*DISCLAIMER: Mom, dad, matt, and emy, before yall freak out and think I am all miserable…don’t worry, I am now healthy, happy, and excited again. I just had to process through this stuff and figured I would let my supporters in on it! Love yall! 🙂 *
My brain has really been getting on my nerves lately. Does that sound crazy? Maybe you know what I mean. Those times when you can’t control your thoughts no matter how much you want to and you wish you could just poke your brain with a Q-tip and make it shut up?
I LOVE to travel. New languages, lifestyles, flavors, landscapes, friends…I feel the most alive when I am immersed in the challenge and excitement of a new place. I am pretty sure my travel itch will never be scratched to complete satisfaction; there will always be just a few more places I want to see and experience. The World Race was tailor made for me, combining my biggest passion in life…serving Jesus by loving others…and my love for travel.
Becki and I doing backhandsprings on the beach in Leon, Nicaragua.
That being said, nothing annoys me more than feeling like a situation SHOULD make me happy, and yet it fails to. When your brain is telling you that you should be having fun or enjoying something, and if you aren’t, well why the heck not?
You know what I mean. Everyone does. That feeling when you are on vacation, or at a wedding, or out to dinner with best friends, or in some other “happy” place, and you just feel sort of blue and can’t get into it. In spite of yourself, you cannot seem to enjoy it for the blessing that you can logically acknowledge that it is.
I have been so annoyed with my inability to enjoy Thailand in the way that I had anticipated I would. I am grateful that God gave me a naturally joyful spirit, and considering my above mentioned love of new cultures, languages, foods, and lifestyles, I should be skipping merrily through the streets of this strange and exciting new land.
The strange meat-on-a-stick (i.e., animal organs, tendons, and seafood scraps) should be consumed with a cheerful “Welp! Here goes nothin’!” Learning to speak Thai should be keeping me laughing, considering how rarely I actually communicate what I need and usually end up in a hilarious situation. Walking across the street onto the campus of Chiang Mai University and making friends should be a welcome challenge.
To top it all off, we are currently celebrating Song Kran, the Thai New Year. To give you the short description of how the nation celebrates: for about 3 days (or more) almost all of the businesses, schools, and government offices are closed and the entire nation hits the streets to have a free-for-all water fight. Everywhere you turn there is everyone from 3 year olds with water guns to 70 year olds with buckets of water to dump on people. It is perfectly acceptable (encouraged, even) to dump a bucket of water on a complete stranger’s head as they walk by, or to use water hoses to spray the inside of passing cars. It is, without a doubt, the funnest and most hilarious holiday I have ever experienced.
So when I couldn’t bring myself to eat pad thai at every single meal, when speaking Thai exhausted me, and when my first day participating in Song Kran I only felt anxious and overwhelmed, I decided to try and figure out why I was in such a funk. You may not all relate to all of this, but hopefully you will relate to some of it enough to understand my situation.
You know that feeling you have when you are on a trip or big fun vacation that you have been planning for a while? How you wake up every morning excited to go eat the new food and do the excursions and see what cool stuff there is to do? And even when you are tired and just want to sleep in, you still get up and go do the fun stuff because…well, when in Rome, right?! But by the end of the week, you are kind of relieved that you will be able to rest without having to worry about missing anything cool once you are home again…
And you know that feeling right after you got home from church camp in high school, or after a really awesome mission trip? How you would be all on-fire for Jesus and ready to share about Him with your non-Christian friends? And excited to plan out all the awesome ways you were going to grow in your faith and witness to others every single moment? But then the feeling would start to wane a little bit, and you would start to realize that bringing that “mountain top” feeling into the secular world was going to be harder than you anticipated…
Or how about that first week of having new room mates in college? How everyone was excited to share clothes, to go out on the town, to cook meals, to watch movies, and even to study together? But before long, people began to get annoyed with each other as personality differences and miscommunications began to surface, and you began to sense an impending screaming match if something didn’t change…
And smaller things, too…like that slightly sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you order something in an ethnic restaurant and they bring you a plate of something that still has a face on it? But for just one meal it makes a funny story…after all, you can always make a sandwich when you get home, so who cares?
Or when you realize a cab driver is totally missing the mark with where you asked him to take you, and you have to do a lot of whisper-communicating with your friends to see who is going to speak up?
Now take all of these experiences, roll them into one, jump on a plane with 42 strangers, and commit to doing all of the above every single day for ELEVEN straight months.
With no breaks to sleep in your own bed, hug your mama or daddy, laugh with your brother and sister and friends, eat your trustworthy oatmeal for breakfast (as opposed to the entire plate of deep-friend chicken fat blobs and skin I inadvertently ordered yesterday for breakfast), or lay on the couch in quiet peace for an afternoon.
And you might have a small idea of how I am feeling. Situations that normally would make you laugh hysterically at best or feel mildly annoyed at worst now make you want to go lock yourself in the squatty-potty, toilet paper-less stall and cry about the fried egg you THOUGHT you ordered.
I don’t know why I was confident in the beginning that culture shock and homesickness would never hit me as hard as people said it would. I knew I would miss my family desperately; I did NOT know that I would get to the point that I would rather forgo meals altogether rather that risk finding a chicken’s face in my soup…and I am adventurous when it comes to food normally.
My World Race is completely different from how it was two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I had just finished my favorite month so far: I had done nursing as my main ministry, made friends with local Nicaraguans, really begun to understand Spanish, gotten to know a team of amazing college students, and come to consider team Tharros family.
Now, I am in a new continent, new language, new culture, new ministry, new team, and new role on the team.
No WONDER I had to take a step back and take it all in. The reality of what I am doing for nearly a year of my life is no small undertaking.
Strange as it sounds, I actually started feeling better immediately after God reminded me of the reality of how intense this whole experience is. My faithful Father has held me close and comforted me through it, reassuring me that it is ok to not be in the mood for everything all the time. And pretty much as soon as I started praying and processing through all of this, the weight lifted. I was actually able to laugh and play in the enormous water fight of Song Kran, but that is another story. God is still warming me up to the idea of grilled pig intestines for breakfast, though, to be honest.
Future World Racers…try to realize when you leave what it took me until month 4 to realize: it is ok to be overwhelmed by this thing. Don’t be afraid to crave American food and a day off from ministry once in a while. You are some sort of super-human robot if you never do. But trust me in this: for me, the days of homesickness and exhaustion have been FAR outnumbered by the moments of sheer giddiness and appreciation.
So now that I am feeling revived (by the grace of God alone) full steam ahead, folks! We are working with the WonGen Kafe campus ministry this month at Chiang Mai University, so I have two more weeks to enjoy life in Thailand before heading to Siam Reap, Cambodia!
