I head home in 11 days. What? How is that possible? On one hand I can tell that these 11 months have already come and gone, but on the other hand I still feel like it has just began, like there is more.
I can’t seem to wrap my mind around the fact that once I get on the plane to head home there won’t be another new culture to get used to, another currency exchange to figure out, another host to meet, it will just be home.
I am excited I am. I am ready to lay on the couch and take a break. I am tired my friends, my body tells me every morning that it is tired and needs a rest. I am ready to go eat sushi with my best friend and cuddle on the couch with mom, I am ready to see my daddy sitting in his chair in the evenings, and also I’m not. My mind can’t seem to wrap around the fact that things are going to be the same. Things are going to stay the same for months at a time. No new culture, no new food to get used to, no new public transport to try out, it will just be normal. This seems to be the only thing keeping my excitement about coming home at bay. I am scared.
After my 20 hour layover in Atlanta at the beginning of this month, I realized something. I realized how easy it is to fall back into the normal routine of life. How easy it was to spend $25 on a single meal and how going to a huge mall and seeing clothes cost $50 seemed so normal. How seeing fully paved roads and traffic lights didn’t even make me bat an eye. Even though things so easily felt normal in Atlanta it didn’t at the same time. I felt like an alien. I felt like I was in a daze just seeing things from behind a fog. It didn’t seem real. I felt like I was not in America, but in a whole different place entirely. It was such a strange experience, feeling like a foreigner in my own country, but feeling like I belonged at the same time.
I don’t want this. I don’t want to fall back into the normal. I have seen the world and fallen in love with the not so normal way of life that so easily became normal. My normal has been transformed this year into something completely different. My normal is leaving and moving to a new place every 30 days. My normal is sleeping on an air mattress. My normal is having a selection of about 10 different outfits half of which have paint and dirt that just won’t come off on them, and not batting an eye at wearing that out in public. My normal is strange foods, room temperature water, and beautiful foreign scenery. My normal is the world now.
Honestly, I am scared that in just a few months I will forget how spending $10 on a meal was like spending $100 or how for only $25 I can send a kid in Haiti to school for the month, how I can get a taxi for $1 to a completely different part of town. I am scared I will forget my normal and will fall back into the normal life in America that I so desperately want to be distant from.
The truth is, I’m nervous and scared about how easy it is going to be to fall back into the normal American life. I’ll let you in on a secrete….the American way of life is not normal. It is the most uncommon thing in the world and I don’t want to fall accustomed to that again.
So, as I head home in just 11 days keep me in your prayers. Pray that the burdens I have on my heart will ring louder than a half-off sale at Old Navy, or a latte at Starbucks. There are more important things I do not want to loose sight of.
