Bittersweet.

I adored being in Wellington over the weekend. It is only very rarely that I have the opportunity to be surrounded by family. I cherish the experience. We are scattered and so it is only in the event of death or celebration that we see each other. Despite the fact that I only see the lot of them every few years, I love them so much. I really wish that we could have somehow spent more time together than this, that we could know everything about each other's lives and that we could talk and laugh with some familiarity. I wish they knew who I was, that they could understand the person I have become and the person that I so want to be.

Inevitably talk turns to the future. 'Ministry' I answer and the replies are hollow, polite but ultimately confused. I begin to explain to others my hopes almost apologetically because I know it is not what they are expecting. And for a moment I wish I could say: "well I'm in my third year of international studies and doing advanced french by now which is just as well because I'll be heading to the University of Paris in July for a year-long study abroad program and I'd like to do honours and when I'm done? Well, diplomacy, policy-making or something of the like, naturally..."

Which is honestly where I would be if my first MYC hadn't turned my world completely upside down and I knew that my priorities had to be changed. I'm not the first to make such a decision, in fact I know people all over the place who are making choices that the world thinks are mad. I just gave up a glorified BA, I shudder to think what my family might have thought if I'd given up a Med degree...

But I refuse to regret it. He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose - Jim Eliott, of course.

But what hurts even more is that although we have the same blood running through our veins, I will never have the depth of relationship required to explain why I made this decision, why I will keep making these decisions, why this is more than just religious fanatacism, that I'm not the same child they once knew, but different and better and happier because I'm free. Because I'm saved. Why are the people closest to us the very hardest to reach?