Goodbyes and Hellos

My last hike in CO (Reservoir Trail). A friendly bear took this picture while I posed.

“Love from the center of who you are; don't fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply..”  Romans  12:9-10 (The Message)

For five weeks I’ve eaten three meals a day together, worshipped, prayed, played, and trained for a future in missions with a group of about 45 people and their children. I think my experience in Colorado has been a small taste of what the early church must have been experiencing when Acts 2:46 says  “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.”

My roommate Jenn (a nurse practitioner heading to Ethiopia)

 I personally thrive on large doses of privacy and solitude but it surprised me how much of me cried out “I was made for this!” when it came to living communally. It’s interesting  to me that when I didn’t have my own car or even my own room, the new “normal” became feeding  other people’s children, asking for and sharing whatever was needed (a ride, peanut butter, cold medication), and doing activities in groups (“I’m going to Walmart at noon and I’ve got three more spots in the car!”). 
The painful side of being tightly woven into this community of people was saying our goodbyes and parting ways. Some will be my future neighbors (Kenya, South Sudan, and Rwanda) and I hope to see them when I’ll have to periodically cross the Ugandan borders to get my visa renewed. For most of these precious people though, I don’t expect to see them again until we cross the “border” of our earthly lives and say our hellos in Heaven.  That fact makes me even more grateful for one of the last and hardest lessons in our training: “Goodbyes and Hellos”. 

On the day of that session, there wasn’t a dry eye in that training room as we all took turns sharing who we would be saying goodbye to at home in the near future. The thrust of the training was that healthy goodbyes prepare us to risk offering our hearts anew. You can’t numb your heart from pain and still feel true joy; happiness and grief are inexplicably bound together.  With that in mind, I felt challenged to say a real goodbye to my brothers and sisters that I had spent more than a month with. I think before that I would have been tempted to smile big and just say “see you later!”, making light the of the loss of that relationship that God had built.

My hardest goodbye was to a young couple and their two preschool children that will be heading to Japan in the next week. We had a special connection since the first day and I literally became a part of their family during our time together.  It made us laugh that their toddler daughter would yell “Doy!!” (she’s still getting her J’s) from across the room every time she saw me. We started dreading our goodbye a few days before we knew it had to happen and kept saying to each other half-jokingly “I’m not ready yet”. That final day we had together we asked God for His hand of blessing on each other and couldn’t hold back the tears.  We wholeheartedly committed each other to the Lord and grieved the loss that we might not see each other again on this earth.  I rode away in the van to the airport sad, but with a clean feeling of release.

An hour and a half later I was sitting at my gate waiting for my flight to board when I heard “Joy!!” . My friends had just arrived to wait for their flight, sitting down just one gate away from mine.  I rushed over and we hugged and laughed over the fact that we had just literally cried our eyes out over our goodbye. God in His sense of humor and sweetness decided to give us another hello and another goodbye. We called our second parting our “happy goodbye” since the last one had been so thorough. 
I don’t know why the Lord would have me to share all this except that there might be some people reading this that need the release of a healthy goodbye. Maybe it’s to a person or maybe it’s to a season of life or something you previously enjoyed. I’m not an expert in this, but I pray you’re able to grieve that loss honestly before the Lord and acknowledge that it might not come back into your life again. I think only then can we really say an authentic “hello” to the new things God is bringing into our life. 

“ See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”   Isaiah 43:19