I’m sitting on my bed, loads of laundry needing to be done, suitcases needing to be unpacked, lesson plans needing to be prepped and papers needing to be graded. Yet, I think I’d rather spend some time processing…

Back in October, we got an email saying, “Who would like to be an interim leader?” This of course meant learning what interim meant… apparently it’s an RVA tradition to take a week off of school in second term for the junior and senior students to travel, see parts of Africa (or just Kenya this year because of COVID) they normally wouldn’t see, learn about ministry contexts outside that of their parents, gain cultural experiences and spend time bonding with other students and staff members. I was in! Except for the part of the email that said, “First year staff cannot be interim leaders.” Welp. Okay. [CLICK DELETE].

And so the drama began… long story short, even though I’m a first year staff member, I ended up being assigned to a trip that had two girls sign up where we would spend the week in Nairobi (Kenya’s capital), learning about different Southeast Asian religions, visiting temples and places of worship for those religions while staying with a local missionary family and eating lots of delicious amazing foods. I was stoked. My co-leader and I were meeting fairly regularly, organizing our ducks and making sure everything was all set to go!

Fast forward to late February, the interim coordinator pulls me into her office and says something along the lines of, “How’d you like to go camping?” With just over three weeks before the trip departs, my co-leader and I have been asked to switch interims. We pass off our almost completely planned trip to a new set of leaders for something completely different. We sit down to learn about our trip and realize that though communication with the tour company has been regular since October, bookings haven’t actually been made, and the quote for the currently scheduled itinerary comes in more than $100 over budget per student. After careful consideration and consulting with the students and former leadership, we revert the itinerary back to an earlier proposed plan that will bring student costs down, and in a frenzy we begin to collect paperwork and nail down details.

T-minus 14 days to leave day: We’ve handled everything. We’re ready. The invoice is paid. The booking is official. All students have submitted their forms. We have a game plan for devotion time. What felt like an impossible situation has been conquered. What could possibly go wrong?

T-Minus 11 days: One of the leaders who was supposed to take over our old trip is added to ours, his wife staying with the two ladies heading to Nairobi, but he’s not going to be a leader… just an added adult presence?

T-Minus 9 days: My original co-leader is transferred interims again to cover for a staff member who had a death in the family, the third adult that was just joining is promoted to official leader status

T-Minus 6 days: A student transfers out of our trip

T-Minus 2 days: A last minute addition of a different student… due to injuries sustained from a significant fall he took on his bike in practice for his… well, biking interim.

Needless to say, Friday night I was a mess. I had gathered all of the necessary student stuff and equipment I would be borrowing, but hadn’t packed a single thing for myself. What did I do instead of packing you ask? I sat on my bed and watched a movie… or two.

Saturday brought a day of packing, organizing, sub-planning for my 20 sophomores being left behind, grading and cleaning to make sure I was prepped for our Sunday departure.

I had no idea what to expect, but I knew I was responsible for the lives and passports (almost as scary) of fourteen teenagers, and with the ever changing leadership, I had been “promoted” from the back-seat-as-the-first-year-staff-member to the person-who-knew-a-little-bit-more-about-the-trip, catapulting me to the front seat leadership role in our group. No pressure.

I tossed and turned, waking up almost every hour on the hour as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning. I don’t remember what time I had set my alarm for, but I’m pretty sure I got out of bed before 6:00am to make sure I had ample time to pull together all the last minute details, including, but not limited to transferring my stuff from the dining room table into the suitcase that was sitting empty on the chair.

We met with our luggage at 8:30am as a massive truck came lumbering into the parking lot. My morning coffee and naturally excitable personality had me bouncing off the walls as my nerves collided with my anticipation. Locked and loaded, we took a group photo with the bus, and off we went! Sitting almost 15 feet off the ground, every bump and pothole (of which there are a lot on the dirt roads) jostled the truck from side to side.

With each kilometer that we slowly distanced ourselves from campus, my shoulders felt lighter and lighter as I felt a burden lift I didn’t realize I had been carrying.

