My relationship with Jesus began well before the World Race. He’s been teaching me for years what it means to believe the gospel and follow Him with all my heart.
But there’s something about leaving home, about putting myself in a position to need God in more ways than I ever have before, about living 24/7 in a community that expects Him to show up every single day, about inviting Him to display His glory and keeping my eyes open constantly to see the work He’s doing in and around me, that enabled me to discover a new degree of intimacy with Him this year.
There’s something about experiencing God’s presence in action that takes the truths He’s constantly telling us and enables me to truly believe them.
Before I left for the Race, I read a blog post called those 18 damn inches: what I learned traveling the globe. Here’s what Darcie has to say about learning truth on her Race:
“All these truths that have changed the way I live? I knew them each in my head before. Without a doubt. This year I’ve picked up on a strange reality about that sacred space between the head and the heart. Gravity fails in those 18 damn inches. They say it’s the longest journey a man can make. Things that should sink down easily from head knowledge to heart reality just don’t. Lies get in the way. So do insecurities. So do cultural norms and social acceptability. The space between the head and the heart is the battlefield of spiritual warfare.”
I learned a lot of things during this year of traveling the globe–not just as concepts I agree with, but as truths that I finally believe down to the core of my being. Here are twelve of the most revolutionary truths that Jesus allowed me to experience so I could learn to believe.
Many of them I knew already, but didn’t fully understand or deeply believe. Some of them were new and mind-blowing.
All of them have changed the way I view God and myself.
All of them, hopefully, will change the way I live for the rest of my life.
1. I am not perfect.
This was a hard one for me to grasp, but arguably one of the most essential and transformative things I learned on the Race. I’ve always been the kind of overachiever who gets straight A’s, follows the rules and doesn’t do any of the big, obvious sins. For a long time, I couldn’t really see my sin, and I beat myself up over my bad habit of procrastination as though that was the only thing between me and perfect holiness.
But what I didn’t realize was that a) I was disregarding the big, nasty pits of sin in me that put me in desperate need of a Savior, and b) I was requiring myself to meet my own standard of perfection and self-generated righteousness in a graceless system I’d created. Realizing–and truly believing–that not only am I not perfect, I’m not even just a few feet away from perfect, able to get there if I work just a little bit harder, allowed me to let go of my unreasonable expectations for myself and finally breathe easily.
2. Grace gives me freedom to fail.
This was perhaps even more revolutionary a concept for me than learning to believe I’m not perfect. The gospel in a nutshell: Because of Jesus’ death on the cross, God showers me with an unfathomable amount of grace. That’s a great Sunday School truth, but the magnitude of it didn’t really sink in for me until this year.
Grace means I don’t have to strive to live a perfect life. It means I don’t have to work hard day in and day out to behave impeccably, to achieve flawlessly, to succeed admirably. Jesus has done that for me, and my perfection and righteousness come from Him alone. Grace means that I am just as valuable to God and loved by Him when I am grumpy, snippy, and refusing to contribute to whatever my team’s doing as I am on the days when I’m enthusiastic, encouraging, and well-prepared.
And as huge as that is, God takes it a step farther: Grace gives me freedom to fail.
I’m an overachieving perfectionist, remember? I don’t like doing things I don’t feel qualified to do, things I’m not confident I’ll excel at. But grace invites me to try, to take risks, to allow myself to go places where I might–and probably will–mess up. Freedom to fail assures me that I can do anything because it’s okay to make mistakes. There is an incredible amount of freedom to be found in doing things I don’t know I’ll be good at.
3. When it comes to grace, sharing is caring.
Early on in the Race, it became abundantly clear that I struggle to recognize my need for grace, accept grace from God or give grace to myself. Pretty soon, one of my teammates called me out on my equally severe struggle to give grace to others. I’d stockpile the slights committed against me by the people around me: big and little, intentional and unintentional, real and imagined. I’d allow them all to build until I was a giant ball of righteous anger, subtly punishing those around me for acting so imperfectly.
The problem is, that’s not the gospel. Just as Jesus pouring grace on me frees me from striving for unattainable perfection, so Jesus asks me to offer grace, freeing those around me from striving for perfection, too. Love involves keeping no record of wrongs, instead choosing to offer grace when my teammates drink the last of the strawberry juice, lose the cap to the water filter, or make hurtful, angry, unnecessary comments. Grace: receive it. Give it. Live in it.
