Today my little brother comes home from Uganda. I’m so proud of him; he had his own plans for his summer, then God called him to raise $4000 and go all by himself to Africa for 7 weeks and he said yes without blinking an eye. He’s so much braver than I am.
I so wish I was home to welcome him back with a huge sign at the airport then take him for milkshakes at Cookout and talk for 5 hours.(there are so few people on my squad who know what Cookout is; whenever I say how much I miss their shakes I get blank stares. Bless their non-southern hearts)
But that only makes me more excited for the day I come home, because I know he’ll be waiting for me in a suit(because he always wears suits whenever he picks anyone up from the airport; he’s an interesting kind of person), and have the funniest questions for me(which he’ll ask as loud as he can because he loves to embarrass me), and when I get to drive for the first time in a year, he’ll ride shotgun and sing Frank Sinatra to me, and we’ll have twice as many things to talk about since we’ll each have our own mission trips to catch each other up on.
I know that day is ten months away, so I shouldn’t be so excited for it yet. I’m sure it’ll get easier for me to be gone and soon I won’t ever want to go home, but for now I just want to be with my best friend who I didn’t get to say goodbye to.
At training camp they talked about how sometimes we don’t know we have expectations until they go unmet.
And so I had no idea that I expected not to miss home until November. My whole life I’ve never been one to get homesick, ever. Before I left, whenever people would ask me if I thought I’d get homesick, I’d say, “July will be miserable because camp will be going on without me, but once summer is over I probably won’t think about home at all.”
That isn’t exactly how it’s happened.
I didn’t even expect to miss camp THAT much because I was supposed to totally love whatever ministry I was doing on the Race.
And I didn’t think I’d miss my friends because I’d have my team.
But last month was twice as hard as I expected, and now that our whole squad together I think about my friends once an hour.
When you’re getting to know 43 people, you have to tell the same stories and answer the same questions over and over. And I love new friends but at the same time it makes me miss being around people who know what I’m thinking before I say it, who automatically give me hugs because they know I love them/need them to survive life, who know when I’m lying, who remember that I hate chocolate, who make me drink water because they know I forget to(and know I get really mean when I’m dehydrated)…the list could go on.
I do love my squad, and I’m totally happy with where I am, and I mean we still have 10 months. They’ll get my quirks eventually. The point of this post isn’t really to complain; just to note that everything is different than I thought it would be.
Holli, Hope, Leighanne, there’s your proof that I didn’t go around the world and forget about you; quite the opposite actually.
Be praying for us this week as we help teach in the school where we’re staying and lead church services throughout the week! It makes my heart happy to be working with little kids again.
