Sometimes I wonder if growth is repercussion in disguise. Sometimes I wonder if the year and a half I’ve lived since I got back from the World Race has been a pile of months gone to waste.
And most times, I question whether or not the Race ever happened. But my life is very much split into “before the Race” and “after the Race” on my timeline, and that’s how I know it was real. We joked about that in foreign countries, my squad and me. It’s reality now.
They warned us about that: people who had travelled this road before us. I remember a stranger commenting on my blog in Thailand–my third month of the Race–saying, “I’ve been home for six months and I question if it all really happened.”
I remember being both horrified and judgmental, convinced that this too good to be true lifestyle would never end. The Race was everything I wanted to be, wrapped into 11 sweaty and beautiful months. I was used to the label of “wanderer” and happily stapled it to every part of me.
But wanderers get tired eventually. And most experiences have an expiration date.
It was weird to say goodbye. To all of it–the travel, the backpack living–but mostly to the people who had become home for me. For years before the Race, I hadn’t claimed any place as home. Wanderers don’t tend to do that; it’s a continual search for where to land next, not a longing for the one place to return to.
But I had none. They had become my roots, and the title of “world racer” my identity.
America is hard because America is too easy. And I lost myself in the coming months. I lost myself to a sliding scale of judgment and insecurity, to anger and grief, to confusion. And yes, even to the wonder of “did that year of life really happen?” The question weighed me down, and I thought back to that stranger’s comment I received in Thailand.
Frankly, I think the Race is glorified, if even accidentally in our own minds. I think we become baby celebrities for a slice of time, and holding elephant trunks or foreign hands makes us feel ok about ourselves again. Not just ok, but worth something. Purposeful.
And then it ends, and suddenly you’re not cool anymore, and no one wants to hear your dusty old stories. They don’t want to walk with you through the pain and hellfire of returning to a first world country as much as they did inserting themselves into your dirt road descriptions from another time zone in another country.
The lies seep in and you question it all. Not just whether or not it happened, but everything. Who you are to your very core. Did you even learn anything at all? Did you actually grow, or was it just a perception? And why can’t stories like that exist here too?
So my answer has become this: “The World Race completely wrecked me.”
At first, the bad days seemed to outweigh the good. The flashbacks, the loneliness, the lies. And suddenly–but not really, for God was working the entire time–a shift occurred.
The title of “wanderer, nomad, world racer” wore down. The more wrecked I realized I was, the more it dawned on me how I longed for a home.
Yes, traveling the world was grand. It was everything I wished my life to be and it definitely looked good to other people. But you know, God often doesn’t call us to the grand. He often calls us to the least of these, to the valleys, to–dare I say it–the mundane.
I had developed habits of uprooting and moving from mountain to mountain. I had prided myself in being the one to go and never stay. I had prayed and begged God to call me to a place I least expected and assumed he would point it out somewhere in my travel itinerary during those 11 months.
It seems a bit backwards, but the world taught me to go home. I drowned in Indian hospitality, though they hardly had anything to call their own. I was lent fluffy, giant towels and offered a hot shower by a couple in Nicaragua my team and I had just met. I noted the different ways cultures embodied home and envisioned myself one day carrying my baby in a colorful Guatemalan wrap on my back or sitting on pillows around a table Turkish style.
But never did I imagine that out of the 11 plus countries I’ve had the complete joy and opportunity to enter, God would call me back to a place I had grown to dislike: America. And not just America, but the very city I grew up in and swore I would never ever call home again.
Yet here I am, back in my hometown. And I’ve been calling this place home for the past six months, though the word tasted foreign at first.
So what did the World Race teach me? How did it change my life?
I learned that life goes on, and not in a hopeless “did those 11 months really happen?” kind of way (though that is still a struggle from time to time), but in a “the Race was insane and incredible, and I’m so thankful it led me to where I am and who I am today” kind of way.
I learned that Isaiah’s exclamation, “Here I am, send me!” can be a battle cry in my own hometown. It doesn’t–it shouldn’t–have more weight because you’re in another country living an uncomfortable life deemed worthy of a hashtag or photo proof.
I learned that being wrecked has been the absolute worst part of my life, but it’s also been the absolute best. Because I see life differently. I can’t just undo the 11 months of insanity, brutal honesty, and indescribable joy I lived all over the world.
Some days I don’t like that. But most days, I’m thankful.
Because without the Race (and ultimately without Jesus), I’m not sure I would have ever found home. I would probably still be out there wandering with my pack and my pride.
I miss it everyday. The thrill and exhaustion of travel days, the feeling of entering a brand new country, living each moment with my best friends. But I also know that those moments are still with me. And yes, stories like those can exist here in my hometown too.
Jesus does incredible things when you act in obedience to him.
And by listening and obeying, you may just find home.
