“We’re in India.” At first it was something I said out loud, along with the rest of my overly ecstatic and jet-lagged squadmates. Five days later it’s something I whisper to myself, a quiet yet powerful thank you to the Lord God Almighty for allowing this to happen, for choosing me, for creating this town and group of people.
Although you all probably want to know about how life has been this past week, it’ll take me a while to formulate my thoughts enough to write a blog post. For now, I’m going to talk about a facet of my personality that I want to work on while on the race – self-sufficiency.
For me self-sufficiency is more than just a form of independence – it’s hard-core struggling with receiving and asking help from others. It’s having trouble answering with anything other than “fine” because I don’t want people to try to fix what’s “wrong.” To justify this personality flaw I tell myself that people don’t want to help me, which is certainly not true.
I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while because it was a huge hurdle in fundraising for the race. There was no way I could possibly work enough to earn my way on the race, so of course I had to reach out to others and by others I mean like every single person I’ve had contact with in the last five years.
When I couldn’t get a job past June because of training camp and visiting my grandmother, I literally cried because my parents would have to help me pay for gear and spending money on the race.
I wanted to risk leaving the states with an untreated sinus infection because I didn’t want to bother my squad leaders or ask one of my teammates to miss out on launch to go with me to urgent care. There I was sitting on the hotel bed with my team, texting my mom that I was “fine” because I was too prideful.
Yes. Prideful. I used to think pride was just gloating about your accomplishments and not admitting you were wrong, but pride manifests itself in many ways (as I learned two years ago through a Cru Summer Mission) and can be one of the hardest sins to be free of. Through my self-sufficiency I’m basically telling people and even the Lord, “I don’t need your help.”
It’s crazy that so many years later I’m still that little girl trying so hard to prove to her parents and the rest of the world that she can do normal life without falling apart (see My Love Story). But the truth is I have nothing to prove – not to my squad and definitely not to the Lord. He knows who I am and he loves it! He knows that I’m not a helpless wreak. He doesn’t see my need for help as a weakness and a reason to love me less.
For those of you wondering, I did end up going to urgent care, but not without wanting to curl up in a hole to hide.
Burrowing further into self-sufficiency is the mind blowing concept that being obedience to Christ means trading my independence for dependence on Him. Apart from Him I can do nothing (John 15:5). Probably more on this later.
Love you all! Thank you so much for your prayers.
P.S. I won’t be on social media or email until Nepal, but I’ll try to post blogs until then.