This term has been a very hard. Starting the term with online school and a campus wide bought of COVID and quarantine made me off kilter right from day one. Relationally, I’ve struggled a lot with loneliness in light of strict COVID protocols preventing me from inviting other staff members into my home, and not being allowed to enter theirs. It has felt like an insurmountable barrier to building friendships. Personally, I’ve struggled with homesickness. Two of my closest friends back home got engaged within two weeks of each other and I can’t be there to walk through all of the excitement and joy in the planning process with them. Professionally, AP Chem has been kicking my butt. This term, I have the same students for two class periods back to back for a “lab period” which, from an instructional standpoint is amazing, but from a workload standpoint has been really hard to navigate, manage, and balance planning, prepping labs, and grading lab books for hours on end. The past few weeks especially have been hard as I’ve been walking through the two most difficult units in AP Chem that just take a little more studying before I teach to make sure I know what I’m talking about. All that to say, I’ve been feeling the grind and have had more than one moment in these past couple of months where I have reached into my tanks for those energy reserves and have found them completely depleted, but for small trap door that says “you could never have done it on your energy anyways… here’s mine.”

Which brings us back to interim. I had no idea how I was going to manage. On top of my already floundering self, I felt like each day brought a new curve ball in the planning process. Normally, I really struggle with flexibility, but my original co-leader was so great about smiling, shrugging and saying, “It’s fine! It’s going to be fine. It’ll all work out I’m sure.”

When I picked up the sleeping bag I’d be borrowing from her on Friday, we chatted about the complete utter ridiculousness of all the changes that took place. “God is obviously doing something.” She said. “If any human had looked at the scenario and taken a step back, there would have been at least five ways to make this happen that would’ve made more sense and been less complicated to navigate. The fact that it all turned out the way it did tells me God is definitely part of this. The leaders for each of these trips needs to be on each of these trips, we don’t know why right now, but there is no other explanation for how things have worked themselves out.”

As each day this week passed, I began to see what she meant. The person who ended up being my co-leader balanced me out perfectly. With a medical background, he was flawlessly able to navigate dressing the wounds of our last minute added student, and pretty much every other medical need that occurred. I started telling students to see him and his “Magic Medical Box” if they had need for anything. His easy going demeanor and subtle sense of humor fit right in to our group of crazy. The dad of one of the students on our trip, his parenting experience helped him think of things that wouldn’t have occurred to me, and he easily befriended our driver, tour guide, and chef that travelled with us. We made a great team!

God knew exactly what I needed. I didn’t need a week of eating delicious food in a big city full of loud noises and traffic. I needed a day biking through gorgeous gorges, learning about ministry in Mozambique, in Narok, Kenya, in Tanzania.

I needed to ride in a tiny little motorboat and watch a fish eagle swoop down to eat the fish our boat driver threw into the lake as we drive over thousands of hippos who have made the lake their home.

I needed to walk with giraffes and learn the gestation period for fifteen different types of animals, and that all of them “give birth to a single baby. They do not give birth to twins.”

I needed to laugh with students.

I needed to play Dutch blitz for hours on end as the truck lumbered from campsite to campsite, bruising my leg as I braced against the table.

I needed to play a game called taco-cat-goat-cheese-pizza and pound my chest when a gorrilla card is played, or clap my hands high above my head at the narwhal card, smashing my hand down fast on the deck so I’m not last.

I needed to eat an inordinate amount of gummy bears, cookies, and potato chips.

I needed to sing along to Disney music, and teach my students a round my family used to sing on road trips all the time.

I needed to learn to count to 10 in Korean, how to say “Sah-rung-hae” (I love you) and “Hai-so-itz-so” (you can do it!) amongst a dozen other vocabulary words that I hope to impress my other Korean students with.

I needed to hear buffalo hooves outside my tent, and the whooping call of nearby hyenas. I needed to go ask our guide Moses if I was hearing lions as we listened to a low rumbling rhythmic sound, only to realize it was snoring from a nearby tent.

