been a lingering feeling of pressure to need to have everything figured out— self-imposing a life under a microscope of my own making: to have answers to questions, justifications for expenses, a spiritual piety born of an airtight theology. This is not a life of faith, and not a life of confidence in Christ. It’s not a life I’ve been cornered or pressured into, but why is it the place I seem to place myself?

Call it pastor’s kid syndrome or scrupulosity, the effects on my spiritual life have been very real. For every moment of sincere service there was a scrutinizing of my own motivations, every confident belief linked to the threat (and reality) of living heretically, and in fear of a spiritual closeness always at risk of being yanked away from me. In what is our spiritual insecurity rooted? How is it possible to serve, to live out a confession of faith, while we are so depraved of the security of our self in Christ? I do not know where I am with this, and half of this is spitballing the complexities of already being made whole, and yet still waiting for wholeness.

I’m also trusting that my time on the road in the last few months has not been in vain. I’ve treated it as its own form of pilgrimage— How beautiful that even in our confusion, our disoriented, sheeply nature, we are given the gift of loving- knowing that our capacity to love is first and foremost found in our design as Christ-bearers.

There is a whole other essay on collaboration to be written at a later time - a topic that seems to be coming up again and again both in my thought life and lived-out spiritual walk. I’m being given a short-sightedness that I’m taking to be primarily an opportunity to stay present. A season to trust the process, the timing. I return to New York City on January 15th, we’ll see what happens next.

Where are you, God? Where will you have me? How strange it is that when you give us the freedom to saunter we want your clear direction, and when you offer clear direction we complain of not being free enough. You know, and I do not. You have been good to me, and if this next season is anything like my last, stay near.