Dearest Friends and Family,
I am officially feeling much more like myself! Thank you to every single person who responded to my last post in comments and private emails and also to everyone who has waited for me to be ready to come out of hiding. I have slowly begun to meet with friends and have made my way to Target, Southpoint and to church. Sometimes I feel panic but so far the feeling has always passed fairly quickly. Learning how to be home… how to rest… what I think about the past year… what I learned… all of these things are coming slowly but surely.
I am going to continue to blog as I work out what it looks like to transition from traveling around the world to living life again in North Carolina. Right now I think I am working out what I think I’ve learned now that the Race is over for me. I think sometimes it is in looking back that we more fully realize all that was learned during the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
One thing I wondered about while I was away was whether or not my home and family and friends were being remembered by me as better than they actually were simply because everything familiar was so far away. I think it is often so easy to remember what was with fondness, forgetting that in every season of life there are hardships and things hoped for and frustrations that just come because we are alive. Somehow, those things, unless they were truly devastating things, just don’t make it into our memories. As a result, I often wondered whether or not I would feel disappointment once I was home with everyday frustrations. I wondered if I would realize that home seemed so wonderful to me because it was out of reach. I wondered whether I would miss traveling around the world. Whether I would long for the not so distant past of being on the Race. Whether regular life would be normal after holding orphans and clearing fields and making friends all of the world had become a new kind of normal.
Two days ago I was in my room getting ready to leave to meet an old friend and it struck me: it is. Home wasn’t wonderful and missed by me because it was far away. It just is wonderful. My family. My friends. I missed them. I love that now I know that I have both the blessing of having made a few lifelong friends on my squad… that it is possible to miss my team so much… and still find that the relationships here that I left and could barely maintain for months because of spotty internet are what I remembered them to be. I have both and I am thankful.
I am so thankful for the crazy loud lunches on Sunday afternoon. I am thankful that Quynn, who wasn’t really sure who I was anymore, has become my little friend… that Tyler and Brooklynn are growing and thriving at school and that I got to see their classrooms and watch them in their final school performance.
It’s wonderful that Target has everything. And a lot of it. I remember joking with Jillian when we were cooking for the entire month we were in Romania about what it would be like to go to a grocery store and not have to buy out the meat section from fear that tomorrow the shelf would be empty. What a weird blessing that there is so much here that I never made note of before.
My prayer is that I would learn the balance of living in this place with so much, while remembering those that have so little, and that the blessing of being gone and now being back would work themselves out in me and keep me ever aware of the truth that wherever I am, it is for a purpose, that the Lord is watching, and that I can trust Him.
