Goodbyes

When people ask me where I am from now, it takes a little longer than it used to to answer. "I live in southern California, but I grew up in Delaware and lived in Indiana for four years during college." Where is home? For the last eleven months home has been Door of Hope, where I work. For a week now, I have been telling people, "I'm moving home." Every place where I find myself making a life becomes home for the time I am there, but home will always be the place where I grew up, the place where my family is, the community that shaped me for the first 18 years of my life and makes up the core of me.

I am incredibly excited about moving back home to be with my family again. I think they are pretty psyched too, given my mom's squeals and running next door to tell her parents when I first told her on the phone. All week I have been preparing for the move: deciding what to keep, getting rid of my bed and selling my car, packing up my belongings in boxes to FedEx home, and having goodbye dinners...

I look forward to the life that is waiting for me in Delaware with my family. But especially as I begin to say my goodbyes in California, it is obvious that in order to get to the next place I have to leave the one I am in and the people who have been a part of my life here. The thought really started to hurt today because our time together is so quickly coming to an end. I now can feel the weight of what I am leaving because it has been an incredibly rich, fulfilling, frustrating, emotional, and impactful journey. So many people I have had the privilege of meeting, working alongside, serving, investing in, having fun with, being taught by. Beautiful people who have left a part of themselves with me and I with them.

There is never enough time. I wish I had more of it to give to everyone who has blessed me so much.

Hopefully, this is not goodbye forever. I don't even want to think about what it will be like if/when I move out of the country and do it all over again, unsure whether I will ever come back to live in America.

Usually when I write, it helps me get my emotions sorted out and organized. Words help me express everything going on inside me. But tonight none of my words express the giant gash in my heart that I feel from knowing in four days I will leave behind friends, spiritual family, and community I love immensely. It's a good thing I feel this way though, because it shows that I was impacted while here. Perhaps it is a combination of all the fun we had and all the struggle and growth we went through. Those things together build a lot of love.

Goodbyes have always annoyed me. I just want to get on with the next thing in life; people come and go, and we move on. But goodbyes are getting harder now as I invest more of myself in people and go deeper than a week, or a couple months, or even a year-long stay. We share our resources, we learn personalities, we have a blast, we get hurt, we heal, we teach, we encourage, we comfort, we live life together. It all creates these ties that bind us together, and even though people come and go I am so glad I can know that it is never  goodbye forever to those who share my faith in Jesus... we will get to live forever together in eternity!

How blessed I am to have so many brothers and sisters to have fun with forever! Albania is another place where I have lots of these love ties, but many, many of them do not know who Jesus is. I can't stand the thought of eternity without them. That's why I have to go make my home with them for a while so they might find their homes in heaven.

Heaven. I will be glad when that is my home and there will finally be no more goodbyes.