I’m sad tonight as I write this. I’ve had the gamut of emotions today, changing about every 10 minutes. Right now, the emotion is sad. And I’ve been sad off and on quite a bit today, usually ebbing and flowing with saying goodbye to yet another person. Goodbyes suck, if I may be so blunt. I never know what to do with them. My head wants me to pretend like I’ll see that person the next week, to protect my heart. But I know how important it is to experience the whole thing well, for closure. So I let myself be sad, and cry, and mourn the loss of things not ever quite being the same again.

I know “this too shall pass,” and I know there’s exciting things ahead. But I also know it’s just so important for me to go through this valley of sadness and to honestly call a spade a spade – to pretend like I’m just bummed out, or to say I’m more excited than I am sad would be a lie, at least for tonight.

I think of all these kids, these wonderful and amazing kids that have been great little buddies for Chickpea the past two years, and how they’ll be so much older the next time we see them. I see people and want to look into each of their faces and tell them “you mean something good to me,” but it’s just so emotionally exhausting to do that 200 times in one day. So I don’t. I offer that to the Father in a quiet thanks for how He has encouraged me so much through the body, through these little Christs living life alongside me.

Tonight I think of all those who went out not more than 100 years ago, and I wonder how they did it. They took six-month voyages by boat, and they packed their earthly possessions using a coffin for luggage. Gladys Aylward took her first furlough after 17 years; her parents didn’t recognize her at the train station. In a lot of ways they make me feel like a weenie, but tonight their legacies also comfort me. Theirs were the stories I read and devoured and gave my girlhood heart a desire to do something bigger than myself.

Tonight I also think of all those who are currently out there, the hundreds and thousands of them worldwide, living in a culture not of their home, daily seeing sights and smelling smells that will never be native. They are raising their children to be global nomads, ambassadors of the One who sends, and a sweet-smelling aroma to the earth’s population. They, too, have said countless goodbyes and had far too many difficult farewells at the airport, and I bet that they, too, have wondered if it will always hurt like this. Will I always be mourning? Will there always be that pit in my stomach? I think of them tonight, and they comfort me enormously – the path I am walking has been trodden many times before. I can step in the treadmarks and walk where I know comrades have stepped and survived.

Tonight I go to sleep in our dear friends’ home, with my husband next to me and my daughter in the next room. This weekend my friends will be going to the grocery store and doing laundry and waving to their neighbors. I might be doing the same things, too, this weekend, 6,000 miles away. It’s just all so surreal right now.

So I yet again echo those words Elisabeth Elliot has said and has been such an encouragement to me: do the thing in front of you. Or as Dory says, just keep swimming. That’s all I know to do right now. In a minute I will turn out the light and I will go to sleep, because I know that’s the next thing in front of me. And tomorrow I will get up and start another day, my last full day in the U.S. And one more time, my good Father will provide the strength and energy to handle another day of this.

posted: 07 February 27
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