Believe it or not, the field in this picture was nothing but dirt when we first arrived in Ohio, back around the middle of May.  Still in the early days of the summer and our family's Great American Adventure.

It was about a week after our arrival that we started to notice the first tender green shoots of corn pulling themselves out of the damp brown earth.  The corn was more or less knee-high by the Fourth of July.  And now, it is a tassled, towering wall of Ohio's cash crop.

It's been a long summer.

As we prepare to head back to Amsterdam (the packing process is already well underway), my emotions are a strange mix of excitement and anxiety.  Relief and regret.  Eagerness and uncertainty.  To be honest, when I think about flying back to Amsterdam on Tuesday, my most instinctive response is a kind of twisted, queasy feeling in the most central part of my abdomen.  It's not exactly a feeling of dread.  Maybe more like "butterflies in the stomach" or a pre-game systemic wash of adrenaline.  But it's not really a pleasant feeling either.  I guess I'm kind of nervous.

More than anything, my current thoughts and emotions remind me most strongly of the way I felt in the days leading up to our first big departure for Amsterdam, back in January of 2003.  I feel awed and awkward in the face of the Great Unknown.  This is silly, I tell myself -- since I know that I have a home and church established in Amsterdam, that I know the language (though it may be a bit rusty by this point), that I have friends waiting for me there.  But I guess these "advantages" are balanced out by the fact that I don't have the wide-eyed idealism and sense of adventure that I had back the first time around, that I have three small children to drag through the airports and through the readjustment process, both physiologically and psychologically, that I know how difficult life and ministry in a second culture can be.

And so, these next few days, these next steps of preparation and transition... well, these are days and steps of faith.  And even when things get difficult and the transition is hard, I just have to remind myself that "this too shall pass."  Like the changing of the seasons.  Like the growing of the corn.