4. I. Need. Jesus. Every. Single. Minute.
Halfway through the Race, I got worn out and worn down to the point where I couldn’t speak civilly to my ministry contacts or teammates if I didn’t spend significant time with Jesus in the morning. During those weeks, Jesus allowed me to truly feel how deeply I desperately need Him every minute of every day.
I need His love if I’m to love others around me, His strength if I’m going to face all the things the day brings, His patience if I’m going to remain calm in the midst of confusing communication and ever-changing expectations, and most of all, His grace to cover all my sin, moment by moment.
Even though He lifted me out of that weariness after a couple of months, He also reminded me that that soul-deep desperation is my true state all the time. It’s easy to cover it up with all kinds of comforts, but it’s always the reality underneath. Recognizing that reality and relying on Jesus rather than worldly comforts or my own strength to address it is essential.
5. God designed me to depend on Him for literally everything.
I taught English in some capacity or another for more than half of my Race. At first, I really struggled with being asked to teach: I majored in English in college, worked in my university’s writing center, and want to become an editor. In theory, I was one of the people most qualified to teach English on any of my teams. On the flip side, I have no training in teaching or ESL, whereas many of my friends in college majored in education and spent four years learning pedagogy and doing student teaching. Because of my “qualifications,” I felt obligated to lead whenever my team was asked to teach. But at the same time, I felt woefully unqualified and inadequate because I knew there are many people who have been trained extensively to do things that I was making up as I went along.
Over the course of the Race, though, I learned to accept that I was there and those qualified people were not. Not only that, but Jesus knew there were more qualified people available, and yet He had chosen to bring me and not them. And then, weeks from the end of the Race, it finally dawned on me: Jesus was asking me not to depend on my own strength or on an education and experience I didn’t even have. Instead, He was asking me to depend on Him, and Him alone, even in things like lesson plans and ideas for corralling disruptive students.
This year, God’s run me through a crash course on dependence. He touched on finances during my fundraising process. He hit on strength and love halfway through when I was completely worn out (see #4, #10, and also this blog). He worked on wisdom and future plans when I was discerning what to do after the Race ended. In my English teaching experience, though, He touched on a surprising (to me, at least) new side of it. To recycle a tired, overused cliché, “God doesn’t call the qualified; He qualifies the called.” Dependence on God means he qualifies me for the things he sets before me. I shouldn’t depend on an education or experience I do or don’t have; He will be my help.
Don’t get me wrong: I still highly value being trained for the things I’m asked to do. If there’s education or experience available for me to get before diving into a position, I’ll absolutely seek it out. But this year God showed me that He didn’t design me to rely on education and experience over Him. He knows what He’s asking me to do, and He WILL be everything I need.
6. Jesus is always at work, but He may not always show me.
There were several months of the Race when I couldn’t see how my presence at a ministry was doing any good. Sometimes I felt like I just wasn’t doing anything meaningful; other times, I felt like I was actually getting in the way, making life harder for the long-term missionaries and community members I was supposed to be serving. At the end of every single one of those “wasted” months, though, my team would be surrounded by the people we’d tried to serve and love as they shared with us just how much our presence there had meant to them and how much they’d miss us, often with tears in their eyes.
At the beginning of the Race, I got easily frustrated when I couldn’t find purpose in my ministry or see results, or at the very least, clear progress. Now, I’m confident that even if I see nothing at all come of the time I spend at any one place, Jesus IS working. He’s not always going to show me what He’s doing, but that’s okay. I don’t have to see what God’s doing to trust and know that He’s doing A LOT.
7. The Holy Spirit in me changes the spiritual atmosphere around me.
Along with trusting that God is working where I can’t see, I now also believe that my presence changes the spiritual atmosphere of a place. I can trust Jesus is at work everywhere I go because the Holy Spirit lives in me.
I could have a two minute conversation about the weather with a stranger in the subway, yet know that Jesus is doing valuable things in and around us through the Spirit in me. I could sit in a bar in the red light district and not even get to talk to a single girl working there, yet know that my very presence has brought the light of Christ into that darkness.
I am the light of the world simply because God has placed His Holy Spirit in me, and even when I’m not actively “doing” something to further His Kingdom, He’s using me in ways I may never see or understand to change the spiritual atmosphere and shine His light into the darkness everywhere I go.
8. Jesus’ love is better than Jesus’ miracles.
I’ll confess: when I went on the Race, I was hoping to see the cool stuff–miracles, healings, signs and wonders, demons cast out, the dead raised, etc. That certainly wasn’t the reason I went, but it was a desired perq. I did see many instances of the Holy Spirit working in ways I wasn’t familiar with (though I never witnessed anyone raised from the dead).