I needed to smile as a student prayed for us to see a lion during breakfast, hoping God would answer her prayer, but knowing there was only one pride of lions in the game park we were in. I needed to be the one to whisper excitedly “LION” to the students dozing as we passed “boring” zebra’s, giraffes, impala’s, gazelles, and buffalo.

I needed to sing around the campfire songs of worship, and share devotions on various attributes of God. I needed to share my story with my students, to tell of God’s faithfulness in my life. To share how I saw it so clearly in moving from Grand Rapids to Southfield, and how that faithfulness means I can trust him as I moved from Southfield to Kenya.

I needed to challenge them to look for God’s faithfulness in the past and think through how that means they can trust him with their future. I needed to challenge them, because I needed to remind myself.

I needed to wake up early to hike to the bottom of the waterfall with a small group of students, getting drenched as we approached the base of the falls from the misting water.

I needed to have my breath taken away as I ziplined through the forest and over valley’s.

I needed to stay up to 12:30 am, laughing and hearing the drama of who is asking whom to banquet (or even more dramatic… who ISN’T asking and why not?!).

I needed to stay up to 12:30am, listening to a student share about how hard it was for her to transition here to RVA, simply sharing about her life.

I needed to watch a sunset or two, and admire my students incredible ability to turn any moment into a photoshoot.

I needed our campfire the last night, where we asked our students to share a story corresponding to one of the devotions from the week, hearing them share about God’s faithfulness, about specific verses that have spoken to them, about stories of difficulty or hardship, but of how the Lord used that in their lives.

I needed to learn about Korean culture, to have my stomach drop as the reality of “mandatory military service” for their men hit a little different with a round of a-little-too-real-feeling paintball fresh in my mind, having had our other leader sit out the game when PTSD flared up in a student who lived in an active war zone before coming to RVA.

I needed to read my bible while swaying in my hammock. While sitting on a bench in the middle of a national park. While sitting by an early morning fire, overlooking a valley.

I needed to eat smores, with plastic-ey melty kenyan marshmallows, and with sticky fluffy, you-don’t-realize-how-good-you-have it marshmallows brought from the states.

I needed to feel like a rockstar for having brought a campfire popcorn maker, sending popcorn flying everywhere when the lid came off and the corn kept popping, exploding all over the ground, teenagers screaming and laughing alike.

I needed to pose like a flamingo amidst hundreds of flamingos, laughing as we attempted synchronized cartwheels through bird poop and balance on logs for the optimal picture.

I needed to narrate an epic game of Mafia, killing off students with dramatic flair by drowning them in pools of chocolate, or from getting their tongues stuck to poisoned candy canes in the town of candyland.

I needed to stare out the window, admiring the Lords beautiful creation, watching the landscape pass by.

I needed to be reminded of why I am here, why I am at RVA. I am here for them. These 14 beautiful souls that I got to laugh with each day, who I got to watch love each other, who never once complained (except maybe when there were no showers), who woke up each day, a smile on their face, who plopped themselves into a chair to do devotions unprompted, who prayed for each meal, and who made me feel oh so loved.

Now I have to go back to teaching this week and somehow, pretend these 14 students aren’t now my favorites… I have to not give them huge hugs when I see them, winking mischievously as we reference any one of a million inside jokes that developed during our trip.

I have to spend hours once again grading, lesson planning, writing tests, prepping AP homework and teaching them Chemistry.

But only for one week.

The end of the term is coming up fast, and I’m looking forward to a month of rest, and re-focusing. I’ll miss my students immensely, but I feel like I have renewed purpose. I think I’ll spend lots of time this next month praying, praying for them, and praying that the Lord would help me learn how to create balance in the job I’ve been assigned to do with the ministry I’ve been entrusted, that the enormity of the tasks I have to accomplish each week wouldn’t eclipse the beauty of the students in the seats in front of me…

Prayer Points:

• Please praise God with me for such an incredible week!
• Will you pray for me this week? The to-do list for getting to the end of the term seems so long…
• Will you pray I get the rest and rejuvenation I need over the break between terms?
• Will you pray for continued moments to deepen relationships with students and point them to Christ even after this interim experience?