This is the place.
This is where this whole crazy journey called the World Race began. It was at that very… orange hotel that this adventure truly took root.
Devotees of my blog will know that it was on a vision trip to Cambodia in the summer of 2012 that my path to the World Race first started.
A group of friends from Iowa, including myself, who had a heart to one day work to fight human trafficking, came to Phnom Penh to visit some NGO’s and see if there was anywhere in particular that we felt God calling us.
We spent our nights in that big orange eyesore, and needless to say, I was surprised when one night God told me through a dream that the World Race was meant to be the next chapter of my life.
To make a long story short; it’s month 8 of my World Race, and we’re back in Cambodia. We’ve been teaching English here since the beginning of January, and our first month was spent in a village roughly 2 hours away from Phnom Penh.
One weekend, we made a trip into the city to enjoy some civilized cuisine, as well as some shopping. And where is the first place we find ourselves, but at a restaurant called Jars of Clay, which is a mere 3 blocks from where else…?
Big Orange himself!
As I pondered the significance of winding up in the exact same location where my journey started, I began to consider a phrase made famous by Thomas Wolfe.
He made this statement in the title of his final novel, and since then it has been ruminated on by the likes of everyone from Judy Garland to Frodo Baggins: You Can’t Go Home Again.
Wolfe writes about a fictional author named George Webber, who leaves his hometown and makes it big as an author who uses his upbringing as a source of material in his books.
Finally, when the author returns home, all his friends and family are unhappy with the way their town has been portrayed. To make an 800 page tome short, he eventually realizes that once you leave your home, you can never truly go back to the way things were. You can geographically end up in the same location and see some of the same people, but the passage of time makes it truly impossible to bring yourself back to the way things were, and how you often wish them to be.
Some of Wolfe’s final words of the novel are as follows:
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to
a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back
home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which
are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
I’ve been thinking, not so much about these words, but about the message they serve; are any of us, World Racers or otherwise, truly able to go back to the way we remember things to be? Can I leave a journey of 11 months and go back to Iowa the same person I was when I left? Can any of the 42 members of R squad (and dwindling) return to the homes we left behind and possibly expect things to be the same after 11 months serving the Lord?
I think you know what I’m driving at: the answer of course is no… yet I don’t think that that’s a bad thing.
We should expect our lives to be changed. How could we not? Every single person who signs up for the World Race should expect to have at least a minor portion of change set in place in their spirit.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes in his chapter about marriage that, “It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.”
What I think Lewis is trying to say here is that we can’t just be content with enjoying the pleasures of our youth without wanting to go on to bigger and better things that might be even more enjoyable than what we’ve already known.
Lewis goes on to write, “Let the thrill go-let it die away… and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.”
We’ve spent the last seven and a half months (and counting) working to serve the Lord in whatever capacity we can. And that is no small feet. That’s something that 99% of the American population will never do in their lives. And it would be a shame if we didn’t allow that opportunity to change us in some way.
One last literary reference: in Alexander McCall Smith’s book series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, Smith writes that every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map.
So can I go home again? Can I go back to my dreams of glory and fame? Back home to the escapes of time and memory? To the places where I paddled as a small boy?
I hope to embrace the notion of a map in my heart in a purely geographical sense. I look forward to a time when I’m “home” again with my family, and I get to see my old friends, and experience the things (and food) that I’ve missed for 11 months. But I hope that’s where my physical journey ends. I hope that the World Race has changed me in such a manner that I can’t help but feel that my life, and by proxy, my home will never be the same.
