I have felt the heartbreak of leaving a place I loved. I have felt the heart being torn into as God calls you onward.

I have spent much of my walk with Jesus learning to leave.

Often, I didn’t see my assignments ending quite so abruptly and many times I wept as I asked the Lord why He didn’t warn me sooner.

I have felt the longing for familiar faces that I knew would likely be far from my heart now and often I wondered if they missed me like I missed them.

It’s one of the hardest things to get use to when following Jesus.

It’s the surrendering of seasons…

Time continues and the Lord calls often to go to new places and new faces.

But still…I confess a deep missing of many.

I am acquainted with Paul’s words of anguish as he pours out his heart on paper of the faces he hoped the Lord would allow him to return to….yet often it just didn’t happen.

His letters would have to be laced with the love in his heart as he sent word that “the work of the gospel” was continuing well in Jesus name.

There is a faint swelling of tears that drips for what once was home and the place of many I’ve loved deeply.

I haven’t mastered it quite yet. It’s always hard. At times, you’ll be called to go in the opposite direction of everyone else.

You’ll want to go with the crowd and savor the journey….yet, Christ gently says, “Come…”

The older I get the more in love with Heaven I am becoming. For there will be a precious reunion of those many wedged into my heart.

Although the work of the gospel is greatly rewarding….it is also filled with stonings, shipwrecks, betrayals, losses, and suffering. Weariness can overcome at times the most zealous heart.

But there is such a lovely voice that compels you to keep moving. A love so deep nothing compares.

So when the time comes to say goodbye to a place full of faces and move towards the next assignment….

You just do it…

Perhaps with a waterfall of tears…

Or a thousand glances back at those sweet faces…

And surely with a heart heavy in grief for the personal cost…

But, still, you go…

And a new season begins.