sweet? home? chicago.

June 8, 2010. I landed at O'hare totally drained but ready to jump right in to the next season of my life. Or so I thought. I'm actually quite thankful that I was so overwhelmingly behind on my blog posts when I came home. I know many people probably don't understand why I take the time to update my blog on events that happened 8 or 9 months ago. Believe me, I understand the confusion. And the reasons behind it are totally selfish:

This is the recording of my life. This is my story in writing and it's important to me to have it to look back on. God has given me this story - the good and the bad - to teach me, refine me and make me into the Mallory that I am today and the Mallory that I will be tomorrow. I want to do all I can to keep the chapters of my story fresh in my mind, and this blog is how I choose to do it.

With that being said, it's been almost 9 months since that warm June evening when I stepped off the plane in Chicago - and I believe that sharing about this time retrospectively may be the wisest way to go. Even just a few weeks ago, I was in no place to write about this. The past 9 months have been indescribably messy. If my life was a soundtrack, you'd hear beautiful, harmonious melodies for the bulk of my 27 years, but there'd be a dramatic change in the composition as the music tells the story of my recent months. The joyful, exciting, blissful musical blends would quickly turn into the sound of confusion, hopelessness, lostness, tears, anger and loneliness. It felt like my life had been smoothly traveling at record speeds and, all of a sudden, I arrived back at this hemisphere and hit a wall. Crashed & burned. Looking back, it feels like I didn't just arrive in Chicago, but I must've exited the airplane right into a valley. A deep, tangled valley - the kind that you are aware you're in but don't really know how to find your way through. And don't necessarily want to.

Although so many of my days since coming home have felt empty, they have been full. Full of emotions and thoughts and lessons and tears. Full of fights and questions and holding on and letting go. Full of regrets and defeats and "i'm sorry's" and "i love you's." Full of grace and restoration and glimpses of great hope for a path that leads to a place above the valley.

It's an overwhelming task to try and sum up my life since I've come back to America. Too many events have transpired, too many feelings have been felt. I can't tackle all of this at once. But it needs to be tackled. I've cried too many tears and felt too many emotions and experienced too much to just let it go without processing it with you. Some of it I want to share, some of it I don't - but all of it needs to be exposed.

I've decided to divide the past 9 months into 3 different topics. I have absolutely no idea if this will help in my thought process or organization, but we'll try by tackling these three:

my church.
my family.
myself.

I know I haven't made it sound like any of this will be very uplifting, but I promise that the ending will be good & triumphant...even if I'm not there yet...