On Losing Keys and Feeling Stretched

I lost my car key. It is simply gone. Kapoot. Outta here. No idea. And its not gone in the “silly, you, its in the couch” kind of gone because my apartment is small, like uber small, and its not here. And I just want to add this to the fact that I move my stuff to Arizona in less than 20 days, return to live in an expensive bare apartment, then move in with friends, then drive back to Arizona to fly out to Georgia to move in with my parents, until I have raised $3,600 of monthly support, and can move back out to Arizona. 

Without a car key. 

Oh my life. 

In addition to my car key fiasco, I am feeling these days as if my limbs have all been stretched in different directions. I’ve got one foot in Georgia, with my college friends, my family, my church, my life. And I’ve got another foot in Arizona, with my AYM team and my Apache students. Add to that an arm in Pasadena and another arm being tugged between Virginia, Chicago, Kansas and anywhere else I’ve ever been in my life or have friends to keep up with. In all of these places there are relationships to sustain, things to be done, and things I am missing. 

And the problem is that I don’t feel fully in any one of these places. 

Instead of being able to live wholly in one location my mind is constantly wandering to the lives and places that move on without me. 

In the missions world they call this phenomenon “third culture.” American kids who grew up in another culture never fully feel at home anywhere. I think at 24 I have become a TCA, a third culture adult. I have trusted God to lead me where He wants me, and that means that I have people in multiple states (and countries) that I love and desire to live my life with. And I never feel like I fully belong or am fully at home in any one of these places that I connect with.  

Its exhausting. 

So this post ends without answers and more of a statement, that my car key is gone and my limbs are stretched, and I look forward to the day when I can just sit down and chill for a full 24-hours. No papers to write, no students to tutor, no messy apartment to be cleaned. Oh yea, and a car that has a key. 


A girl can dream, right? 

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