Month 10.
60 days left.
That thought induces nervous vomitting.
Good thing I had a real-life-warm-up in Moscow.
It was travel day again, this time we would be in four countries in two days. To make a really boring story short, we waited a lot, somewhere around 25 hours was spent sitting around various airports throughout Asia and Eastern Europe. At one of our last stops before our final destination, we had just enough time to meander through the airport to find good food and then lounge around a cafe and catch up on each others lives before heading to our gate.
As I sauntered from the bathroom to our gate, in no rush whatsoever, a strange man with an American accent stopped me and commented on the Virginia Military Institute sweatshirt I was wearing. So I told him about my little brother and this stranger told me that he and his group were from Virginia Tech. [Yes my friends, not only were there Hokies in the Moscow airport but they had picked me out of a crowd… it’s a weird bond that attracts Hokies to other Hokies, like a magnetic pull kind of thing.] This man continued on to tell me that not only were they here from VT but they were with a church called New LIfe Christian Fellowship (which just so happened to be the church that I went to when I was in college) and they were on their way to the Ukraine on a mission trip. No sooner had he said that, I heard my name called out from the crowd of people he had pointed towards. Would you believe that not only had I run into Hokies in Moscow, but I had run into a group of them from my old church, and I knew a few of them.
If you know me at all or have been keeping up with my blogs, then you would know just how much I love Virginia Tech and all things maroon and orange, so you can probably guess that my heart melted over this little reunion. It was great seeing all of the maroon and orange t-shirts and catching up on the past football season and all the news from Blacksburg but I’ve got to be honest, the nostalgia only lasted as long as the small talk. Not two steps away from the familiar crowd, after wishing them safe travels, did it really hit me how hard that brief interaction was for me.
How bizarre it was to have Virginia Tech and World Race in the
same room.
same room.
How incredibly unusual to have my past and present collide.
It caused a little bit of a complex.
Don’t judge me, but I might have cried a little on the airplane from
feeling so overwhelmed.
feeling so overwhelmed.
And it was hard to interact with them. After talking about football and Blacksburg, I didnt really know what else to say. I forgot how to talk to Americans, it’s way easier to make small talk with an African, ask them about their family and they could talk for hours about their 18 brothers and sisters.
I’m getting more and more nervous about coming home. If God has spent two months trumping my fears and then felt like He needed to give me a practice round, then going home is going to be a lot harder than I thought.
