The Wise Words of Frodo Baggins

From a journal entry
on April 23, 2012:

The
sweat drips down my face as my headache pounds to the bass beat of the party
music down the street. The noise is so loud that I’ve rendered my earplugs
useless and given up on trying to sleep. The Buddhist chanting will begin in a
few hours anyway, just before sunrise.

      Earlier tonight I
fell asleep lying outside in the hammock. I was thankful for the loud banging
of the generator, because I knew it would mask the sound of my sobbing as I
drifted off to sleep. One of my teammates woke me up long enough to walk inside
and crawl under my suffocating mosquito net and fall back asleep onto my
sleeping pad. I awoke less than an hour later to the news that my mother was
trying to reach me from the states. I knew immediately what that meant.

      Cambodia has no
doubt been one of the most challenging months of the Race so far. The
distracting heat is overwhelming and nearly unbearable. My skin is coated in a
layer of sweat day and night, and through the well-water bucket showers, I
never seem to get all the dirt off of my body. Sleep doesn’t come easy, and I
spend most of my nights tossing and turning on the tile floor, praying that the
Lord will send a cool breeze through the windows and send away the bugs. If I’m
honest, I get excited at the breeze that comes just from someone walking across
the room! (Luckily, Cambodia’s redeeming quality comes in it’s incredible
people and beautiful children.)

      Many times on the
Race, our lives continue on and we easily forget that life moves on at home
just the same. It’s not until we have good Internet that we are reminded that
people are getting married, having children, changing jobs, and even moving.
Our lives change on the Race, drastically actually, but its almost as though
our lives “at home” are sitting dormant waiting for our return. The trouble is,
those lives will never be the same. Those lives will never exist as they once
were. Those lives are, in a sense, gone.

      It hit me
tonight, during my restricted 8-minute phone call with my mother, just how
different my “home” would look like upon my return.

Upon
receiving the news that my grandmother would never come home, I realized that
several things would never be the same. Never again will I eat her creamy lima
beans, curl up in her lap on that squeaky brown chair as she rocks me to sleep,
waste the day away putting together Charlie brown puzzles, stay up late
watching braves games while eating bowls of crackers and drinking diet coke,
spend Christmas Eve dinner at her house (where she always made sure I felt
special on my birthday), hide under her big wooden table with my blanket until
she came to find me, fall asleep in bed with her and listen to her stories
about my dad and their many dogs, or hear her and grandpa tell me how they
looked at my picture that morning, blew me a kiss, and said, “Good morning,
Mandy!”. Never again would I sit in embarrassment, listening to her speak in
her daffy duck voice to my boyfriend, whom I’d invited over for lunch after
church.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Going
back home the first time mostly felt like a dream. In fact, from the first week
of the Race, I began having dreams that I would return home early. I always
dreamt that I went home for a visit or a conference for a week, and then I
returned just as though it was a part of the journey. I always wrote off the
dreams, even though I had them at least once a week, but when the news came
that it was time for me to return, it finally made sense: there are no
coincidences when the Lord speaks to us.

“How do you pick up the threads of your old life? How
do you go on? With a new heart you begin to understand there is no going
back.”

Sometimes I want to come home to the comforts I
knew before. Sometimes I miss having a secure job, income, and comfortable home
to call my own. Then I am quickly reminded: that’s not the life I was called to
live. If I’m honest with myself, I always loved that life, but I always had a
hunger for more. I can’t sit back and live a life of comfort with the things
I’ve seen and the people I’ve met. My heart has been changed and my fervor has been
renewed!

I am sad to leave a lifestyle of constant “mission”
work, but I am so excited for the next journey the Lord has in store for me! A
fire has been set in my heart and I am ready to come home a changed woman of
God. I will not continue on in my old life, nor cut it out, but continue on in
the gracious will of the Lord, in His vision that He has placed before me.

        There are GREAT things to come, so stay tuned!

This blog is in honor
of my beloved grandmother: Hilda Ruth Howard, a woman who truly ran her race
well.

      It’s a
bittersweet feeling to not say goodbye when you know you don’t really have to.
Yet, there’s no peace in the world like knowing you’re losing someone, only to
see them again one day.