How would you live your life if you knew your days were numbered?
Before I came on the Race, I lived with the mindset of 'tomorrow's another day.' There are only 24 hours in a day and if I ran out of time one day, I could always pick up where I left off the next day.
Since leaving, I have learned that is not the way life is meant to be lived. The last week of life before the Race was a time of much busyness and stress. Never in my life had I felt so pressed for time. I was literally leaving the country in x number of days. I wouldn’t see these people for a year; I wouldn’t be able to experience these things for a year, either. I hadn't even been a college graduate for three months and I was already completely changing my life. I had to be an adult and sign a power of attorney for while I was gone; I had to open a new bank account that had no fees overseas; I had to pack up my entire life into boxes and store them in my mom's attic; I had to pack what little of my life I was taking with me into a back pack and pray that it weighed less than 50lbs.
If you asked me how I felt about leaving during those last few days at home [which many people did], I would have told you that I felt indifferent about leaving but I was most excited about being done with everything that needed to get done before I leave.
Little did I know that this was just the beginning of that feeling: pressed for time with so much that needs to be done with only x number of days to do it. And to further complicate things, sometimes I don’t even know how many days I actually have. For the past two months [and the next 9 months], I have "started over" with a new ministry host. I'd meet some total stranger in a foreign country and had to rely on them for my shelter, my food, my safety, and my work.
These past two months have made me realize that it takes me about 3 weeks to get comfortable with people I've just met. Especially being an introvert, I understand that it is naturally going to take me some time to get used to people. But when you are only spending a month with these people and will most likely never see them again after you leave, three weeks is a lot of wasted time and a lot of wasted opportunity for relationship.
This came to my realization after a one-on-one I had with one of my squad leaders. We were talking about how I felt about last month in Guatemala and it occurred to me that I didn’t have many strong relationships that had formed other than the ones formed with my teammates. I had just spent a whole month with my squad and felt like I cultivated very few relationships outside of my team, if any.
