I often joke with my teammates that I am a product of my environment.
After deciding to follow Christ in high school, I continued on the “right track” into college. I immediately found myself involved with all the right Christian clubs, leading Bible study and serving. I had great Christian friends, and I would never be found at a college party. Sure, I felt a constant pressing to share Christ with the girls in my residence hall or the people in my classes, but I remained in the Christian bubble I had created around myself.
After college I moved to New York. After two high school mission trips there, I swore I would never live in such a dirty, busy city. But the summer before college graduation, my family and I drove up for a weekend to see Wicked with the original Broadway cast. I immediately felt at home, and knew that despite my fears and my anxieties, I would move to the city after New Years’. I had these great dreams of a job in television production and doing great humanitarian work with the homeless and poor of New York.
Instead, I found myself alone for the first time in the middle of a city of 8 million people, with no direction and no idea how to find my dream job, much less an idea of how to share Christ with the guy peeing on the sidewalk or the businessman on the subway. As a result I found myself fascinated by all that the city had to offer and strove to live like a “real New Yorker.” I met amazing people, I began a completely new career path, and I took pride in finding the hidden treasures that make New York the magical city it is.
But God was not in it. I mean, I still believed in God, I still defended my beliefs when challenged by philosophy and reason, but I was not really listening to Him. I was not being His hands and feet in a city of great physical and spiritual need. I was living for myself and justifying sin by the license of grace.
After two years in New York, God called me out and brought me to the World Race. At training camp in April, I seriously reconsidered leaving for this mission trip, because though I really wanted to know God and follow Him and travel and help people, I knew that being surrounded by 25 radical Christians 24 hours a day for a year would completely rock my world. I didn’t want to be a sheep, and that is what I feared I would become if I was expected to behave and think and BE a certain way. I knew also that it was not just the people I was surrounded by, but the dependence on prayer and faith, that would change me. And I wasn’t ready for that.
But I did it and I’m here and I can say my world has been rocked. Not because I suddenly cleaned up my act and started believing everything I heard and followed everything I was told. I am still very much a rebel. But through the trials, through the joys and the teachings and the hard work and the relationships, I have begun to see God in a new light. I’ve seen Him not as a God who worries about how good I am or if I do all the right Christian things and is disappointed when I fail. But I see my Father, who sees my heart and places knowing me and being known by me at utmost importance.
When I am old, I don’t want to look back on this year of my life and say “look at this cool thing I did for a year,” but I want to look back and see how it impacted every fiber of who I am. The fact that I am in Costa Rica eating Latin food and loving on indigenous people groups has nothing to do with the World Race. It is the vessel that brought me here, but it has everything to do with a big, passionate, personal God who has each step of my journey in His hands. And He won’t let go.
Every story, new or ancient
Bagatelle or work of art
All are tales of human failing
All are tales of love at heart
