Five hours

It's 2:30 AM on Thursday, March 6th. I just finished packing my life for the past two months into two suitcases and a backpack. If all goes well, I leave Cuenca in five hours. It's such a surreal feeling, to know that the past eight weeks actually happened. Sometimes it seems like I just dreamed it all up. (Some things, however, even my active imagination could not have created.)

It's weird knowing that I'll pass people from the Ecuador group on campus, and we'll exchange pleasantries before continuing to live our separate lives. It's weird because we've spent so much time together over the last quad.

It's weird knowing that so much at home has stayed the same, and so much has changed. It's weird knowing that I have changed so much, yet I can't really tell in what ways.

This experience has been so beneficial, but I don't know how I'll adjust back to normal life after this. Normal has been one-way cobblestone streets and pigeons, Andean music and street performers, high altitude and stray dogs, for so long. I have a feeling I won't know what to do in a land where people generally obey traffic rules, where street vendors are not constantly crying, "Un dolar, un dolar, un dolar," or "Cerezas, cerezas." I honestly don't know how I'll adjust to not air-kissing everyone on the right cheek. It's become ingrained, to the point where we even do it among ourselves.

I'm scared. What if nothing is the same as I remember it? What if nothing changed? Either way, I can't really relate. Not at the moment.

But then again, in the words of the inimitable CH Spurgeon, the living are not given dying grace, and the dying are not given living grace. Applied to my situation, the returning are not given staying grace, and returning grace only begins when I step out on my next great adventure.