Made in Richmond

I was at the gym today, doing my required 30 minutes of cardio on the treadmill while watching CNN on the built in TV (seriously, the cardio wouldn’t happen if it weren’t for those blessed screens).  Anyway, they did a brief coverage of the British Open which from what I gathered is being help in Scotland.  Well, that did it for me.  I actually started tearing up and sniffling right there.  And I totally didn’t care.

Allow me to give you some back story.  Our friends James and Jennifer have been planning to go to Scotland as missionaries for a while.  The whole time they’ve been raising support, I completely understood that, yes, someday they would be going and that they would be gone for 2 years.  They are very close to having 100% of their support which means they’ll be heading off probably at the beginning of September.

I knew all of this.  But, for some reason, seeing footage of Tiger Woods struggling against the wind in Scotland made me really get that they are going to be gone and that we are going to spend two years without them.  Yes, they’ll be back for a wedding and hopefully we’ll get to go see them at some point, but we won’t get to see them at least once a week like we do now - like we have for the past 2ish years.  It just made me very sad.

At the same time, I was (and still am) glad to feel that way.   I feel like a lot of people get so caught up in their jobs and the trappings of life that they don’t ever get truly invested in the lives of other people.  We are invested in James and Jennifer and in all of our friends.  We want to see them do well, we pray for them, we love them totally and completely.   They are so wrapped up in who we are that to imagine going through part of our life without any one of them is very difficult to do.

This fall will be the start of a lot of changes for us.  James and Jennifer will be gone.  MattWhite will be gone off and on.  Other things will be different.  But, everything is expected to settled back down in 2009 - for everyone.  I doubt that is a coincidence.  It seems so far away, but when you think about it, in grown-up time, it’s nothing.  I hope I can remind myself of that when I realize that these people aren’t within arms reach for a while.