Well, I’m back. I’ve been on US soil for four days now, home for three, and I’m finally starting to shake off the jetlag. It’s been an incredible trip. It’s wonderful to be home, but it’s incredibly hard at the same time. I spent the last year with 47 other people who are first and foremost men and women of God and who I love dearly. It’s hard to go back home from that community – they know all my junk, they’ve seen me (and I’ve seen them) at best and at worst, and we’ve all learned to love each other unconditionally. Not being around people is one of the hardest things – my room at home is bigger than many places where I slept with two or three other guys this year. Coming back home is hard in lots of ways, but for me the roughest part is how easy it is.
I still remember how to drive my car. I still remember where the cereal bowls are at home. I still know how to navigate Omaha to get to my chiropractor and the nearest Hy-Vee. I don’t understand this. I’ve been gone for a year. I know that’s not really THAT much time, and it flew by, but I had a lifetime’s worth of experiences and it feels like I’ve been gone forever. In a lot of ways – little things like muscle memory for my car radio, or big things like feeling totally at home in my bed – it feels like I’ve never left. There’s a persuasion here to believe that the World Race, this thing that was supposed to be so inescapably life-changing, never even happened. “It all feels like a dream” is something I’ve heard from more than one of my squadmates over the last few days, and it’s true. There’s a sense of surreality about it, a distance from which I’m already looking back at it. One week ago I was living on the porch of a house in Cambodia with 20 teenagers, but it might as well be ten years ago for all the memories tell me. I don’t understand it. I don’t get it, and in some ways I’m upset. Didn’t I have a thousand and one incredible experiences? Of course I did. Didn’t I learn more about God in 11 months than I had in the previous quarter-century? Absolutely. Didn’t I praise and worship God in two dozen languages in a double handful of churches all over the world? I know I did. If I am to be truly honest with myself, it doesn’t feel so much as though the Race were the dream. It feels like the old life I led before the Race was the dream, the fairytale, and I was only truly awake (or perhaps awakened for the first time) out on the Race. And yet here are the trappings of my old life: my car, my computer, my twin bed (that, after a year in a sleeping bag or hammock, seems like an acre of mattress) and they’re just waiting for me to pick them back up. I left, changed, grew – but all my STUFF stayed exactly as I left it. If anything, it really feels like I’m going back to sleep – falling back into the dream.
There are things that have changed, though. I feel overwhelmed when I look at my closet – I have to keep the door shut. There are things I just can’t deal with yet. I stood in front of the washing machine for 5 minutes trying to figure out how it worked. I keep looking over my shoulder to see where the rest of my team is, and yesterday I almost started a conversation with my empty car because I was absolutely SURE there was no way to have a vehicle with only one person in it.
That’s all surface stuff though. The biggest change wasn’t in how I view luxuries like a warm bed of a private room. The real changes that happened to me this year were internal. I’ve encountered the Living God in ways I never imagined were possible. I’ve had my whole view of how the world works radically altered. I see how easy it is to slip into the patterns of my old life, and I realize that the thought “oh no, I’ve changed nothing” isn’t from me. I understand that the feeling that the Race was a dream is inaccurate. I see my old life and I’m able to discern the positive and the negative aspects – and I can see the heart conditions that led to those things. I have a new perspective now.
I went to the rest of the world and I saw how they live. That’s not some cheesy metaphor – I lived with people from all sorts of lives, in all sorts of countries. I am no longer drawing on only American experiences here. I’ve seen National Geographic and those fundraising TV ads come to real life right before my eyes. I’m incapable of viewing a room the size of mine, where a family of 5 could live in most places I’ve been to, in the same way. I’ve seen suffering and human indignity and things that are just plain not FAIR that I never knew were possible. I’ve discovered that people are the same, and that God is the same, all over the world – but circumstances are NOT. It’s opened my eyes.
So where does that leave me? What do I do with this crazy life I had a week ago that makes ‘real life’ back home feel like falling back into a dream? Well, I’m still working on that – but this time, I’m falling back asleep with my eyes open.
There’s more to come! Stick around for so much more!
