Drafted: Foreign on Familiar Ground

Coming back didn’t feel like coming home

📖 This picks up after Part Four — Counting Conversions & Carrying the Cost — where I began to question the currency of worth in ministry, and what it meant to measure impact by salvation tallies. But the story begins long before Garden Valley. In From Altar Calls to Enlistment, I wrote about how a child’s ache to belong was baptized as calling. Then, in Signed, Sealed, Sent, I explored what it meant to disappear in the name of devotion — convinced that being willing to go made me worthy of love. Boots on Holy Ground followed the moment I was sent, ready to burn for something bigger.

Counting Conversions asked what happens when passion becomes pressure.
But this is what happened when the mission ended — and the hunger to matter didn’t.

When the fire didn’t die — but the altar disappeared.
When I came home changed, but everything else looked the same.
If the mission field tested my obedience, coming home tested my identity.

This is what it felt like to be foreign on familiar ground.

The mission ended, but the hunger to matter only got louder.
There wasn’t a stage to perform on or an altar call to serve at, but I was still burning — with nowhere to place the fire.

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The airport looked the same.
My childhood bedroom still held the same posters, the same Bible verses scrawled in Sharpie on notebook covers, the same expectations.
But I had changed — quietly, completely.
And I don’t think anyone really understood the shift.
I didn’t really understand the shift, if I’m being honest.

What do you do with a calling when the altar is gone?
What do you do with a sense of purpose that doesn’t fit your zip code?

I had gone to “the ends of the earth” and returned thinking I’d done something holy. Eternal, even.
But I still had a curfew.
And my youth pastor still asked when I’d be speaking to the congregation about my experience.
And so I spoke. And they clapped. Then they asked where we were meeting for lunch.

Everyone smiled like they were proud of me.
But no one really got me.

They had waited for my return.
But the girl who left never came home.
I was different now.

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📦 The Ache of the After

No one tells you how quiet it gets.
How heavy ordinary can feel when you’ve lived on adrenaline and altar calls.

I tried to keep the fire alive.
Signed up to volunteer at every opportunity.
Said yes to every Bible study, every small group, every Sunday.

But it didn’t feel like purpose anymore.
It felt like performance.

Like I was trying to recreate meaning in the midst of the mundane.

They called it faithfulness.
I called it trying not to disappear.

I didn’t know who I was without the mission.
So I made myself the mission.

If I couldn’t be saving souls, I’d be sanctifying myself.
An offering. A living sacrifice.
Still burning. But still not quite enough.

🧠 This is a classic trauma-adjacent response often seen in overfunctioners and religious perfectionism. When identity becomes fused with utility, stillness can feel threatening — even unsafe. The nervous system interprets inactivity as danger when safety has historically come from doing.

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🕳️ The Hole in the Middle

No one prepared me for the emotional whiplash.
One week I was preaching through a translator.
The next, I was fumbling through my middle school hallways.

For the first time since kindergarten, I was back in public school.
Coming home was jarring enough. But returning to public school after seven years of homeschooling?
That was another kind of disorientation entirely.

Suddenly I was lost in the sounds — lockers slamming, bells ringing, boys telling jokes I still didn’t understand.

I didn’t know how to be a teenage girl anymore.
Not really.

I knew how to fast.
How to intercede.
How to lay hands and take up my cross.

But I didn’t know how to read my class schedule.
I didn’t know who we were rooting for at homecoming.
I didn’t know how to answer when someone asked if I had fun.

I didn’t feel fun.
I felt… separate. Set apart. Strange.

I didn’t fit in with the kids at school.
I didn’t fit in with the adults at church, either.

So I floated — over-involved but under-connected.
Smiling on the outside.
Convincing myself I was still walking in my calling.

They called it spiritual maturity.
I didn’t know what to call it, so I called it that too.
I was “set apart” and wore it like a badge of honor.
Because calling it lonely would’ve been one more loose thread to unravel.

