You know when you play hide and seek with someone and they are close to being finished counting and you have a mini panic attack because you still haven’t found the perfect place to hide? You’re running out of time and you have to scramble to find a hiding place and you aren’t confident in your ability to stay hidden from the searcher long enough to win the game. That is how I was feeling when I left about a week and a half ago to head to Atlanta Georgia to start a journey. The journey however, had actually started almost a year ago when I first applied for the World Race.
I was given a little under a year to fundraise $18,200, pack my bags to the brim, say my goodbyes or “see you laters”, and prepare myself for this radical journey. While a year seemed like such a long time, it left me feeling like everything was scrambled together in the past few weeks. I finished my last undergraduate exam and then turned in my last paper the next day. I packed up my room in my suite and said goodbye to my closest friends in the same day. Over the next week, I attended four Christmas’s, in which at all of them, I said goodbye to multiple family members. I took the GRE Test (test to get into graduate school) shortly after that. Which led me up to packing everything I will be using throughout the year two days before flying to Atlanta with my parents and ultimately saying goodbye to them a couple days later.
These jam-packed weeks left me feeling anxious about what I had signed up for. I kept asking myself whether or not this was really happening and if I was ready. The words kept coming into my head, “You’re crazy to think that you can do this. You can’t leave for 11 months. There is no way.” The four-year dream of doing this trip was falling apart and I was really doubting my ability to commit. I was excited but didn’t feel like I was ready. This perspective has changed so much within the last week being of being in my first home: Honduras.
Ready or not…here I am. In Urraco Pueblo, Honduras. Waking up every day in a hammock and starting my day with a run throughout the small village that I now call my home. I am still not ready, and I don’t think I will ever be in that perfect place but here I am. What I have realized from processing the past couple weeks is that I was called to be here, right now, doing what I’m doing. And no, I’m not in a perfect place or have a perfect faith, but I am meant to be here. It has been cool to see that God doesn’t ask or expect us to the be in that perfect place. He welcomes us with open arms regardless of where we are in our walk with Him. That is something that I have grasped onto throughout the past week in Honduras. It doesn’t matter who I was, what I was doing, how anxious I was, or anything else. I am meant to be here doing what I’m doing. So, with that being said, I am loving my life in Honduras, and am excited to continue this crazy journey for the next 11 months.
As always, thank you for reading my blog and following along. I plan to explain more of what I’m doing with my time in Urraco Pueblo in my next blog!
See you next week!
– Elisabeth Sage
