Ive been wresting with this idea of time and realizing more and more with each day that passes that we just dont have time any longer. The clock has been ticking down from day one and now it feels like we are left with only minutes left. India feels like a lifetime ago sitting at that conference room table with Mountain Movers and yet here we are. We no longer have time.
We no longer have the time to procrastinate on the conversations… or walking in new areas. In three weeks this will all be over, ill be at home in my comfortable house with a family who all have their own stories and life experiences from this last year as well and I wont have my team, I wont have my squad..I wont have the people ive grown so close to this year. It will just be me. The time between now and then is short and I hope to finish knowing that I have ended well….that until the last possible moment I was all in. There have been months on the race that I know I wasnt all in…There were months I didnt know how to be. Here we are in month 11 and I just want to be in for whatever the time left holds.
This goes for any place you happen to be in life, its obviously not limited to the race. I dont want to ever look back on a time period and wish I would have lived differently. Id much rather just realize that no situation is endless…that everything runs out of time. That we all get new jobs, move cities, friends get married…life is dynamic and changing… and Ive just come to this thought that I dont want to look back and wish I would have lived differently in the situations id been given. I think that right now I could look back and wish id done things differently over the past several years but from now on I want to just live from those places differently so that I dont look back and wish these things…that I wont have to because the time was just full to the brim.
In just a few weeks im going to ache for the things I have right now. Im going to miss Asian culture and how fun it is to play charades every month and speak in very broken english. Ill miss the opportunities we’ve had. Never in my life did I think that id bathe the elderly in Cambodia, build a children’s home in Thailand, teach english in Vietnam…Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Mongolia. When I said ‘yes’ to this year I didnt know that “playing with kids” was going to be in the job description for 8 of the 11 countries. Ill miss the markets, ill miss buying food on the street, buying my clothes off the street. It will be foreign to have a washer and a dryer in my home…it will be foreign to have a bed, blankets and normal size pillow of my own. It will the strange to be able to read every road sign, street sign or business sign. It will feel luxurious to dry myself with a real towel and not just a sarong.
Im going to miss my squad…
Teams and living in community all the time are hard as all get out…but I’m going to miss it. I love how much we talk…that we really do everything together. Ive come to really enjoy being able to share every aspect of life with my friends. I didnt always feel that way but there is something so incredibly freeing to have people who you know are just with you through life and you with them. To have people who will call you out on your crap …and people you want to go to to make sure you aren’t full of crap in the first place. It will feel very weird to be in my house and not have a single one of them… to have no one who knows what this past year has been. You’ve heard my stories and what I’ve written in blogs but you don’t know the ins and outs of every day… you don’t know chunks of what this past year has meant…what we have walked through. Im going to miss the squad of people who have chosen to do life with me…who have fought for relationship. Im going to miss the 30 some crazies that collectively make up H squad…Its going to rip my heart out to walk away from all of you in the LA airport.
We are out of time… three weeks is a blink. This whole year has been a time warp…
A month isn’t long… you can fake it…you can play nice and hide behind shields, you can be seemingly perfect and distant for a month… you can put up with any schedule or any type of food…you can deal with sweating for a month…a month isn’t long, you can put up and fake anything for that amount of time.
You cant fake a year…. Ive had every kind of day you can have this past year and my various teams have been with me the whole way. Somehow through the surrender of a year the Lord has done something incredible.
Most of the things we walked through this year I didnt know where there… and I didnt know that we were ever going to have to deal with them. But He knew I trusted him so we were able to go there. Ill write up an overlook of exactly what the Lord did this year another time and share it with you but for right now I get to look back and see the maze he guided me through and now we get to cheer at the finish line. Its just a season, its not the end all be all but its a season that merits cheers… and my Father is cheering.
