A friend posted a quote the other day on facebook that I loved. It said, “You will never be completely at home again because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” I had heard it before but I keep coming back to it, realizing its significance now resonates on a deeper level.
I am just entering month 5 on the Race and although I still can’t expect anything to go the way I think it will, I have settled into this crazy rhythm that I get to call my life until August. Every month begins with a few days of frantically taking in everything with wide eyes– the new sounds, new environments, new social norms – and is categorized by an excitement and energy for the potential that the next 30 days has. After about a week, the newness wares off and I am settled into the routine that emerges. Week three tends to bring a slump of weariness and then before I know what has happened, I am nearing the end of week four where I realize how much I’ve come to know the community I’ve been apart of; I have my familiar places and faces and know how to get where I want to go just in enough time to be ripped from it and transplanted into a completely new place.
I want to say that in each place I have given my all for the sake of Christ, loved until I had nothing left, let my heart be broken and put back together with a small piece of it missing, leaving a sliver in each community that has so abundantly blessed me. But that would be a lie.
As I sit here, reflecting on the past four months, I am embarrassed and disappointed in myself. I didn’t come on the Race just to see the world and have some wild adventures. I came to love deeply, to be impacted by the people I’ve met, and be stretched and grown in my intimacy with the Lord. Don’t get me wrong, those things have happened.
But I still have my heart.
I have been protecting myself and using my role as a team leader as an excuse to hold back in loving as fully as I am capable. I haven’t thrown myself into relationships with people because I doubted my ability to love them well in the short period of time I have with them. So rather than invest deeply, I avoided it; I busied myself with other tasks that kept me distracted and looking useful enough to not be called out in my half-heartedness during feedback.
A few days ago, I read a letter from one of my mentors that stopped me dead in my tracks. She had attached a short essay in which she described the differences between two of her experiences living abroad; during the first stint, she was living in another country and her heart remained in the States. Her experience left her depleted and questioning if she would ever live outside the US again. She tried again a few years later and this time, she allowed herself to jump into the culture and make the country home, forever leaving a part herself there.
“I dared to enter in. I dared to actually move my heart to Portugal instead of keeping it in America.”
I want the above phrase to define the remainder of my Race. I want to move my heart to Malaysia this month. I want to move it to Vietnam, to Cambodia, to Thailand. I want to leave it in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and in Puerto Rico.
It’s a daunting challenge and it’s going to hurt. It is going to be messy and filled with tears and heartache; I know this full well. I left my heart in India two years ago and I was never the same. But isn’t that the point? I didn’t come on the Race to return the same person.
Maybe it’s the spirit of the New Year, being in a new country, on a new team so appropriately named New Reality, but God is instilling in me new desires; to love His beloved children with everything that I have without hesitation or reservation.
Bring on the heartache, bring on the tears. I don’t want my heart back.
