This morning, I woke up missing home for the first time.
I spent the last week in the wilderness of northern Michigan, in a tent staked down with cut vines, drinking out of gallon water jugs that my friends and I walked to fill every morning from a hose marked SAFE FOR DRINKING. I bouldered steep cliffs along Lake Superior in a pair of Tevas, built fires, and pulled over to the side of the empty highway to cook dinner out of the back of my car when a windstorm swept through.
But it was this morning at 8:47 am when I woke up tangled in two quilts, the ceiling fan lazily rotating in the cool, dark, incensed-air of my second-story bedroom, that my heart turned into a rock in my chest. I sat up and looked at my countdown to departure – 93 days – and wondered with it felt more like 3.
Was it okay to be a little afraid of leaving? Was it okay to be missing my family, even while I could hear their footsteps on the kitchen floor downstairs?
Is it okay that lately, I wake up in the middle of the night from a re-occurring dream where I try and say goodbye to old friends, but my mouth is full of paper towel, and I suffocate trying to pull it out? Is it okay that there are only two or three people lately who don’t drive me totally crazy, and that I even want to text?
Is it okay to do the one thing the World Race has asked – to have no expectations – and still feel as though the time I have in the life I’ve always known is about to be up, and that I’m running out of air?
Is it okay for me to be telling you this right now?!
Meeting alumni Racers has been one of the coolest, as well as one of the scariest, things I’ve done while prepping for launch. Some people adjust SO well to coming back home, starting non-profits or moving back to a foreign country to continue ministry. Some come home and don’t leave home for weeks. They no longer understand why they chose their major in college, what their purpose is, and what the heck they need to be doing.
The more I try and prepare myself for leaving, the more people and things from the past and present seem to reach out to me and remind me why I love them, and how much I will miss them. Lately I’ve had this overwhelming feeling of, Oh my god, am I going to see this person before I go? Do you understand that everything is about to change? Do you understand that I will never be the same again?
Don’t misunderstand me: I am not afraid to go on the Race, not one little bit. And I am not sad to be leaving. I believe with all my heart that I was made to do this, and that my life has been a sequence of events that have all led up to this moment.
But for the first time since last fall, when I made the choice to do the Race, I have the sense that I am actually making a sacrifice. Because I am going to miss the relationships that probably would not be ending had I chosen to stay. I am going to miss having my family on the other line to help me grapple with poverty, slavery, spiders, and weeks without running water. I’ll want my best friend next to me as I climb Angkor Wat, ride an elephant, sit next to the Mediterranean ocean and dance at Holi festival. And as ready as I am to be tested and taught and challenged, I am already missing the people, as well as the current Kayla, I am about to grow out of.
There have been two themes threading through my existence lately, and I’m trying to respect their continual presence while attempting to decode why they are here at all.
The first one is the idea that everything, every person, is connected.
And the second is time.
Jesus, won’t you bring me peace and vision? I’m so ready. I am SO ready for this.
And yet, so un-ready.
