“…I Feel So Alone…”

On By Kamiko BlalarkIn Uncategorized8 Comments

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“Lex just left and I feel so alone…”

I messaged my mother and my sister these words a few minutes after Lex left to catch her bus at six o’clock this morning. I won’t lie – after she left me in the small house I’ll be calling home for the next year, I went back to a bed that probably belongs to one of my roommates and I cried. I cried because I finally realized the depth of the situation I am in: I have never been out of America before, and here I am, at 18 years old, in a foreign country, unable to speak the language enough to hold a decent conversation or convey my needs (I honestly struggle speaking English sometimes), and I’m all alone. And from the moment Lex woke me up to say goodbye, to the moment she walked out the door and drove off with Beto to catch her bus, I found that the weight of loneliness suddenly became too heavy to ignore.

So I cried, and even though there was no one to see my tears, I kept silent, and tried my best to keep a straight face. And when I finally left my bed, I did what I taught myself to do years ago and hid my grief behind a smile. But my mother and my sister both responded to my text in the same way – God is going to take care of you. Lex (to no surprise of mine) said the same thing when I told her how I was dealing with her absence. She told me to just allow Him to use my loneliness to draw me closer to Him.

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So I did.

He brought to my remembrance the way I had depended on my brother for nearly my entire life. I refused to do anything new if he wasn’t going to do it with me. I couldn’t even be bothered to attend Redefined on Friday nights until he convinced me to go. I saw the world as this gigantic place filled with places that were just as big – but Parrish always made those places a little smaller and easier to process and digest. For someone who is easily overwhelmed by the physical world, someone who could do that was a real necessity. It wasn’t healthy for me emotionally or spiritually, I know, but God worked with it, as He does.

I followed Parrish to Redefined, and I grew closer to God, and as my dependence on Him grew, my dependence on my brother dissipated, which made it easier to handle his falling away (I’m still believing for a resurrection of his faith, though!). And his falling away has made me draw closer to Him still, and by the time my brother lost interest, I was too plugged in to want to follow his lead. I can go on about the magnificence of God’s planning and whatnot, but I really just want to draw this parallel – If I could make it without my brother, I can make it without Lex. In fact, I can make it apart from anyone, because God has been teaching me how to depend on Him more than I’ll ever depend on anyone else. He has called me to Tepic for so many reasons, all of which I’m so excited to discover, but I know that this is the one I needed to understand and rely on first. I’ll make friends here, I’m sure, but I need to take care not to cling to the security I will find in them.

I miss and am praying for you all, and though I still get a lump in my throat when I think of home, I’m no longer heartbroken. Lex just left, but I know I’m not alone. I’ll see you guys in 177 days or less!

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My New Year’s Resolution

On By Kamiko BlalarkIn MusingLeave a comment

It’s almost that time of year – the time of new beginnings, of resolutions. People all around the country are making lists of what they would like to do this year: lose weight, eat better, go skydiving, etc. It’s a time of celebration after a time of stress and anxiety. Last year, I was among those who were making their New Years’ resolutions, and in a way, I am among them now.

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In two days, I will be starting my New Year off in a way I could have never expected. These next couple of days will consist of packing my bags for a year-long trip to Mexico. They will be full of mental preparation and goodbyes. And though I may make it seem like it doesn’t faze me as much as one may think it should, these last few weeks have been incredibly hard. For some reason, it has taken me an unfortunate amount of time to get into an appropriate mindset. A mindset that prompts the realisation that my days in America are dwindling, and I should have been preparing months in advance.

If I’m honest, these past few weeks have been full of subconscious denial – the knowledge of my departure didn’t usher the necessary motivation, so I didn’t feel the need to put a packing list together, or to use my time as wisely as I possibly could. But I still felt the stress. I felt the early onset loneliness that came with knowing I would be leaving the familiar – I would be leaving my family and friends, the people that loved me, and knew what I was comfortable with. So I crammed as much as I could into the days I had left, and it’s taken a lot out of me. I ended up leaving myself with very little time to get anything done, and even less time to rest and recharge.

Though, in a way, I think I see how God has been able to work my procrastination into something good (if you can bring yourself to believe it). Through a seemingly small series of revelations, I’ve become increasingly aware of why this trip is necessary, and the reality of how much I’ve grown in the years leading up to this journey has been placed in the forefront of my mind. And now I’m more motivated than ever to be more intentional in following God’s plan for my life. The insecurities I’ve had concerning my faith are no longer holding me down, but rather, they present me with goals I can realistically hope to reach. And due to the stress which has caused me to draw closer to my Father, I’ve come to realise that, while I still have an entire lifetime of growth ahead of me, I’m not as much of a wreck as I once thought. If I can trust God with an entire year of my life in a place that is completely foreign and unfamiliar, then I will certainly learn to trust Him with anything and everything else.
And that is my New Year’s resolution: to trust in Him fully and to live out that trust in everything I do. To accomplish this will be to set up the most secure foundation on which to live my life, and will allow Him to use me in ways I could never imagine. And what better goal to strive for in this New Year?

On Why I’m Sending Miko to Mexico

On By LexIn Fundraising9 Comments

Hijacked.

Hi. I’m Lex. I’m a student ministry leader at Redefined. I want to tell you a story.

Less than a year ago, a couple young ladies pulled an anxiety intervention on their friend.

Miko is graduating this spring and she’s kinda freaking out. She doesn’t want to talk about it … but she needs to talk about it.

So we talked. She graduated a whole year early, which is exciting and impressive … and also a little bit of a rude awakening.

Oh ya, by the way, you’re an adult now. Don’t mess it up.

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We talked about community college, and universities, and jobs, and apartments, and cars, and all those things. And then, on a whim (or maybe not—hindsight being 20/20 and all that), I said, “Or doing something cool. You kind of have a whole extra year. Go overseas! Do missions work for a year! Do something crazy!”

To which Miko quietly shrugged and murmured, “Ya.”

“I’m serious. We know people. I could safely send you to India, or Cambodia, or Mexico next week if you wanted to go.”

To which Miko quietly shrugged and murmured, “Okay.”

But it was enough of a seed, and she is enough of a young woman of prayer, that she came back some weeks later and said, “Mexico.”

I said she should go for a year. She thought six to nine months. Pastor Simon said if she was going to go, she should enroll in their ministry school, which is a one-year program, so pretty much I’m 2 for 0 and Miko has to just do what I say from now on. 😉

Never Wrong

And before either one of us really knew it, we were here: pricing airfare and figuring out the best way to handle donations and setting up social media platforms. What had been a long running joke (“See? This is why I’m trying to send you to Mexico for a year!”) is suddenly very, very real.  Continue reading “On Why I’m Sending Miko to Mexico” →