I only have one more month left on the race. And it feels weird.
Because the race has been my whole life for the past 300 something days. It has been all I do, all I see, and all I breathe. My family is my team. Five people who I have lived with since December. One that I have lived with since the beginning. And the six of us have done it all together. Every single day.
There has been so many days of work, HARD work, of sweating, of praying, of crying, of LAUGHING (especially laughing)…
We move our lives around every 30 days and try to adjust to the cultures, the sights, and the smells. We try to love everyone we meet in all these different countries as best as we can, and when it is time to leave, we try to remind ourselves that it is going to be okay without them. We get on a lot of planes and leave a lot of people behind. But we try to remind ourselves that even though it is so hard, it is so worth it.
Sometimes, when we are all sitting around at night, we talk about home. We share stories, talk about our parents, our jobs, or schools, and especially about the food we miss. We laugh and try to remind each other that it won’t be long and we will see our families again. It is a struggle sometimes, to stay “present” on the race. But now I am sitting here and I only have one month left. And I miss Carolina. I miss my home. I miss my family.
But I have 10 new homes and I have 50 more people in my family now. And I am trying to figure out how I am going to get on that final plane in one month and leave them behind. I am trying to figure out how my heart is going to be able to stand that.
And then I think about Jesus. I think about how he left his whole family, his father, behind in heaven to come down to the earth and live as a man. How much he loved those he met on earth, and how it was the hardest thing is the world to leave this earth by dying an unimaginable death…getting on his plane, so to speak… But then, I remember how the angels in heaven rejoiced as the King came home and how when it was finished, he closed the door on death and opened a new one of life. And that makes me feel a litter better about this whole leaving business.
