It is inevitable… there will always be moments in life when we have to say goodbye. To people, to places, to things. It is the reality of living.
I knew coming into this year that this reality would be one of the hardest things for me. Growing up my family moved across the country every 5 years from the time I was 7. And when we weren’t in the middle of moving, we were just waiting to find out when and where we would move next. My parents are dreamers so there was a near constant discussion in my house where one of my parents, usually my dad, was saying something along the lines of “I was looking at job listings today and saw this really cool job in (insert random city here). Wouldn’t it be cool to live there? Think of all the cool stuff we could do!”
I was born in Georgia, then when I was 7 we moved to Colorado to get to know my grandparents there. I remember being so excited about a new place and I had loved Colorado when we visited.
The next time we moved, I was 12 years old. This was a much less exciting. To my 12 year old self, it seemed like the end of the world. I remember the last day of school my 6th grade year was spent in near convulsive tears knowing that nothing would ever be the same. My heart shifted a little, the lies in my heart whispered that it was better not to care. And I began to believe them.
When I was 17, it again became clear that we were going to move. My whole world was crumbling around me and there was nothing I could do. I tried to convince my parents to let me stay, I tried to think of a way to keep everything from changing again, to no avail. When summer came, I climbed in the car and watched my life fade into the rearview mirror.
I became very cynical and allowed the temporal world we live in to make me bitter and lonely. I knew at that point nothing lasted, but instead of taking advantage of every moment and making each second last as long as I can, I just stopped caring. Whoever said “tis better to have loved and lost than never have loved at all” lied! Losing hurts! In my mind, it was not worth the losing to have something for a second.
As a result, I spent years settling for skimming the surface of my life, never allowing myself to care too deeply for anyone or anything. I could, in an instant, shut off any love I had for a place or a person or a thing if it looked like I might lose it.
My dreaming parents had given birth to a dreamer as well… the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree I suppose. When I felt the call to go on travel and do missions I felt this struggle internally. I wasn’t sure how one person, one heart, could simultaneously experience an ever present restlessness whispering “go” and a deep intense longing for the permanent unchanging steadiness of home. But that is the irony of the human condition is it not? We have eternity written in our hearts yet grow restless when things stay the same and often find ourselves feeling trapped.
I knew when I signed up to spend 11 months moving from place to place that God wanted to break me of my complacency. He wanted to teach me how to love, how to lose, and how to find myself in Him. I thought it would be an easy lesson to learn, it sounds great… to love fully and to live fully. But I had spent years building up walls to defend my heart from doing what it was created for.
Last month my teammate Janelly and I were sitting and talking. She has lived in the same place her whole life. My dad had just shared with me that he had lost his job. My heart ached with the same sense of “here we go again” that I have grown so accustomed to in my life. As I shared with her some of the aches in my heart and how I was fighting hard against falling into old patterns of not caring and just skimming the surface of life. She shared with me how the race is giving her an interesting glimpse into the things I had shared with her. The race is like an accelerated and condensed version of my entire life. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it’s true.
Every time we enter a new season, there is a choice to be made. We can choose to love, which is in turn a choice to live, or we can choose to not. Every morning when I wake up, I have to make a choice. I can look at today and choose to keep my distance because I know that in 15 days I am going to leave and go someplace new… or I can choose to dive head first into where I am and what God has for me.
As we sat together as a team feeling the foreboding sorrow of another goodbye and leaving behind our hearts in yet another place to go and do it all over again in a new country, my team mate Kate quoted something she had read in a book at some point.
“Goodbyes offend the sense of eternity in our hearts”
Which makes perfect sense. We were never created for endings. We were created for the eternal, for life not death. But we chose death. Adam and Eve chose the ending when they picked the fruit in the garden, but God takes what is intended for evil and uses it for good. This is the same for our endings. But if we never choose to live then we don’t give God the space to use our lives (endings and all) for good. I am tired of choosing not to live and not to love because of fear that I might lose. God is eternal and He is good.
“Living is a choice
and we must make it each day
the moment we wake”
– Tyler Knott Gregson
