Thoughts on Saying Goodbye
I remember the first time I ever said goodbye to my parents for a significant length of time. For most kids, this happens at college. For me, it was in the middle of a swamp in central Florida.
Let me back up.
My junior year of high school, I decided I wanted to spend my summer on a mission trip. Not like a week-long trip trip, but a 6-week, full on summer mission trip. I knew an organization called Teen Missions who was crazy enough to take groups of teenagers to serve all over the world for an entire summer. I raised the funds and joined the team going to Ethiopia.
Now, what’s unique about Teen Missions is that before you get to the country you’ll be serving in, you have to go through boot camp. Which consists of two weeks of living in the swamp of central Florida in the summer. At boot camp, you are waking up at 6am to run an obstacle course (literally swinging over a slough with a rope), you are doing your own laundry by hand with a bucket of lake water, which you also collect to flush the toilet and bathe with since there is no running water. You are sleeping in tents. You are lathering on 100% DEET because the mosquitoes don’t get any bigger. And if I’m being fully honest, despite all the deodorant I used - I discovered a new level of odor I didn’t even know was possible for myself.
This is all so that by the time you get to Africa, you feel like you’ve reached the promised land. Running water?! Sleeping in till 7am?! A REAL bed?! Does it GET any better?!
Rolling up to bootcamp in central Florida.
I wasn’t kidding about that obstacle course. If your shoes (or you) got wet…you stayed wet until that Florida heat dried you off. Good incentive for swinging well.
Home sweet home during boot camp. (Except that I had a tent mate, not pictured. And sometimes they smelled worse than I did.)
Now, back to that day I left my parents. We had rolled up to boot camp, and I carried my box of belongings in a wheelbarrow to registration. I was assigned my tent and given my duffel bag to put all my belongings in. Then I had to say goodbye.
I felt a knot in my throat. I hugged my mom and dad at my tent site, and watched them walk off, trying to fathom that I would not see them for the rest of the summer. It was hard to wrap my mind around. I’d be traveling to the other side of the world - and they wouldn’t be going with me.
[Side note, I could write a whole other post on how my mom felt dropping her daughter off at this place. As she tells me, she cried the whole three-hour drive home].
As I watched them walk away, I decided I’d take this whole trip one day at a time.
When I think about that summer now, over 15 years later, I don’t remember the goodbye as much as I remember the amazing things God did that summer.
That summer, I discovered an entire world outside of my own and felt a call to serve others that literally changed my life trajectory. That summer, I happened to hear about Columbia International University, a tiny school in South Carolina where I ended up deciding to go to college, which were some of the best four years of my life. That summer, I matured in my walk with Jesus in leaps and bounds.
None of these things would have been possible had I not said goodbye.
Just another day heading into town to buy bread in rural Ethiopia. Please note the amazing cornrow hairstyle I was rocking.
Because of my summer in Ethiopia, I decided to go to Nepal with Teen Missions the following summer. As I wrestled with the decision to give up my last summer of high school, I was less nervous about leaving parents and more fearful about what I was missing out on. I remember feeling nervous that I wouldn’t be there for my last church summer camp with friends. I was sad about not spending the summer with my family, knowing I’d be heading to South Carolina for college as soon as I got back.
And yet, God still said go.
And THAT summer - wow, I am still seeing the fruit of that trip to this day as well. It led to friendships with Nepalese pastors which paved the path for future visits, the creation of a full documentary, followed by a non-profit we started which has sponsored 20+ kids’ education in Nepal for the past seven years.
None of those beautiful things would have happened if I let my fear of missing out win those summers.
I also got to check “riding an elephant” off the bucket list that summer in Nepal.
This week is our last one in Florida. Our last week with my parents and siblings before we move to Kenya. And the feelings welling up inside of me feels oddly familiar to me saying goodbye to my parents at boot camp.
Let’s just say there have been tears. Lots of them.
This letting go is still so hard. It’s stepping away from the good things you know you’re leaving behind. But you don’t quite see the full beauty of what lies ahead yet.
And so that’s where this week finds me. Saying goodbye to the goodness of what I do know and will be missing out on for these next two years. I’ll miss consistent visits with my parents, where they can share in person the joy of how much the kids are growing and changing. I’ll miss being apart of the daily rhythm with nieces and nephews and my kids playing with their cousins.
The letting go of these good things is really, really hard.
And yet, this memory of saying goodbye re-centers me. What I gained from that summer in Ethiopia and the following summer in Nepal was so much greater than what I was so afraid of missing out on. Sure, I could have had a great time at camp with my high school friends, and made some great memories at home that summer.
But the incredible experience of those summers in Nepal and Ethiopia?! That was a rare opportunity - a life changing opportunity not just for me, but for others it impacted - that I am so glad I seized. God is still using that summer to bear fruit today.
I write all this to mostly process myself. I know it’s okay, and good, to grieve the loss of what I am leaving behind in one hand. But it’s also helpful to simultaneously hold the beauty of what came from those trips. And that beauty was only possible through the process of saying goodbye and letting go.
Jesus doesn’t promise that the road ahead will be easy. Boot camp sure wasn’t. But he does promise he will be with me in that hard place, and he will make something beautiful out of it all. That for all the letting go, there is something worthwhile ahead.
The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see.
Hebrews 11:1