Homesick.

This morning, I am homesick.

My sister Kendra is graduating from high school this upcoming weekend, and tomorrow is her graduation party.  My brother Karl just finished his junior year in college and is now living off-campus for the summer in Grand Rapids for the first time, not far from where Jack and I lived last summer.  And as excited and happy as I am for both of them, this morning I'm just sad.

I wish I could be there to celebrate this milestone in Kendra's life, to help frost the hundreds of cupcakes she's excitedly making for her grad party, to look at her beautiful pictures and art and rejoice to watch her with her friends and mentors, to honor the ways she's grown up and the ways God has so evidently worked in her life.

I wish I could be there to share the summer with Karl, to dumpster-dive together and have him over for evenings of card games and pie, to share his first-ever beer at a nearby brewery, to run into each other at the farmers' market on occasion, to rejoice in the ways God has provided for him and how Good life is in Grand Rapids in the summer.

I miss plenty of other people, too, and I could name them here but I would probably start to cry.  For now, though, it's these two siblings, the people God somehow chose to put together with me in the same childhood home with wonderful parents -- these two amazing friends of mine -- and I miss them.

I guess I'm writing this blog to honor them, and to publicly admit that living in Romania is not always a glamorous, great adventure.  We were recently visited by some filmmakers from CRWM who are traveling the world documenting missionary stories and work, and they said the thing they've been most surprised by is how "normal" life is even for people on the missions field.  We buy groceries.  Plenty of missionary kids fight with their parents about how much time they can spend on the computer.  We put gas in cars, we clean our bathrooms, we gripe about work at the office, we get excited about good deals at secondhand clothing shops.  And we get homesick.

And I don't want to end this blog on some sort of spiritualized, syrupy "it's all going to be okay" note -- because it's always just going to suck to be somewhere else when you long to be with the people you love.  But there are people I love here, too.  And I know God is at work here, too.  And for now, that just has to be enough.