"And the end of all our traveling will be to arrive at the place we started from..."

It is five days before Christmas and I am sitting at Arbatos Namai looking out on a snowy Mazyvedo Aleje, up to my eyeballs in Academic Writing essays to grade, full of end-of-semester wistfulness and a sort of resigned melancholy.

I head to the States on Friday. Through a bus ride to Frankfurt, Christmas Eve with a friend in Stuttgart, and flight on Christmas day, it will be an epic trip. And, even though my I-pod is chock full of suitably folksy songs to accompany my journey home, I am feeling ambivalent about going. Is this weird? In the last few weeks as I have settled into my new apartment and spent a lot of time with so many students and friends in celebration of the holidays, I have felt even more connected and at home here in Klaipeda than I have all semester. And suddenly, I am going to be packing my stuff onto a bus, a train, over land and sea, and be plunked down again in Colorado.

I am scared.

Can I say that? I am fully unenthused about the emotional upheaval that can accompany the abrupt conjunction of my separate worlds. I am not ready for glaring shopping malls full of overweight Americans. I am not ready for garish Christmas lights fastened to every immovable surface. I am not ready to tell the story of my semester over and over and over again until I’m wrung out and limp. I am not ready for jet lag. Or airplane hair. I’m not ready to let my worlds intersect each other and to begin the emotional effort of putting together the increasingly complicated puzzle of my life, with all its different friends and sensations and facets of my personality.

I think I’m feeling nervous about finding a way to let who I have become in these past few months meet up with the person I have been for the past 27 years. Travel is always about the process of maintaining an integrated self, and I fear fracturing. That the stretching of mind and eye and body that these transitions require will eventually stretch me out beyond repair.

The reason I’m feeling this way is because right now in Klaipeda and LCC I am 100% HERE. I have been living in the HERE and NOW in a way that I have not lived in years, and never before for such a duration. Talking with my friends Jared and Jerilyn over dinner the other night, we were discussing our individual perceptions of our time at LCC and how it fits into the bigger picture of our lives. The best word I have found to express my feelings at being here is, arrival. It’s as if all the details of my life to this point in time have brought me here, as inevitably as a plot leads its heroine to the end of a story.

Lately, I’ve been writing a phrase in blue pen on my left hand to remind myself not to look too far ahead, or to live in the past. I write: Cherish What Is. It has been a reminder to me not to get caught up in wishing for what I don’t yet have or what I used to have in the past, whether that be friendships or possessions or ideas.

More than this, I think I fear a lessening of God’s Spirit. I fear not being able to hear Him in the distances and changes I’m about to cross. I fear that I might come back from Christmas break with a less intense focus on the work I’ve been called to. I fear getting too comfortable with the pattern of how things are – I don’t want to lose momentum. This trip home feels like that, a trip, a stumble, in my stride. I know I shouldn’t feel this way. Tomorrow, I’m sure, I’ll feel differently, and I don’t want to hurt my family or my friends’ feelings being so honest. I just wonder if it wouldn’t have been easier to stay put for this holiday!

I should trust more. I should understand that God will carry on to completion the work He has brought me here for.