We’re winding down here and preparing to go home. The Junior 2 exam is this afternoon, so classes for them have been cancelled this week. We’re all supposed to go around the classrooms to monitor the exam, then we have our last faculty meeting of this term. Our colleagues are looking forward to the long break for their travels. It’s bittersweet, as always, to leave one place and go on to another.
I feel that I failed in many ways, yet for a few students I made a small difference in their lives. I told all my students, “I do not care at all about exams. I care that you will be able to speak English.” Only a few could even begin to understand what I meant.  We have a few classes left with the Seniors and I plan to review the exams we did last week. Then we turn in our grades, and that’s the end of this chapter.
We’ll be going to another city in China to visit friends we’ve known for ten years. It seems so long when you say, “A decade” and yet it seems like yesterday that we met them. After that we go back to our own country, visiting friends and relatives on the way. We hope to be home by early March, in time to start the garden season.
We’re always “on the way” somewhere. We’ve been “on the way” our whole lives. I so remember wanting to be tall enough to ride certain rides at the Katy Road Kiddy Land in Huston, Texas. But our family moved a different way before I achieved that height. I remember wanting so much to be able to throw and catch a softball, not to mention to bat one. I was always the last one chosen for a team at recess, and often my name was not spoken, I just went to the team who had the last choice. I remember reading a study done at Pacific University school of Optometry that said the best athletes had the best vision. I could have saved them the trouble by the time I was ten years old. But they had to find their own way to understand why some kids just can’t play ball.
In my mind, I’m still about 35 and it’s hard to believe that three of my “children” are past that already, and the fourth is rapidly reaching that milestone. It’s been hard to believe that our colleagues here are of an age to be our grandchildren, yet they invite us to go out with them for dinner and drinks afterward.
We’re always on the way home, from our travels, our adventures, our work, our play. We’re on the way home from earth to heaven, by way of the one who said, “I AM the way, the truth, and the life.” We cannot know how much longer our travels are on this way, but we know for certain that we are on the way home.