Our three months here are coming to an end. In one week, we will get on a plane to Bangkok, on our way back to the west. Our time here has stood still and flown by depending on the day or week, and now it seems to be speeding up exponentially as we have to start saying goodbye to friends who are more like family.
We sit in our apartment, the mess that is our life sprawled out across the space, and try to figure out how to make it all fit into our backpacks again. I wonder to myself, “How do you tell someone you love so very much that it is time for you to move on?” I’m not going to lie to you, our time here in Cambodia has been good but it has also been so very hard. It’s made us question everything we are doing and everything we want to do going forward. Life in Cambodia has rocked us to the core. But Cambodia has also nurtured us, lifted us up, and taught us more about resilience and hope than we ever imagined we could learn. We are loathe to break up with her, even though it is the right thing for us to do.
Our time here has shown us that sometimes the best way to figure out what the right choice is in any situation is to make the wrong choice. In many ways, Cambodia is the right choice, but in many more important ways, she is the wrong one. She will keep calling to us again and again, and we will forever be drawn back here to visit and reconnect. She feeds us spiritually in ways that no place else does, but this will never be a place that we can truly call home.
We are grateful to her for that realization and so many other things that she has taught us about community, about generosity, about faith, and about hope. But mostly, we are grateful to her for all she has taught us about who we are and what we need out of this big bold life we’ve chosen for ourselves.
The journey continues…
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