The Extraverts Melancholy

Urbana wrapped up at midnight on New Year's Eve. After staying an extra day in St. Louis to see an old friend, I'm in Chicago's O'Hare airport ready to claw my eyes out with a plunger after a long day of lines, stand-by lists, and watching the sun rise and set from two different airports. Currently I'm satiating my angst with a stale Dunkin' Donut--apparently they don't know the joys of Krispy Kreme here in the land of nasal accents.

I'll be waxing eloquent about the actual conference this week, but my experience of the end is what I'm thinking about today.

At 12:30 a.m New Year's Eve, we sang the last song, went through the last announcements, and 22,000 people began filtering out towards the exits. My students left, my IV staff friends were long gone, but I stayed back watching everyone clear out.

Maybe it's my military kid upbringing--saying good-bye to friends every three years. Maybe it's an unhealthy expression of my extraverted nature. Whatever the reason, I'm always sad at the end of a big conference or retreat. I love the energy, the clear purpose in something like an Urbana or even something smaller like a weekend training conference. I feel the uniqueness of an event like this deeply. Never again will these exact 22,000 be gathered for such an intense and unique experience of God and his heart for the world.

I think a redemptive side of this whole sadness is that it genuinely makes me ache for the time when there will be no more good-byes. I think that this is the core and deeper yearning that's being experienced as I sadly watch delirious 19-year-olds skip out to waiting buses to take them back to Oregon and Omaha and Miami and Maryland.

This is not to say that the New Heaven and the New Earth won't have space for introverts. It's just to say that my extravert's melancholy points me to a larger reality and a specific glorious future that I sometimes foolishly think is irrelevant to my every-day life.

Of course, soon my thoughts turn to my wife and two great kids waiting for me at home, and the melancholy lifts. I'd fight through just about anything today to get home and be reunited with the people who I most deeply love--even suffer through a stale Dunkin' Donut.