emotional jet lag

I am back and my blogs got progressively less consistent toward the end of my trip. Since Thursday night when I returned, I have been trying to sit down and write a blog entry but to no avail. It wasn’t time or energy I lacked. I simply was finding it hard to know where to start. I was back in church Sunday and preached about the way that anxiety and worry drains one of the joy and peace that can be found in the present moment. I had a preaching professor once that said you should never “work out your own ’stuff’ in the pulpit”. I kind of broke that rule this week because my sermon was in many ways a self-reflection. My trip was wonderful in many ways, but all the time alone with myself helped me see several things more clearly. One of them was just how much I let anxiety and worry dictate my life. It was serendipitous perhaps that the lectionary passage this week came from Paul’s letter to the Philippians in which he addressed their anxiety and worry.

When people return from a big trip, they often talk about jet lag, that extreme fatigue that comes from traveling great distances. But I think there is sort of an emotion jet lag that comes from any big trip also. It was as if the trip gave me so much to think about that my mental processor is backlogged with input that needs to be thought about. People have been asking me, “How was your trip?” I am grateful for their interest and yet don’t know how to begin answering the question. It was great, it was thought provoking, it changed my faith, it made me question myself, it was stressful, it was relaxing – it was all that and more. I even found it difficult to write a sermon because there was so much to wade through.

I suspect I am not alone in this feeling. There are times when I think all of us get emotional jet lag, where our emotional processing is a bit behind and needs to do some catching up. My hope is that I can use this blog over the next few weeks to share with you about my trip, what it made me think about, and what implications it will have for my ministry. I share this in the hopes that in my own reflection, you may find a new lens with which to think about your own journey in faith.