In nineteen days I will be returning to the States. After nearly a year of experiencing the brokenness of the world, I will be coming back to an environment that is assumed to be “familiar.” Many people I’ve spoken to are excitedly counting down the days until the race is over and I’m back “home.” I know that they are expecting me to be just as excited as they are, but instead of pure excitement, I feel emotions ranging from anxiousness to fear.
Many of my teammates are feeling the same way. How do you explain to people the depth of what you’ve experienced after a year of living in poverty? How do you make someone understand what it feels like to have your heart broken for families who can’t afford to feed their children, or for women who are enslaved to trafficking? How can you accurately show friends and family back home that your heart and soul has been altered by the things you’ve seen abroad, the conversations you’ve had with people who have lost hope, or the complexity of the spiritual realm on this earth?
I want to try to explain how a lot of my squad mates are feeling about coming “home.” You see, to us “home” is no longer a place. We’ve had many homes over the course of the year, and we’ve come to recognize “home” as a group of people, not a physical location. We’ve created homes for ourselves within our foundations that have been built in Christ and within the living church that we have become. For many of us, it will be a difficult adjustment having to learn how to stay in one place for more than a month.
I know many of our family and friends can’t wait to be reunited with us, and we’re excited too, but we need you to recognize that this reunion with old relationships means a separation from the new family we that have created. Our squad has experienced so much in other cultures that most people will never experience in their lifetime. Living in such close community in countries where nothing is familiar has forced us to rely on each other in ways that we’ve never had to rely on others before. We have seen each other at our worst. We’ve been vulnerable together and shared things with each other that we’ve never shared before. We’ve cried together, grown together, and challenged each other to grow closer to God. This does not take away from the relationships we’ve invested in with people before the race, but I want you to know that our return home isn’t pure excitement for us. We have formed bonds with each other, with our ministry hosts, and with the people we’ve met overseas that we never expected to form. This does not take away from the love that we have for you, but we will need time to grieve the end of this trip and to mourn the separation from each other. And I don’t mean a few days. For some it will take weeks, and for others it will take months.
We are not coming home the same people we were when we left. I’ve often heard that traveling the world broadens the mind, but if anything, I feel more confused about the world we live in. There are so many different ways to live, so many different ways to do things, so many things out in the world that don’t make sense with an American mindset. I would assume that returning to the States would give us a welcomed sense of familiarity, but to be completely honest, most of us are returning to a culture and society that we no longer understand. Our perspectives on how to live have changed, and not only that, but our relationships with God have changed. We are coming back as different people who view the world in a different light.
The thing we need most from people at home is patience. We need patience when we spontaneously burst into tears for no apparent reason. We need patience when we are not ready to share some of the things we went through. We need patience when we become overwhelmed with the way our society is structured around unnecessary abundance. We need patience when trying to figure out the emotions that we will be feeling. And although we are not asking you to understand the things that we have gone through, all we are asking of you is to give us time and patience.
