Since it’s almost the end of Month 10, there’s been some thoughts about ReEntry and what I’ll tell people about the Race when I get home. I thought I’d get a bit of a head start by starting to write blogs about the Race as a whole and trying to describe what it’s been like. I don’t know how many there will be but here goes.
One thing that is different on the Race is the experience of the passage of time. In normal life you have things that mark the passage of time. You have seasons and changes in the weather, you have holidays and birthdays, you have the beginning of the school year and the end of a semester, you have Mondays to start your week and Friday’s to end it, all of these things to give shape to the experience of time passing. There’s a rhythm to the calendar a busy season and a slow season. In my industry of property management near college campuses, the end of May and the beginning of August always mark high turnover season.
The Race is a strange twilight zone where none of those markers of time passing are there. It’s Saturday as I write this but it doesn’t feel like a Saturday because it was a full ministry day. Tomorrow is Easter, but it doesn’t feel like Easter at all. Normally there’s a Lenten season that lasts 40 days where there’s more reflection, more of denying of yourself and entering into reflecting on your need for Christ. Then the week before I normally spend time at a Passover Seder thinking of God’s salvation of Israel which is then redefined by Christ at the Last Supper. Then comes Good Friday and then at last Easter. On the Race we might celebrate holidays, but there’s not the build up and movement that comes with the season.
Life feels like its perpetually on hold. The days are long. But after it’s over you look back and it seems to have flown by. You can never look ahead very far. Most times you look forward and can see only a few days and after that everything is opaque having almost no idea what is coming. Time is organized around the month. At the beginning you’re figuring out all the details of a ministry, seeing what shape it will take, and the dynamics of working with your host and navigating the place that you live. You figure out a schedule. About a week in you hit your stride. You now figure out when there’s hot water to shower, where to get fresh fruits and vegetables, where to get wifi, the laundry situation, the optimal time to have quiet time, whether exercise is a possibility. Most months you start out ambitious, but after a few days you figure out what’s realistic and go with that. There are still minor adjustments but on the whole you’re good to go. You go for a few weeks and then you start to wind down. You try to take advantage of everything available to you because you don’t know what next month will bring and then you do it all over again.
You’re in limbo a lot. Sometimes the period of being in limbo can last quite awhile. When we were in Nelspruit at the end of month 4, we couldn’t leave because our India visas hadn’t come back. We ended up at Manna Church, always planning a few days at a time, not settling in because we weren’t sure when we were leaving. Oddly, you never really feel like you move forward. It’s not true; it just feels that way. Oftentimes the changes from one month to the next are abrupt. You don’t experience the season transition from hot to cold or vice versa. One day you’re in the sweltering heat of Vietnam and the next day you’re in the chilliness of Johannesburg. One day you’re warm in India and the next you’re huddled up shivering in Nepal. Even though you know its December it doesn’t register really because there are no other markers to indicate that it’s December and it’s like that every month.
It reminds me a friend who had moved to California from the East Coast. She said the lack of season changes makes it feel like no time passes. I’ve also been told the first few months of motherhood are like that as every day is just sleep, feed, and change diaper.
All in all even though I’ve been on the Race for 10 months, it still has a surreal quality to it. It’s still semi hard to believe that at this very moment I’m in a pseudo-country that’s not recognized by the US, living with 13 Americans and 10 Russian men in Rehab and I am about to go to a church service that’s entirely in Russian.
