Yenakan

This is me, today.

I have been staring at this winking cursor for several minutes.

How does one write the last post? What words can wrap up two and a half years of challenge, beauty, pain, growth, anger, sadness, love, laughter? I'm not sure, but I feel like I should try - should use this forum to claim at least this bit of closure.

We left a bit quickly, somewhat unexpectedly. We haven't said goodbye. The things are in our house quickly being covered dust. Luke will go back to hug and pack; I will (most likely) stay here to continue to heal.

(The good news for those of you who aren't quite ready to say goodbye to kaitlynandlukeinrumbek, is that there is a good possibility of a Post Script blog post by Luke upon the conclusion of his pack-up-trip-to-rumbek).

I remember Luke in his second year of university living with our friend Mark at Grebel. I used to go there a lot, skipping my OAC classes so I could hang out with my university boyfriend. One day we were sitting on the fuzzy brown styrofoam-filled couch from his parents house and Luke said, "you know, someday I would like to do a term with MCC or something". We had been dating for about a year, and I remember thinking "someday I would like to do a term with MCC". This is the first time I thought that maybe this boyfriend  of mine could become something more, and (spoiler alert!) turns out we did become something more, and we held each other to that conversation on that brown couch, and we went where we felt called.

And now we're back. We're still processing and can point to funny things about the process: being cold all the time, being overwhelmed with too many yogurt choices, looking in the cookbook and realizing that theoretically I could make everything in that book. Closing the book and making tomato peanut soup like we ate in Rumbek. There are good things to process like being enveloped in an incredibly supportive community, and there are hard things, and in all these things we are adjusting, but most importantly we are not walking this path alone.

We're back having learned many things and having found more questions than answers. We're back having made friends from all over the world, and with our "to-go-to" travel list exponentially expanded. This chapter in our life that we looked forward to, dreamed about, and lived, is over. We move onto the next chapters holding faith and hope that we will learn many more things and continue to ask questions (although to be honest I like answers now and then too).

I can only take so much processing, so much wondering of what's next. I have a finite ability to allow myself to think about where we've been, what we've seen, and what these things mean for our future. And the cursor will blink infinitely. It is waiting, impatiently, for me to type the next words, urging me to write more when I feel like I have nothing else to write. So this is it. This is the starting point for what is next.

Thank you for journeying with us. We are truly blessed.

Yenakan
(so be it)