🧠 This is what we often refer to as misattuned praise. Traits like hypervigilance, emotional suppression, or over-responsibility in children are frequently labeled as “mature” or “obedient” — especially in religious or high-demand environments — when in reality, they’re signs of survival.

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🧭 The Pretending Season

I survived eighth grade.

I heard about so many of the friends I’d made on the mission field returning the next summer.
Back to the same country.
Back to the same calling.
Back to the same fire.

But that just wasn’t an option for me.
Not that year.

Money was tight.
No one said it outright, but I understood.
It hung in the air like a closed door we all agreed not to name.

My family was still reeling from the loss of my uncle.
We were still learning how to be a public school family again.

Everything felt tender.
Stretched.
Fragile.

I ached to go.
But I felt like my family needed me to stay.

You would think that staying would put a damper on the fire.
Quiet the calling.
Convince me it was just a phase.

But it was quite the opposite.

It was the staying that confirmed my need to go.
Because something in me couldn’t settle.
Not into math class.
Not into youth group small talk.
Not into the version of girlhood that suddenly felt too shallow, too slow.

I wasn’t just homesick for the mission field.
I was heartsick for purpose.

And the more ordinary my life became, the louder the ache grew —
to matter,
to mean something,
to burn again.

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🕯️ After the Fire

I thought the burning was God’s calling to go.
But looking back, I think the burning was really my desire to escape —
from stillness, from sadness, from the parts of me I didn’t yet know how to sit with.

I wasn’t burning for God.
I was burning for belonging —
for a sense of home I hadn’t yet found.

Living in a world of ministry gave me certainty.
Clear roles. Clear rules.
Eat. Sleep. Save souls. Repeat.
The mission field didn’t just give me purpose — it gave me a script.

I could disappear into the calling.
And no one questioned it because it looked holy.

But disappearing felt safer than staying.
Safer than asking questions.
Safer than admitting I felt lost in the one place I was told I’d be found.

They said I was chosen.
I said I was obedient.
But deep down, I was just afraid —
that if I stopped moving,
stopped serving,
stopped giving…

who I was wouldn’t be good enough.

🧠 When a child is praised primarily for what they give or how they serve — especially in religious environments — it creates a conditional sense of worth. This is spiritualized attachment trauma: the belief that love, belonging, and even divine approval are earned through output.

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🪑 From the Therapist’s Chair

Looking back now, I don’t blame that girl for trying so hard to be faithful.
I see her.
Aching for connection.
Disguising grief as obedience.
Trying to earn safety by staying useful.

She was never taught how to feel — only how to surrender.
Only how to spiritualize her overwhelm.
Only how to make suppression look sanctified.

🧠 When emotional expression is consistently spiritualized or dismissed, children often internalize the belief that feeling less = being more faithful. Over time, this creates a split between what is felt and what is allowed — leading to chronic self-abandonment in the name of obedience.

They told me I was set apart.
But no one taught me how to feel at home in my own skin.
They praised my passion.
I made it look so holy, I didn’t notice it was hurting.

I did what so many of us did:
I learned to regulate my belonging by extinguishing my needs.
And they called me obedient.

They taught me how to crucify my feelings, not how to care for them.
And I carried that cross like a good girl.
And for a long time, I called that holy.

But some parts of you were never meant to be sacrificed.
And healing is what happens when you learn to stay with them — gently, fully, and without shame.

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👉 Coming up next:
I didn’t know how to rest — only how to earn my place by staying useful.
The mission field gave me certainty, structure, and a way to regulate my worth without ever calling it that.
I wasn’t chasing a calling — I was following the only path where I’d ever felt chosen.

It felt holy. Like devotion.
But it was really my nervous system chasing the only thing that had ever felt safe: being needed.
It was also hiding — from grief, from stillness, from the quiet ache of being ordinary.

📖 Read the next post: Drafted: Called for Life