This is my why.

My head twirls and swirls like the river that I saw yesterday, twisting out to the sea in an impatient rush to tumble over itself and be free. I'm laying upon my bed, and as usually happens when I am out of commission, I'm wondering why I feel so...woozy.

My heart beats and it's a foreign rhythm, similar to those created around fires in African jungles, with occasional crescendos--ebbing and flowing underneath a swaying cacophony of trees and wildlife. 

Loss of appetite, emotional problems, slow or irregular heartbeat, nausea and dizziness. These are the side effects of malfloquine, my malaria drug, required for anyone traveling to the Dominican Republic. 

The wooziness subsides to a more tolerable amount as I grasp the cause of my condition. Knowing why helps one to endure whatever how may come along. That's something I learned from Victer Frankl, and it carries me through these upcoming 48 hours as I prepare to fly out of the country, it carries me through the next 6 months, it carries me through life. Questions dodge through my mind in no apparent order of importance: 

How can I leave my family?

How can I say goodbye?

How will I weave my way through crowds and to my flight?

How will I connect with my team? 

How will I adjust when I am back home?

How will I communicate with people I'll be working with? 

How will I speak Spanish?

How will I go 6 months without my family?

How can I possibly do this?

Yet each question echoes fear, and underneath fear I uncover a faltering faith, limp and shivering like a trembling spring flower underneath a pile of decay. Faith is an assurance of things unseen, causing fear to be cast into the light, into visibility, and unmasked as the imposter that it is. Fear says it is the one in control, faith knows God is in control. Fear erects itself as an idol in an attempt to allure me to it, because it is an attractive force which somehow seems much more logical than this faith in things that aren't tangible. 

Fear will say how things will go wrong.

Faith proclaims why fear is wrong. 

Faith does not give me a how to every question, but it tells me why, and when my why is answered, I can do whatever is demanded of me. Malaria pill side effects can even be enjoyed as I understand why I am experiencing them. They tell me I am doing something unusual, they communicate an anomaly, and it settles me further into an understanding that this is actually happening. This leaving for 6 months is real. I don't know how it will all happen, and as much as I would like to, I don't know the play by play. But why it is happening, that I can know. 

There are many reasons why people go "6 months abroad" or "volunteer their time" or whatnot. But there is only one reason why I go. I go because He loves. He loves and so I love. His love is too wonderful to ignore, and His love is why I go. This reason will sustain me through the hard times when I miss my family and home, it will comfort me when I am downcast, it will be with me in every situation, and it will answer any how with a resounding belief that cannot be shaken. A belief that any how can be accomplished because the why is so meaningful, so captivating, so much larger than life. 

This is my why, and it shall always remain: I am in Love, and that is why I go.