“And then she woke up and it was all a dream.”
Pardon the over-used line, but the most cliche and frowned upon ending to any story ever written more or less epitomizes everything I am feeling right now.
India was a month of bad sleep in hot weather and eating the same five things for every meal. I spent my days holding and caring for special needs children in an orphanage, and my nights picking head lice out of my team mates hair while fantasizing about Christmas in America. The land of cold weather, Christmas carols, scented candles, pumpkin pie, and coziness were just out of sight of the hot, smelly, bug-filled place we were in. But just for the record…I loved it.
Less than a week after leaving my ministry site in India, everything changed.
Final debrief was a whirlwind of rickshaw rides, impromptu dance parties, nostalgic conversations with best friends, delicious Indian food, and a complete inability to comprehend that it was really the end. But after one last night of hilarious superlatives, an E squad slide show, an incredible meal, and releasing floating lanterns off into the Indian night sky, it was really all over.
When our flight touched down at JFK after 18 total hours of flying, E squad erupted in cheers, clapping, and singing of any song mentioning America…much to the alarm of the other Emirates passengers, who probably thought we had never been on an airplane in our lives and were cheering for a successful landing. I literally had to fight tears when the US immigrations officer handed me my worn passport with a smile and a “Welcome home!”
And then my world and life immediately did a 180 from everything I had known for 11 months.
I spent 5 days in New York city with my mother and sister, and already began to feel like I wasn’t sure if the World Race had really happened at all.
The glitz, glamour, and extravagance of New York at Christimas time…Times Square, the Rockettes, window displays on 5th avenue, the Rockefeller tree, the Met, the MoMA, and hurrying Americans…were more or less the exact opposite of everything I had experienced on the Race.
We had been warned of the possibility of having a mental breakdown on the cereal aisle of the grocery store, or having a panic attack in the middle of a place like Times Square, but I felt too much like I was watching someone else live my life to have any strong emotional reaction at all. The funny thing is, with the exception of pointing out the American flag with renewed pride every single time I saw it, I felt like my mom, sister, and I were just taking a little Christmas trip to NYC and otherwise my life was no different than it had been before the Race.
It doesn’t help that I have heard from a few people now that I am “no different” than before the Race. Fortunately, they mean it as a compliment, even though we all wanted to be thought of as different after the Race.
I am pretty sure that my friends and family expected me to arrive home as a smelly, worm-infested, socially inept, street-preaching, floor-length-denim-skirt-wearing, out of touch, Holy-Spirit-screaming mess of a human being that they had to keep on a leash or else risk the involvement of the public health department, or possibly local law enforcement (luckily for me, I have employees of each within the family to keep me under control). Hopefully this “no different” thing they keep saying is to indicate that I don’t fit any…or at least most…of that criteria.
But honestly, I can not even put into words how much the World Race already feels like it could be a distant dream from a few years ago. The kind of dream that people express mild interest in the next morning at breakfast, but it is kind of understood that you will move on with your life and shut up about it after that. Even if it was such a powerful dream that you swear you could taste the flavors, see the colors, know the people, and have a new perspective on life after it…it was still just a dream, and no amount of explaining it can allow other people to experience it.
Part of me wants to tell anyone who will listen anything and everything about my year, and the other part wants to tuck the whole year away in a secret little box that nobody is allowed into.
Where do you even begin when someone says to you “How was your trip?!” when they are looking for the 5 minute version? What do you even go into about the whole thing…the team drama, what it meant to be a team leader, the culture shock, the adventures, the poverty, the physical and social discomforts, the refinement, the ministry, your squad mates, the living conditions, the food…??? I know I could never do the WR justice for what is was to me, so part of me doesn’t even want to try.
I also realize that while this may have been an insane year of my life, everyone else had their own crazy life changes happening and we all have life lessons to offer each other. Nobody will ever care about my year 2012 as much as I did, and that’s ok because they had their own 2012 to be living.
And really, all that matters is that God gets the glory and I walk away ready and willing to serve in whatever the next season may hold. And after a year of changing scenery every 4 weeks, I pray that I can handle it.
Oh, and just for fun…a random collection of things I really did miss!
Drinking water out of the faucet, toilets that always flush and bathrooms that always have toilet paper, everyone speaking English, customer service, littering being illegal, drip coffee being normal, internet access everywhere, baked goods, driving my car around all alone, having my own room, hot showers (and baths!), not having various uninvited creatures in the house at all times, my dogs, my family, bathing every day, traffic laws, Target, Chic fil A, Chipotle, clean clothes and multiple outfit options, peace and quiet, alone time, fireplaces, smelling nice, good wine, scented candles…I could go on for a while here, but you get my drift.
