Dear MNOPQ+Fusion Squads,
I’m writing to you because this is what I wish someone had written to me when I got back.
You might not need this yet. That’s okay; come back a few weeks after Project Searchlight. That was when I became not okay.
The three points I’m going to make all point back to this big idea: you get to bring grace home with you. God will be the same for the rest of your life as he was on the Race, and as they’ll tell you a thousand times at Searchlight, the Race was only the best year of your life so far.
Disclaimer: It’s been almost seven months and I’m only barely beginning to believe that. Any of it. If re-entry has knocked you on your face, know that I’m right here on the floor with you writing this.
This is how it works.
You probably had a handful of experiences on the World Race that brought up parts of your past that you needed to work through and heal from. That’s awesome. I’m proud of you. Celebrate!
Now you’re home…and maybe for some of you, walking in that healing isn’t as automatic as you might have expected.
When I got off the field, I quickly found that I didn’t want to talk about the Race at all, and it took me three months to realize that this was because I felt like everyone expected me to be perfect. They’d supported me to go on this trip, therefore I would disappoint them if I revealed that I was still a broken person who needed Jesus.
Lesson#1-You needed Jesus on the Race, and you will need him every second of the rest of your life. There’s no shame in that; there’s FREEDOM. Dance in it. Remind your squadmates of it. Tell your supporters about it.
It also didn’t help that some of the issues I thought I’d dealt with while I was gone resurfaced when I got back.
On May 24th, I flew home, tackled my family, crawled into my own bed, and fifteen hours later woke up feeling like I could never leave it again.
Depression felt more unacceptable than ever now. How could I spend a year telling people about the hope they could have in Jesus, only to come home and lose any sense of hope at all? This logically led to my anxiety returning(I’ve swung on this pendulum since I was twenty), and as a coping mechanism I shut God out, grasped at anything that made me feel in control, and buried myself in little distractions to dull the pain. I worked way too many hours and spent all my free time watching baseball or obsessively cleaning my room, expecting to feel better.
But to quote the Oh Hellos, there wasn’t any water in the wishing well.
Lesson#2-Jesus was in control on the Race, and he’s not giving you the steering wheel when you come home. You can exhaust yourself pretending to be in charge, or you can relax in the passenger seat and let him take you on an adventure.
All of this led to me avoiding any community. I wasn’t good enough for it.
I didn’t want to talk to my squad. I was sick of not having exciting stories like they did about their lives.
And I really didn’t want to go to church. I didn’t want to meet new people, have to tell them I just got back from a mission trip, and then live with the stress of wondering if it was okay with them that I was still a mess.
I decided I needed to process the Race on my own, get over this newly recurring depression and put my life back together before I let anyone else into my life.
For anyone, but especially for an extreme extrovert like myself who needs company to mentally survive, this is a miserable lie to live in.
It took an embarrassing amount of time for me to admit that if isolation wasn’t the answer on the Race, it probably wouldn’t help for the rest of life either.
(I almost said “in real life,” but I remembered I wrote a blog about that once and thought better of it)
Lesson#3A-Don’t cut your squad off. Even if you’re the only one struggling(and you aren’t; if nothing else, you’re just the only one talking about it), keep sharing. They get it.
Lesson#3B-Find a church and find it now. Long distance community isn’t enough. God doesn’t want you to hide away by yourself begging him to fix you; he wants to give you safe people to walk through that healing with you.
So seven months from now, if you think you’re the only Racer who’s ever taken this long to get it together, remember there’s at least one other. It does get better. But you aren’t a bad Racer if it takes awhile.
I still struggle with perfectionism and the anxiety that logically follows.
I do have a church now, but that took a long time. Finding them was the best thing that’s happened since I got back.
I still occasionally reach for the little vices that help me pretend to be in control.
And today I accidentally turned onto the left side of the road. I survived, but it was still kind of terrible.
Coming home is a mess, and no month on the Race can compare to it.
But…God is good. He is so, so good. He can handle my broken post-Race heart, and he’s got yours too. Handing it back to him is a daily process. I’m still practicing.
He wants to bless you in your new post-Race life just as much as he has the past eleven months, but he isn’t going to force them on you. You have to open your hands. He wants to give you community, but you still have to be brave and let them help you.
I wish I could tell you how long this lasts…but even if I knew, everyone’s different anyways.
All I can say is, you need grace. Don’t be too afraid or too proud to ask for it.
You need community. Ask God to point you, then run after it.
You need your squad. Tell them so.
And you need to go to Searchlight. I could write a whole blog about that, but I’ll spare you. Just go.
You will be okay.
But let’s be friends if you stay not okay for too long.
