leaving home, going home

Last night I was in a pensive mood and I wrote this crazy blog entry, full of emotional descriptions of what it feels like to say goodbye to a place I’ve come to love.
I wrote, “When I come home late at night after being out, there are a row of lights all the way down the mile-long driveway, and I can make out the palm trees swaying in the breeze overhead. The moon is always shimmery and ringed with a golden halo, and the scent of the flowers is overpowering.
The first of my classmates left today. We know we’ll be back together in January, but there was still this strange sense of incompleteness after he’d gone. We’ve all shared everything this last month and we’ve become so close.”
The best line was near the end and it said “But eternity is in our hearts, we are told, and that is why there is that ache there that doesn’t go away. It just waxes and wanes as we journey through life, drawing us inexorably towards something more, something deeper that will draw together the strands of reality and make sense of our lives.”
Pretty deep, huh?
I went to bed last night and it was raining softly. I awoke sometime in the night to the sound of claps of thunder and then the unmistakable roar as a hurricane-force gust of rain hammered on our tin roof. Shomaila and I both sat up in bed and looked at each other in the dim light. Another sleepless night. We tossed and turned for hours and then at 5:30 there was the sound of a truck outside and voices and we got up and stood on the porch. Nikki was leaving and we waved goodbye before climbing back into bed.
At 6:30 I was woken again by another truck honking. I climbed out of bed and it had finally stopped raining and there was a taxi driver outside who had come to pick up Nikki. I explained to him groggily that they must have made a mistake, Nikki was already gone.
What about Dr. Rust? He asked. She was gone, too, I said. As I watched him pull away I thought, oh dear, I’d better check on that. I wrapped myself in a sweater and stumbled across the campus to Dr. Rust’s house. I knocked on the door twice, and there was no answer. As I turned to go back to bed, I looked up and the sky was streaked with pale pink and the soft light of the morning. I got back into bed and struggled to fall asleep.
My dreams were twisted and crazy. I dreamt of past relationships that hadn’t worked out and there was a lot of saying goodbye, but there was also a lot of hellos and new, changed things.
Yanira woke us up again past nine and I lay in bed, thinking about it all. I feel ready to come home now. I know that I’m going to step off the plane wearing a sundress and flip-flops, and it’s going to be rainy and cold. Things will have changed at home, they always do when I go away. And when I come back here in January, things will have changed in this home. It won’t be the same. I won’t be living in the same bungalow with my class of 7 and catching rides to the beach and having to hang my laundry up inside because it’s always raining. Some things will stay the same, but some things will have changed. I don’t like change, I never have. It takes courage to face it.
But it’s an adventure. Living a life that God directs is not always fun, and it’s not always simple, but it’s always an adventure. Days like today when I haven’t slept much because of storms and noisy trucks, I’d rather do without the adventure. But if I look at the big picture, I know it’s worth it all.