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I've been trying to figure out how to write this post for days. And just like when there's something I'm thinking about and can't say, I have a hard time saying anything else. I've been waiting, too. Letting people know in person, via phone call, in email--rather than finding out on the blog. And so because I don't know how to say it except to say it:

I got the job with Link. There's still probably another month or so of finalizing the main details, and then after that there's the very large task of support raising, but my pending placement is Romania. It's safe to say I might be going back. Crazy, right? The interview was great. It was a phone interview and because I don't get good reception inside my apartment and my other option was having it in my staffworker's office (which would make me way too nervous), I decided to hang out in my car. I don't know that I really thought it through all that well. As soon as they called five or six guys with leaf blowers came out of nowhere and started blowing the pinestraw they'd just put down. So there I was, half yelling into the phone, trying to explain the noise, and also, since it decided to be summer for the last week, I was sweating through my clothes. And they laughed with me, I told lots of stories, and then out of what felt like left field (this normally happens a few days later, yes?), they offered me the job.

Wednesday night, in between all the excitement, it hit me what all this really means. The strangest part is moving it from something that's been almost fully in my head for months to the realization that this is a tangible, actual thing now. That six months from now I very likely will be in Romania. Or Turkey or Spain or who knows. But, provided I've raised enough support, that's something that will happen as surely as I'll graduate. Am I convincing myself? Depends on how you look at it. There was the brief thought: what the heck am I getting myself into?

And then: relief in the form of not me. I started thinking about all the people over there that I care about it. I thought about the first night at camp, all those people packed in a stairwell praising God. How he was working crazy good things amongst them long before I got there and will be long after, how the real blessing, the real thing to be excited about is how I get to step into that. How it's not about me or the things that are scary about all this pertaining to myself.

The bigger picture, still fuzzy in places, may not always look like that one night, exhausted and overwhelmed and straight joy. I know it won't. But it will be made of all those things. I expect to be exhausted, to be overwhelmed in both hard ways and good ways, and for there to be joy in seeing how God's working in students I don't even know yet. Scary? Oh yes. Good? That too.