Nine months ago, I quit my job and left my home saying goodbye to my family and my friends. I left the USA, because God opened the door for me to travel throughout the world with a team of like-minded Christians to spread the gospel. This is the same gospel that has introduced me to Jesus, Who in turn has introduced me to God. The closer I’ve grown to God, the more fire in my heart burns for the world to know the gospel of Christ and to know Jesus personally.
Although none of us knew each other prior, we were bound by the fact that each one of us had received a calling to “go”�.
During the past nine months, we’ve learned to work with one another and although we may not have been preaching Jesus at all times, we have been sharing the message of the gospel through other ways including: praying for a paralyzed Mozambique woman and seeing God heal her as she rose for the first time in 18 years, teaching pre-school to rambunctious Swazi children, sitting next to Malagasy school girls because they need someone to talk to, participating in an interview for Malay boys as to why we do what we do, listening to an Indonesian woman share the abuse she suffers at the hands of family members, prayer walking through the red light districts in Thailand, teaching Bible lessons to Burmese college students, preaching to small Indian villages that they have not been forgotten, participating in the rescue of a Nepali boy from trafficking, and speaking in broken Spanish, instructions to games in Costa Rica.
As this season of my life draws closer to an end, I’ve found myself caught in the middle, and my heart being pulled in different directions. There’s a part of me that misses what I left at home. Some days on the field are difficult and I miss my friends and family and those relationships that fill me up. I’ve missed engagements, weddings, birthdays, graduations, holidays, and the birth of my niece. If I’m being honest with myself, there are times when this reality hurts.
In exchange for losing these moments from home, I’ve created memories with people from all over the world and I’ll always share these memories with them for as long as I live. And this where I find myself being caught in the middle: on one hand, my heart is in the USA and on the other it’s with those who I’ve met in Africa, Asia, and now Central America, and it’s with my teammates.
 The closer it gets to November, the closer it gets to reuniting with the people I left at home, but that also means the closer it gets to saying goodbye to my teammates. There’s a saying from a college group I used to be involved in that goes, “Together for a season, and scattered for a lifetime.” I’ve found this to be true the older I get and the more people I cross paths with.
Nine times I’ve gone into a country and nine times I’ve said goodbye to those I’ve met. Now, as I’m getting ready to say goodbye again, the reality is hitting me. I wanted to be honest in this blog, and I wanted to be real. One of the best things about this season of traveling with God is meeting so many people, but one of the hardest is saying goodbye.
I’ve come to realize that what keeps me going is the joy that I’m not doing this for me, but for God, and a verse that keeps coming to my mind is Ecclesiastes 7:8 “The end of a thing is better than its beginning.”�
When God first highlighted this verse to me in Myanmar it didn’t make sense. How could an end be better than a beginning? But the more time that’s gone on, the more He’s taught me through this verse. I’ve realized that it’s okay to be sad about the end of season and even to grieve it, but it’s sweeter than it was in the beginning because we end with something we didn’t start with–we end with history, new friendships, and with memories we’ve made during a season.
