This post is long by the way.
Dear Friends, Supporters and Family,
I don’t want to beat around the bush and am just going to say it straight up. As much as it pains me to say it, I am not going on the World Race Gap Year anymore. This blog post is extremely hard for me to write because it’s forcing me to fully accept I will not be going on this trip any longer. The decision regarding whether I was going to continue with the World Race or not was one of the hardest decisions of my life given that I was sort of banking the next year of my life on it. I don’t want to get into too much detail about it, but the reason I can no longer go on the World Race is due to extenuating health circumstances. I have been struggling with and recovering from these health problems since January and while I am recovering from the health issues, after receiving an analysis back from one of my doctors, we discovered that I was not recovering nearly as fast as we thought I had been. This brought up serious concerns with my doctors and parents about being in foreign countries for nine months for various reasons. The entire health situation is too complicated to explain on here. Completely catching me off guard, my life was basically thrown into a tailspin and I had no idea what to do. I was fully set on doing the World Race and felt God had shown me multiple instances of confirmation yet if that was the case, why was this happening with my body? I was at a complete lost as to what God wanted me to do. During this time, a few other people spoke out to me as well who didn’t have any prior knowledge of my health issues and told me their concerns as well which made really made me stop and think since they hardly knew anything about the situation. I felt like I was being cornered between two impossible decisions. I didn’t know if I was giving into fear by backing out of the World Race but I also didn’t want to be stupid and not heed a warning from the LORD.
I took a week to make the final decision so I could take time with God, pray and talk it out with Him. I hardly slept at all throughout the week and my hands had begun to shake from the stress it was causing me. I knew I had to hear confirmation directly from the LORD and not from what I perceived as confirmation from the LORD through people. This was between me and God. After multiple times of just sitting and crying out to God asking and pleading (I was desperate) Him for answer, on April 13th I heard Him clearly say to me that the World Race was not the path He had laid out for me. I’m just going to be blunt, I was angry with God and almost felt as though He had led me on and basically teased me with the Race just to take it away from me. In my spirit, I knew this wasn’t true. I know that is not the nature of our God but in my mind, I wanted to believe that and for a few days had convinced myself this was the case to give me a reason to be angry. I had convinced myself I had been almost lied to by God. I knew this wasn’t true as well but again, convinced myself it was and at this point felt a little forsaken by Him. Thankfully, we have the Bible.
Hebrews 13:5, “…He Himself said, I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Even though my flesh and pride was telling me He had left me, I knew He would never leave me. He will always be with me.
This was when the Lord showed me why I had gone so far down the path of the World Race. He showed me that I had chosen to do the World Race and then labeled it as the next part of His plan for my life. I jumped ahead of God and was trying to fit Him into what I wanted to do with my life. It was completely my own selfishness and pride that had ended me up in this situation yet even though I had brought this upon myself, some amazing things came to light because of it and good was worked through it.
Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose.”
That’s the awesome thing about God though. Even when we are stupid and try to lay out our own path in life, He brings good through it if you’ll let Him. He can turn our mistake into something incredible. I know the LORD has greater things for me because His path for my life is perfect. I just have to follow it and trust Him.
Thank you to everyone who supported me through donations and prayer! I am so grateful to each and every one of you. For those of you that financially supported me, I am steadily going to each of you to determine how you would like me to handle your donation as donations to non-profit organizations are non-refundable. If any of you would like more information on my decision, you can reach out to me at my email address, [email protected]. I would be more than happy to answer any and all of your questions. Thank you to everyone again for all your support!!
