On leaving day, and remembering.

It’s leaving day! 

What am I feeling? 

More than anything, a sense of relief.  I’ve been planning and dreaming and thinking and strategizing for this for so long… I’m so sick of saying goodbye, I just want to get this show on the road and start bringing some of these dreams into reality.  I’m also doing a lot of remembering. 

Of course I am remembering my first big departure day, when I left home to join the Peace Corps.  It was a new country and new adventure but I was travelling with a whole group of people and it was a very structured arrival into country.  Then when I moved back to the ship a few years later, I was travelling with a team of people I had been in training with for weeks and knew a whole crew of people and structure were waiting for me on the other side of the sea. 

This time it’s different. I’m heading out really mostly solo – a coworker is travelling with me and we’ll be together for the first week in country, but then I’m on my own, leading a team I barely know into new exciting dreams we might not even share yet.  I’ve only met a handful of people on the other side.  I’m really excited but realistic about the fact that it’s going to be hard.  I was saying goodbye to a few friends last week and they were saying “I hope it’s great” and I replied with “I’m hoping for 51% awesome!”.  They got it.  Anyone who has worked overseas for any length of time knows appropriate expectations are necessary and they are almost always too high.  I’m hoping for 51% awesome and any more than that would be total icing. 

I’m also remembering a journal that is in the bottom of a box somewhere in my mothers’ basement. In it, written nearly two decades ago while I was in college at a campus ministry gathering, are the words the speaker asked us to consider: What would it look like to give up everything in trusting God? Can you do that?  My response?  No… I don’t think I can do that, because he might send me to Africa.  At that time I had a very confused concept of God and his goodness and thought that would be the absolute worst thing that could ever happen to me – a punishment of sorts.  Well, here I am, unable to imagine doing anything else, and living in Africa is the place I want to be more than anything. 

So as I cram my last few items into my bags and hope it all makes it to Liberia by tomorrow evening, I’m filled with so much gratitude.  Thank you, friends and family and fellow world changers, for being so supportive of this crazy life I lead. Thank you for being a part of my story.  

xxk