It’s month 8 of the race now. That means I’ve moved to and lived in 8 countries over the past 8 months…and still have 3 to go. Now I’ve moved a lot in my day, but to be honest, I’m pretty tired of it. At first there was a lot of excitement surrounding the moves between countries. I’m seeing the world, I’m doing God’s work, and I get to witness all these incredible things in all these incredible places. But the hard part about all of it is that once I get “settled” in a place, get a routine and get used to daily life where I’m at…I have to pack up and move all over again. And to be honest, it’s exhausting.
In my past I’ve used moving around as a way of escaping things I didn’t want to deal with. Things got hard, a relationship went sour, I disliked my job…whatever it was, my first instinct when faced with a problem was to run away from it. So I moved a lot, and because of that, for the past 5+ years I have lacked a place to call home. A stable environment. A constant. And I so deeply crave that now.
{Now, I know several of you reading this might think: It’s silly to say you don’t have a place to call home…you always have a home with God! And yes, in the spiritual sense that is true. But I’m referring to a physical home. A solid, tangible, warm, inviting, safe physical place to live in and to call home.}
As much as I’ve loved life on the race, my mind can’t help but wander to life post-race, and dreaming of finally “settling down” somewhere (preferably with a husband and kids someday, so God and I have some talking to do about that). Before the race, I craved constant adventure—always moving from one thing to the next and dreaming of visiting far-off places. Now that I’m living that adventure, I’ve realized that a large part of me now desires the opposite…to a certain extent. I’ll still always love and crave adventures and traveling (and I hope to still do that in the future), but I’m realizing that I now want that on a smaller scale. And my definition of adventure has changed. It’s not just about the sight-seeing, the extreme excursions, the adrenaline rushes, etc…but it’s just about taking risks and stepping into the unknown, whatever that may look like.
Who knows what direction The Lord will take me in come June, but for now, the next adventure I want to take (post-race), is finding a place to call home.
