I’ve finally landed on the best possible way to explain my current feelings about the Race: The going part will be easy. The leaving will be on of the hardest things I’ll ever do.
As I’ve mentioned before, I worked at a summer camp for the past six years. That place is my home.
When God first called me to the World Race in February, I wasn’t worried at all about spending 11 months away from America. I thought about how it’s supposed to be hard to leave your home and your family for Jesus, and how it felt so much easier than I’d imagined it would.
Four months later on the first day of camp training, it hit me: this is my home. This is my family. I’m okay with leaving my house and the people related to me, but leaving camp and the people I’ve worked with and loved for over a quarter of my life is not okay.
Fast forward to now. I’ve made my peace with not working at camp for the next two summers, and being away from my friends. God can take care of camp just fine without me, and my friends will still be my friends when I get back.
This week my campers have been on my heart. Not that they aren’t every minute of the day; they’ve just been there more than usual.
And it breaks my heart to be leaving them.
Some I just met and want to see them be junior staffers next year. Others I watched grow up. I knew them when they were homesick 4th graders, worried about them when they got to 7th grade and started getting bored with church stuff, then screamed and hugged them when they got saved two years later. All of them mean as much to me as if they were my own children.
As much as I love the nuts and bolts of what I get to do, and the friends I get to make, I love camp because of my girls. I won’t miss playing games and singing songs and doing skits; I’ll miss being with my girls, talking about life and laughing at stupid things and trying to answer hard questions and hearing how much God is doing in them. I’ll miss being part of their lives.
And I know God will give them a cabin leader just as capable of having fun with them and loving them and teaching them things, but I’m human and selfish. I want to be the one to do it.
I’ve never had any doubt that I’m supposed to be on this trip, and in my head I know that everything will be okay; it just hasn’t sunk down into my heart yet.
So I was thinking about this verse…
“…forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:13b-14
Paul isn’t saying that the good he’s already done doesn’t matter. And he isn’t even saying he needs to literally forget; he’s saying that what God has put ahead of him is what’s important right now.
One of my precious girls told me this summer, after I told her and the rest of our cabin about where I’d be next summer and how scary it was for me to think about leaving camp, “God has used everything you’ve done here to get you ready for this. Camp has been your everything for half your life, but now he’s ready for you to take your everything around the world.” Then another one chimed in, “And it’s not like we could ever forget you, so what are you even worried about?” Both are more correct than they know.
Pray for me this week that I’ll remember Paul’s and my wise camper’s words every time I start to get sad.
And continue your prayers from weeks ago about school, because I only need to tough it out for 42 more days before I can be 100% focused on getting around the world. =)
