Staring at a lion

The highlight of Kenya’s tourism is the wildlife. Going on an African safari doesn’t get much better than it is in Kenya. And the highlight of African animals is none other than the king of the jungle—the lion.

We’ve found ourselves on a few safaris—sometimes in tour vans and sometimes in our own vehicle—and searching for lions is certainly a highlight. Leopards and cheetahs are rarer to find, but nothing is more majestic than a lion.

One time, we were driving through a wooded area, and we found another vehicle was just pulling away from looking at something. We stopped. About 40 feet away was a half-eaten zebra being gnawed on by a lion. We pulled our truck as close to the kill site as we could and went crazy with our cameras. Then, the lion disappeared. We backed the truck up, trying for a different angle in the dense forest. We could still see the red, black, and white zebra, but the lion was out of view. For a while.

Suddenly, we spotted the lion walking parallel to the road about 20 feet away from us. I now was less concerned about pictures and became more concerned with getting my 3 year old (at the time) son away from the window and getting the car into drive in case I needed to bolt.

The feeling changed from “hunter” to “hunted” in a few seconds. The elation we felt over seeing a lion in the wild—and seeing a lion in the middle of a meal, no less—morphed into terror as this lion appeared within striking distance.

I tell this story as an analogy.

We’ve been looking forward to going back to the U.S. for months now, if not years. The family, the friends, the food, the familiarity—all have been calling to us from this unusual land of our mission sojourn. The years became months, the months became weeks, and now the weeks are just days. Sixteen to be exact.

The excitement and the suspense of “going home” are turning—like our emotions on safari when the beast appeared just yards from us—into something much more complicated.

We’re packing up our house in Africa. We’ll be living out of suitcases for 12 months in America. We’re leaving our full-time ministry and careers in Africa. We’ll be doing a lot of different things—very little teaching—for the next year in America. We’ll be leaving our relationships (hundreds of students and dozens of missionary staff and Kenyan nationals) in Africa. We’ll be renewing hundreds of old relationships and starting dozens of new ones in America. Suddenly, Africa has become more familiar to us than America, and going “home” feels different.

I know there is no reason to fear. God has promised to never leave us or forsake us. He sustained us when we moved to Kenya in 2005, carrying us through those tough transitions. He’ll sustain us this month as we move and adjust back to our “old life” in America.

But that truth doesn’t minimize the fact that right now I’m staring into the eyes of the lion and feeling like I want to put my foot on the gas.

(The picture above is taken without any zoom. 20 feet away. I'm not exaggerating.)