This has been a crazy year. Thirty-two people, eleven countries. Who does that with their life really? We travel for days and days every month. We change and adapt to new cultures and languages every few weeks. We carry one heavy bag. Our entire life stuffed into one bag. We’ve have slept in tents, on floors, in barns, on a mattress without a middle, on pull out beds, on strangers floors, in dorms on trains, on planes on buses, and in the back of trucks. My diet consists mostly of rice (which I strongly dislike) and peanut butter (which I’m not too fond of either) We go days without showering. We live on seven dollars a day. If that all isn’t enough the kicker is this, I share this life with thirty two people. That means no privacy. No time alone. No entitlements. No quiet mornings to sleep in late. No quiet evenings. no quiet anything. Nothing is your own. Everything is shared.
Now for those of you who know me well, I need time alone. I process life well only when I have time by myself. Running has been my one outlet this year. My one source of sanity. My only time alone. My time with God. My time to think and pray.
The last few days of our trip have been spent in Bucharest, Romania for debriefing. In the past our squad debriefings have been overwhelming to me. And often I would just escape and run, sometimes for hours. (Well, I don’t actually run the whole time, but I would run walk for hours just to be away).
However, this debrief was different. Way different. I guess because, I am different. It was the first time in two months our whole squad has been together. And you know what? I wanted to be around everybody, all the time. I have truly grown to love these people, the men and women, who I God has given me privilege to walk this year. I sat at breakfast one morning, sipping on some coffee, and I looked around the room. All I could think was haw each person is living evidence to me of Jesus Christ. It’s Jesus’s church, and I have the great honor to drink coffee with His people.
