As returning home and ending this amazing season on the World Race is getting closer, I’ve been thinking a lot about the steps I’ll need to take to properly wrap up this season and enter into what the Lord has next. One of those things for me is going to be allowing myself to feel all of the emotions.
If you know me well, you know that before I left for the World Race I wasn’t a big fan of emotions, especially crying. I wasn’t sure why, I just knew I did not like them and felt almost embarrassed or not tough enough if I showed them.
The Lord has taught me this year how wrong I was about emotions.
When it came to emotions, I had never thought much about what they meant to me. In a lot of ways that kept me from wanting to feel any of the ‘bad’ emotions. Then, someone described it to me like a pendulum. They talked about how the pendulum can’t swing all the way on one side and not the other. So basically, there’s a good chance that by me not letting myself experience the sad, hard emotions, I was preventing myself from experiencing the extreme side of joy and happy emotions.
So it’s been a lot longer process than I’ll describe here, but basically the Lord took me on a journey to discovering why I don’t let myself experience some emotions to the fullest and how I can begin to do that. He’s shown me how tears are actually beautiful and natural. He’s taught me that emotions are a good thing, and wow, do I have a lot of emotions right now with coming home being only 4 days away.
As I come home and see a lot of you, you may get a glimpse of some of these new emotions. I may get teary eyed talking to you. Don’t be surprised if you see me staring at donuts in the grocery store. I’ll be laughing because I’m reminiscing of the time when my team had donuts almost every day for a week straight. Or my teams favorite (because this happened already), I may begin to laugh hysterically and cry from being overwhelmed by the insane amount of options on the Chili’s menu.
There will be so many different emotions as I begin life again back in the states and right now I am feeling them all. I’m so excited to be home and see you! I am extremely sad to say goodbye to my squad. I’m in shock that I will no longer be living out of a backpack and traveling to a new country each month. I’m anxious to have a permanent space to unpack in. I’m nervous about losing the incredible habits I’ve created in my World Race culture. I’m happy that I will now have running water and hot showers.
There’s so many “feels” as we like to call them and they are all so good.
I can’t wait to see you soon!
