I Don't Know If Anyone Was Looking for a Wrap-Up, But Here You Are Anyway

Brant, James, Katie, and me at CSC.

It's over. I'm back at home in Sparkle City.

We spent our last 2 days at the Campus Crusade Compound, which was a little sketch, but we appreciated it nonetheless. We did some debriefing, which was basically sitting together, praying, reflecting, talking about our re-entry transition, and sharing our memories and learning experiences. I think it was a really good time all in all, though Brant was sick and then Chris got sick and we didn't ALL get to spend the whole time together.

But on Tuesday night, after we finished up with all the debriefing, we just played games for a while together, and since we had to leave for the airport at 4 in the morning, we just decided that we wouldn't go to sleep. We moved the party into Katie's and my room, pushed the 2 twin beds together, ALL piled onto them and watched a movie on my laptop. The "no sleeping" thing didn't really happen for everyone, but I myself only slept about 20 minutes all in all. We just wanted to spend our last hours together enjoying one another's company. This didn't put any of us in GREAT moods for the flight back to Miami, but it was memorable. I personally enjoyed the bonding experience.

The flight back to Miami was 4 hours. Katie and I both had flights leaving out of Miami shortly after 1:00, and as we were cutting it close, we had to pretty much grab our bags and dash. This meant short goodbyes to everyone, which I personally think was better for me. I almost started crying a little as it was, so if we'd had time for proper goodbyes, I probably would have been a wreck.

It really is kind of a tough transition. We were all warned about it during debriefing--I mean, you go from spending just about every second of every day with 7 other people, and you're going to get ridiculously close. And when you suddenly aren't with them anymore, it's really tough. I knew that it would be. Also, things are just different here in America. For being the world's superpower and being so industrialized and proud of ourselves and everything, we're not all that great. Americans are far more vulgar, far less friendly, and far less healthy than people in the Caribbean (and I'm guessing lots of other places), and we think we have it all together. I notice it in really little things now like I never could have before. Being away has made me appreciate a lot of things we have here more, but it's thrown others into a much harsher light.

And it's been tough being without the gang. The good part of it was that we all exchanged numbers before we left, and James in particular has been texting me a lot, and I've gotten messages from Becky, Graham, and Atalie as well. Also, I've never been more thankful for Facebook, since I've gotten to talk to everyone that way too. And I may have mentioned that we did prayer partners when we were on the island together--a guy and a girl would team up for the week and meet up a couple of times and pray together for each other and for our Project. Well, Graham texted us all on Wednesday night and told us that he thought we should keep it up for a couple of weeks anyway, at least by email, and assigned us new partners. I think that was a good idea. It keeps us more spiritually connected and we have to contact each other to know how we can be praying for each other.

But it is hard to tell others your stories when they don't know the characters.

So, since this is the last post for this blog, I will give you a few bullet points of things I've learned, things I've experienced, etc., so you can kind of grasp what I'm taking away from this summer.

• God is far more capable of handling my life than I am. Without Him, it all goes to ruin.
• Having an intimate relationship with Him is the most important thing you can have in your life. Everything else is rubbish compared to knowing Him.
• God took 8 kids--the smallest Project possibly ever--who were all very different from each other and would never have been friends under any other circumstances, and put them all together on this random island to evangelize to Bajans because it was exactly what they all needed to grow in their relationships with Him and begin to find out how they can exercise their faith. The fact that they ended up being practically family was just a bonus He threw in.
• UWI was just practice. The people there were so willing to talk to you and open up about spiritual matters, even if they didn't believe remotely the same things as you did. And at home, on our campuses, it's going to be way tougher, because people are NOT that willing to talk to you, and you can think of a million excuses to keep quiet anyway. Despite all the discouragement and low points we hit on the campus of UWI, that was not the battleground.
• It's true: once you accept Christ as your saviour, you don't HAVE to do anything else. You can sit back and let life happen. But seriously. If you're not putting forth any effort to serve Him, then what are you doing?
• Once you finally do give those things over to God that you've been holding onto so tightly for so long, life starts brightening up. Just let Him handle it. Give it up to Him.
• People are different. You are not always going to be best friends with everyone you meet. You're not always even going to LIKE everyone you meet. But you do have to remember that God loves that person as much as He loves you and you are no better than anyone else. We're all sinners and we're nothing without Him. You don't have to be best friends, but you do have to try to love them as Christ does.
• One reason I went on Summer Project was because I began to feel really confined, like I really needed to stretch myself (this was the phrase I kept using), and I don't even REALLY know what that means, but I definitely feel like I accomplished that. I LIVED somewhere else--a foreign country--for over a month, and I really developed a heart for that place. It was home for a while.
• I learned a lot just about loving people. It isn't something I'm particularly good at, but I am working on it, and I think that being around so many other really amazing, sincere people who are earnestly seeking God and who are GREAT at loving people really helped me out on that.
• I think the biggest thing that I learned was just to fully rely on God. He KNOWS what He's doing, and you're only hurting yourself when you are stubborn and try to resist that. Just be HIS and let Him work in your life.

The tough part is definitely going to be remembering and applying everything that we've learned, not getting down about how much we miss each other, but just surrendering to God and letting Him use us. The bright side is that our bonds aren't going anywhere soon, and we have one another to hold us accountable. We know what's going on in one another's lives and can be continually in prayer about it.

Basically, this was the most important summer of my life to date and I have returned with a new outlook on how I should be serving my great and mighty God and I just want to thank each of you for your constant prayer and support. It was a bigger part of my experience than you probably realize, and I don't think everything would have gone so smoothly without it. I just can't express to you what this experience has meant to me.

Now it's on to real life, to school, to a bigger battleground, a bigger fight, and the same eternal, loving God.