I scream, you scream, we all scream for….
Racers coming home!!
It’s the end of month 10 of my race (our race, I wouldn’t be where I am without my squadmates). We are all living up the last bits of time we have here with each other, here on the field, here in this crazy time bubble where everything stops and we just keep pouring out Jesus. But if we didn’t admit that we miss our family and friends at home, we’d be lying. We’re excited to head home!
We know you’re excited too. We know you can’t wait to hug us and squeeze us and you’re just dying to know how our year was. I think you might find that we’ve changed quite a bit. I mean, yes we’ve changed in the way we worship and understand God, but we’ve changed in lots of other ways too. Here’s 11 tips on how you can better understand us (and the way we’ve done life for a year) when we get home:
- Don’t be offended if we accidentally tune you out. We have traveled to 11 different countries (ok, some of us 10…shout outs to Albania 2.0 and Malawi 2.0) and we’ve heard countless different languages. Sure, we’ve learned a few words in each, but we’ve spent the majority of our time tuning out a lot of background noise because we just don’t understand it. We might continue to tune out voices when we get back, even if we can finally understand what you’re saying.
- Don’t be offended when we stare at you as you speak English. Aside from our fellow squadmates, we rarely hear English. We may just eavesdrop on your conversations simply because we understand someone for the first time in nearly a year. (Yes, this is the complete opposite of point #1. Forgive us if we don’t know how we will react when we get home. We’ve never done this before.)
- Again, with the English. Ours sucks. The little bits of English we have spoken over the year are often in short, choppy sentences of broken English combined with lots of motions to try to get our point across (and #hashtags). We don’t use big words or even remember their meanings anymore. Forgive us.
- Please don’t cook us a feast. I have probably eaten oatmeal for 50% of my breakfasts on the Race. No, I’m not exaggerating. We don’t require a lot of variety in foods. I can’t tell you enough how much I want some good ol’ Chik-fil-A or a steak and mashed potatoes or cookies or pumpkin pie. And while we might ramble on about those things for a while, we will struggle to eat them. Our stomachs are a lot smaller than when we left and we’ve learned to be satisfied with only a little food. We also haven’t eaten much processed food in the last year. Our stomachs might rebel at the deliciousness if we eat it all at once. But we will get to it, I promise.
- We don’t shower. Ask us to raise our hands and see who showered more than 15 times in all of Africa. You’d be hard pressed to find a single person. We may smell. Just kindly remind us that we are back in America and Americans like to be clean.
- We don’t know how to dress ourselves. We have spent a year literally throwing on whatever clothes smell the cleanest. Striped shirt and flower patterned pants? You bet. Polka dots and chevron in every color of the rainbow? Always. We actually caught ourselves the other day saying, “that totally matches….doesn’t it?” We don’t even know what actually goes with what. Please don’t look at us and say “you’re leaving the house in that?” Just remind us that maybe matching isn’t a bad thing either.
- We don’t know appropriate table talk. We are on the World Race. Every conversation is fair game at any time of day. Our dinnertime conversations usually include the latest on who’s got diarrhea, the symptoms we feel from the parasites, or funny stories about that one time at the squatty potty. Poop talk is our new normal. Sorry in advance. Give us some grace and remind us that you do not want to hear it.
- When you discuss the latest movies, songs, artists, tv shows, etc. we will stare at you blankly. We have no idea what you’re talking about. Especially if it’s from a time we were in Africa and had little to no contact with the latest news. We spent 3 months in Africa and didn’t even know about this Ebola craze. How could we know which movies to watch?
- Please, please do not ask “how was your year?” Our year was awesome. But it will take us a long time to process that question into the short and easy answer that you’re looking for. We’ve seen too much, learned too much. Other questions to avoid include: what was your favorite country?, what’s the grossest thing you ate?, what’s the coolest thing you did?, and what’s next?. Those are all great questions, but our year was so much more than cool experiences and nasty food. If you genuinely want to know, take us out to coffee and let us just ramble on and on, jumping from one story to the next about how we saw God move or the cutest child ever or that one travel day (aka 3 days) out of Mozi. Understand that we want to share with you, we just might not know how.
- Even though we didn’t call you every day, we haven’t forgotten you. To all of our closest friends out there, we miss you and we want to hang out! We know that you’ve changed over this last year too and that we haven’t truly hung out in a year, but we still consider you our besties and we can’t wait for the fun times that lie ahead. We want to know all about your new job or hear your proposal story or see your new baby and all the other things we missed while being away. I know that friendship is a two-way street but throw us a bone this one time and take the initiative to invite us to come hang out. We might just be drowning in “how was your year” questions and haven’t had a chance to call you up yet (10 points to all the racers who even remember they have a working phone again!).
- Don’t put us (or our year) up on a pedestal. Yes, we are missionaries and yes we’ve traveled the world sharing Jesus but it doesn’t make us better Christians. It just means that we heard a call to go and we obeyed. There are plenty of others who have heard a call to stay and obeyed. We are still human and still make mistakes and are still learning how to live out the gospel daily. Our year has been dedicated to giving God all the glory and we don’t want that to change just because we are back in the States.
So, my dear friends, we are asking for your help. We are ending our time as traveling hippies and we are incredibly sad to be saying goodbye to our squad-family. We want to do this transition well, but just like this entire journey, we can’t do it without your help.
We love you and we can’t wait to hug you as tight as possible! See you all soon 🙂
