On Exile

For now…

I am an exile.

As of January First of Two Thousand Twenty Two.

The cause is for work, maybe a PhD too. Though the reason is fear. In reality, I’ve been quietly trying to leave the United States since late Twenty Nineteen. Before the lunacy of the next year.

I do not like imagining myself blessed with prophecy or special revelation. I am fairly hardline on cessationism. I can’t deny having seen a miracle or two. I am just unsure who provided the power of such miracles. Satan is the father of all lies and deception, and where there’s miracles there is ironically often little development of one’s faith. No, true development comes in poverty when you must wait on the Lord. Still all the same, I cannot deny the uneasy feeling I had through Twenty Nineteen. In my prayers there was a quiet whisper: “There are no more Heroes”. I mystery, I thought at first. Looking back, I know now it was my Heavenly Father warning me for the upcoming chaos that no heroes would come to fix everything. Then in late Twenty Nineteen, the whisper changed to something more aggressive. “The Doom of Nations is coming”.

I have a creative mind. It’s not at all unusual for my creative juices to orbit a theme for a season to focus on. A theme will appear that sneaks into my heart and stirs my passions. It will often come from hearing or seeing something that will then repeat as an echo in my dreams and thoughts. I’ll latch onto it and allow it to weave its signature into all I make. Hearing a whisper in my mind while I dream that manifests and centralizes a theme is nothing new for me. In Twenty Nineteen I had re-played through one of my favorite games, Dishonored. In the first game you will find a ghostly artifact whisper “The doom of Pandyssia has come to the city." In the game, the doom was a plague. So believe me when I say, it is easy to pass away the entire whisper in my own heart as an echo from this experience. But why did it stick to me so closely? Mere months before the plague?

Regardless, such things are far more sensible in terms of “prophecy” than hearing voices in your heard. At least in my humble opinion. The Holy Spirit may guide you to become more sensitive to one thing or another from the world around you, and you will later find that thing important. This, to me, is practical and simple. And I suspect this is how the Holy spirit geared me to prepare to leave. Truly, I wish I had acted sooner.

It took a full nine months into the pandemic to react to the whisper in my prayer. I was mostly shocked that the warning had come true in so powerful a way. But ultimately I acted, and now here in Twenty Twenty Two, I am in exile, on a three year stint. A few months after turning Thirty, no less. And although I eagerly counted down the months, weeks, days, and even hours until I departed, it wasn’t until I arrived at a foreign country, began setting up my bank account, signing a three year lease, and sitting in a bed that it hit me. I won’t be back until I’m Thirty Four…

Now, you may at this point call me very dumb for not thinking this through. I am calling myself very dumb for not thinking long term. That sudden realization that a third of my thirties will be gone hit me hard and I suddenly found myself amidst a minor panic attack. For I am unmarried. I am detached from community. I am alone. I am in many ways restarting, albeit temporarily, only to return to my life in America and leave whatever I build here behind, other than the PhD I hope to bring back with me. The realization that it’s going to be hard to find anyone to date, anyone to drink with, anyone to watch a football game with suddenly had me in shivers to such an extent I hadn’t felt in a while.

And yet, that is the whole point of Exile.

I am betting that whatever I go back as will be wiser, better, and maybe even healthier than what I was in America.

A friend comforted me with these fears with simple reasoning: “Look, you’re going to be Thirty Four. That’s going to happen. You can’t control that. So what do you want when you’re there?”. It was simple, but powerful. Yes, I do not want to be Thirty Four, still single, still in an office job, still in the pod, experiencing all the decline in America. It’s true.

And so, I am an Exile. By choice. I believe I will see better days. I believe my Heavenly Father will guide me and build me. He provided every door opened before me as I sought this. Nothing held me back. Nothing stopped me. Maybe some man-made delays. It all worked out, so to speak.

And so, I will exile. I will inhabit a foreign land with the hope of a Foreign Deity that died for me in a foreign land. I will bless those around me, I will seek a church community, and I will try to become someone.

And you, reader, should do the same where you are too.