by Jenny Browne
Seeing six kids under the age of eight at an airport is like spotting an elephant outside the zoo. If I saw that family, I’d count too. Why on God’s green earth are you all in the wild?! Road trip. Stay home. Do anything else.
That’s exactly how I felt, sitting through flight after flight with wiggly twins, restless toddlers, and the creeping question: Why have I made my life this hard?
That same tension follows me down grocery store aisles in the U.S.—so many flavors, toppings, and choices. I need this, right? Then come the denim trends, the endless home upgrades, my skin blending in, the majestic suburban roads. I need this . . . right?
Sometimes I imagine making a public service announcement on the plane: “Dear passengers, this isn’t even the hardest thing I have to do. So, let’s ponder that as we maybe look away.”
Because the twelve-hour flight isn’t even my real challenge. It’s the emotional whiplash when we land. We move from conversations about job promotions, youth sports, kitchen renovations and Amazon Prime . . . to babies carrying babies outside our gate. To our work with faces of marginalized women and children left without fathers. It’s the quiet ache of life among the resilient that hits like jet lag to the soul.
Back in Ethiopia, we settle into our simple, cabin-like home with our shared bedrooms, repetitive meals, and vegetables rinsed in bleach. Torrential rains that lead to power outages that lead to cold showers and uncharged electronics. And yet as we settle, something settles in me, too.
In that space, I realize that both these worlds are grappling with the same lie—it’s never enough. It is here that I am forced to step out of consuming and comparing of cultures and instead commune with the Great Enough of where we are. I shake off the “what’s next for me” that hums in my American ears and listen instead for the quieter question: Who’s next for You, Jesus?
Living in two homes has taught me that life doesn’t flow from being the most comfortable—or even the happiest—person in the room. The best life flows from knowing that God is in the room, too. It comes from recognizing the story He’s writing in me and choosing to step into the story of the person He has put in front of me.
It comes from strategizing with Him into the brokenness.
Celebrating a teenager’s first-ever day of school.
Grieving with a heartbroken mom or a fatherless child.
Watching an entrepreneur find hope or seeing joy take root in a young girl.
Wrestling with God through the injustices, the annoyances, and the unexpected.
Here in Ethiopia, I tug at the roots of surrender and discernment. And I see them quietly watering our family with the joy that I never found in “the control.” They dig into something sturdier that the convenience was not built to grasp.
Where my culture says, “I just want to be happy,” I hear God whisper, “But why, why just happy?”
God’s presence isn’t in the pursuit of “happy” after all—it’s reconciling us into whole. It strips away the sneaky layers to uncover the deep. It leaves space to hunger for His faithfulness. It delights in drinking up the daily mercies.
So I sit in the culture clash and let it shape me. Because it’s a gift—maybe the gift of a lifetime—to leave the known and step into the “harder” of whole. To do what we feel made for, now in Ethiopia, and later, wherever He leads.
An even greater gift? I get to do it alongside my epic family, and with my fun friends. And yes, definitely doing it with the heaps of stuff I just hauled through the airport from those glorious American aisles.
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Jenny Browne is a wife, mom of six, and nurse living in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She serves women and children that live near the city’s trash dump while her husband works in business as mission. She enjoys the beautiful chaos of a full house and the wonder of seeing what God can do.
