I am home.
I arrived in the states on September 1st into Atlanta, Georgia where I was greeted by my parents and my sister. Automatically I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the last 11 months of my life had never happened. That everything I just experienced, every emotion I was faced with, every person I met…all of it, was simply a dream I was waking up from. For the next few days I walked around feeling like I was still in that dream and the only thing that reminded me that the Race even happened was the constant texts I was recieving from my other family. My beautiful team who I had just had this wonderful experience with.
Life has become more “normal” now. I know that I lived the last 11 months on the Race, but now I don’t know what to do with it. I am faced with the question, “well, are you a different person?” This is a question that I would not have thought people would ask me. I was ready for the questions: “What are you going to do now?” (NO idea), “What was your favorite country?” (Guatemala followed closely by the Philippines) “What was your best memory?” (time spent laughing with my team) “What was your hardest/best experience?” (meeting and saying goodbye to Otim) Those are the questions I was ready for, but “are you a different person?” The only answer I can come up with is “I sure hope so.”
I hope that in the last 11 months of my life the way I have experienced and come to know God has changed me. I would hope that my life, my world views would be different. But, what I am learning is that it is so easy to go back to “normal”. It is easy to not get up and do morning devotions, it is easy to get sucked into the latest gossip about “Jon and Kate Plus Eight”. It is easy to go back to who I was before. That’s not what I want though. What I want is to be radically different. To be so confident in my faith in God that nothing else matters.
I was at a restaurant last night and the woman who owns the restaurant came up to talk to me about the Race and she ended up preaching me a sermon. She talked about the power of the Holy Spirit, people being healed and the way God can still move today. When she was done preaching I asked her what church she goes to. Her answer was beautiful. “I am the church on the go.” That’s what I want. I don’t want people to have to ask me if I am different, I want them to be able to see that change in me. I want to be the church on the go. The problem is, that takes work. Am I willing to do the work now that I am in “the real world”?
I sure hope so.
