Departure date...tomorrow!

 For the next five months I will be living in Santiago, Chile, studying as an exchange student at the Pontificia Universidad Católica...and I leave Austin tomorrow! I don't know how ready my overweight suitcase is...but I myself am finally ready to go (at least as ready as one can be in situations like this!). I am thankful for the chance to go out into the wider world, once again to learn more of it and of myself in it. Yet in my traveling halfway across the globe I won't be alone. Two of my dearest friends will be living there with me and our host mother, in the midst of an international community we've come to know and cherish. How great is our God, the way He weaves lives together, and the way He reveals only the smallest part our our lives at a time as we are ready for it...I wouldn't have believed anyone who told me one year ago that I'd be spending half my senior year of college this way! 

As I was packing up my room in preparation to leave, I came across this passage in a book I read sophomore year:

"And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside you...about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it? It might be time for you to go. It might be time for you to change...And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don't worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed."

 ~Donald Miller

If you'd like to contact me I'd love to hear from you! I'll have internet access and will use Skype alot (it's a free chat program where you can talk computer to computer on microphones for free) - my skype name is rachelita.gardner. And my email address is gardner.rachel@gmail.com. 

By Thursday morning I should be there, insha'allah. God bless everyone.