But in the midst of some crazy and bewildering times of prayer, worship and the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, another truth finally sank from my head to my heart: Jesus seeks an intimate, personal relationship with us based on love, not a distant admiration based on the incredible miracles He can perform. And what’s more, faith based on a love relationship with God is way better, more secure, and more deeply, truly soul-satisfying than faith based on seeking miracles.
I’m not in this journey with Jesus for the primary purpose of witnessing the supernatural, and I’m now sure I wouldn’t want to be. I’m in this journey with Him because He loves me and I love Him. And that is a beautiful, miraculous thing.
9. Live Kingdom culture.
There are a lot of crazy different cultures in this diverse and beautiful world. American culture is not The Right Way. None of those other cultures are The Right Way, either: every human culture is laced with sin in various ways, and none is in perfect accord with God’s design. My culture should be Kingdom-culture.
For example: The U.S. views time from a very task-centered perspective, while many other cultures prioritize relationships. While I sometimes found the lack of timeliness in many situations to be frustrating this year, it challenged me to reevaluate the way I view time–and most importantly, the way Jesus views time. Although I don’t intend to start arriving two hours after church starts expecting the service to have barely begun, my life should reflect Jesus’ high value for relationships over tasks and His submission to His Father’s schedule.
That’s not complacently following American culture, nor unequivocally demonizing it and supplanting it with another society’s culture: that’s living in God’s Kingdom right here, right now, on earth as it is in heaven.
10. Christ calls me to love even when I don’t like.
Sometimes on the Race, I encountered people I didn’t particularly like. Sometimes I’d only see them for a few minutes; occasionally I’d be working alongside them for weeks at a time. By halfway through the year, I was worn out, fed up, and highly tempted to stop being kind and patient and gracious to people who got on my nerves–in essence, to be un-Christlike and rude, letting my dislike show.
As I prayed daily for Jesus to help me live 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, He sent me a vital wake-up call: I don’t get to stop loving people with Christ’s love just because I don’t like them.
God’s love for me is unconditional; I haven’t earned it in any way. Likewise, God calls me to be patient, kind, and humble, not envying, boasting, or keeping a record of wrongs, towards everyone I meet. They shouldn’t have to earn Christlike love from me by me first determining whether or not I like them–and if they do, I need to consider how faithfully my love really reflects Christ’s.
11. Surrendering to Jesus is lifelong.
I surrendered my time on the World Race, my first year out of college, to God, laying aside the goals, ambitions and dreams that I’ve been chasing for years and choosing to make Him my first and only priority for eleven months. Halfway through my Race, though, it finally sank in that this level of surrender to Jesus–wholehearted, holding nothing back, chasing His face alone–is for always.
I’m not picking up where I left off now that I’m done, returning to the States so I can get back on track in my ten-year plan. Yes, I still have my dreams, and I’m still working towards my goals. I haven’t abandoned them, and neither has Jesus.
But my plans for my life are fully, completely, absolutely surrendered to the Lord. If He wants to reroute me again, I’ll follow wherever He leads, even if it’s in complete opposition to where I was intending to go. Because ultimately, my purpose in life isn’t to achieve a certain career, but to serve my King, and He’s way more satisfying than anything I could achieve here on earth.
12. Missions = love.
Being a missionary = being a follower of Christ = loving people well. That’s it, the whole thing. I can and SHOULD do this anywhere and everywhere, whether a thousand miles away from home, a block down the street, or in my own kitchen. My “mission” hasn’t ended simply because I’ve left the “mission field”–and if you’re a Christian, you’re not without a “mission” even if you haven’t been sent abroad.
Christ has given us ALL a mission to love our neighbor as ourselves, and He invites us to do that every day, everywhere we go.
I believed this before I left the U.S. last September, and it was confirmed, underlined, bolded, highlighted, in every country I went. Love really is all you need.
So there you have it: the greatest things that circumnavigating the globe taught me about Jesus. Wondering how I’ve changed on the Race? How I’ll be different the next time you see me? Maybe you’ll notice visible evidence, outward changes; maybe not. But this right here–this is it. Worldview shifts, deepened faith, increased intimacy with Jesus, and solid truth. Here’s to month twelve, and month thirteen, and all the rest of the months of living, learning, and loving.
P.S. Wondering why my financial support bar at the top of the screen suddenly dropped back down to nothing? Stay tuned for my next post, when I’ll share the next great adventure I’m embarking on with Jesus, and how you can join me! Or, if you’re super curious and just can’t wait to find out, you can get a sneak peak here. Hint: see #11, above.
