"Out of the goodnight, I was born into your arms.
Like you're my country, like you're the hills where I belong,
Like you're the hills where I found love at the end of the world."
- John Mark McMillian, Love at the End.
It's 1:20 in the afternoon at final debrief, and I'm jumping into the resort pool for the third time this morning. The sun feels like a heat lamp against my already dark skin, and the vivid blue of the tiled pool shimmers through my tinted sunglasses. "Grab her legs!" Lindsay screams, upending me the moment my feet hit water. "NO NO NO," I yell, but my protests are drowned out because I'm, well, drowning. She and Stephen drag me around the pool and my laughter slashes my chances at getting one solid breath, because Kayla Garrison is watching from a safe distance and intoning, "That's why I wear sunscreen. So that when people hug me, they'll slip right off."
Eventually, we wear ourselves out and float to the shallow end, hair tangled, leaning into one another, quiet for the first time in hours.
It's really real. This is really happening.
The World Race is coming to an end.
Last night, long after everyone had gone to sleep, I slipped out of our hotel room and walked to the coast - past the pool, past the dimly lit restaurant bar, down the stairs and over the hills of wet sand, finally stopping at the water's edge. And I looked up (which is always an important thing to do, especially lately, when everything here on the ground is so chaotic). And I thought about all of it.
I thought about Syria, and Greece, and how the three weeks I spent at the refugee camps was a way of saying hello to my calling, and I didn't even know it yet.
I thought about the stuff God and I have overcome this year. How at least five times a day this month, I've revisited the night in Cambodia where I seriously considered coming home. I was so mentally tired, so beaten down, and didn't have another hour's left of energy to pull from. God took me up to the rooftop, and what He told me has carried me through these last two months:
"You can stop any time. Your choices can always be redeemed. But there is more here for you, if you want it."
I thought about October 2014, the first time I sat down and wrote on this blog, and the first time someone told me they had been impacted by a post.
And on that note, I want to let you know that this is my last World Race blog.
I'll be home in three days, and I want to spend my re-entry processing all the strangeness with my family and best friends. Don't worry - in the days to come, I'll make sure to tell you where to find my stories! But for now, for this season, this is the final page.
So...I feel weirdly obligated to say something cliché, or maybe sign something vaguely resembling a yearbook, just to give myself closure.
"H.A.G.S. Never change!!!"
Or if I had a hat, I'd throw it in the air and yell "WE DID IT!" and then make my family take me out to Coney Island where I would process all my goodbyes while crying into a Greek salad.
Life, man. What a weird thing it is.
One minute you and your team are sleeping in the storage container at a refugee camp, eating baby food with a flashlight, and the next you're throwing your arms around one another for the very last time.
It doesn't seem fair that all of that ends with one goodbye. But the measure of change and the lessons learned this last year aren't meant to be justified in the pain of the goodbye.
Our lives, from every moment here forward, are the proof that something incredible happened. We could try, but we can't go back to who we were.
So this is to you, Y-Squad. And to you, Reader, wherever you are. None of this would've been possible without you. Because a girl can talk, or blog, and have no relationship or care for those on the other side of the screen, unsure if the words are having any meaning or impact at all.
You've been with me through it all, helping me find my purpose, and encouraging me to keep saying the hard stuff when it all felt like a waste.
I love you. I really, really do.
And I believe in your ability to do hard things, to dream impossible dreams, and to live a better story.
Nothing is impossible for the people who love God.
"Now to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask for or imagine - to HIM be the glory, forever and ever."
Congratulations, Badass Class of 2016.
We did it.
