I don’t really want to let this day pass without some sort of benchmark…some sort of remark on how crazy it is that my Race ended over three years ago.
I thought the World Race would be the hardest thing I would ever do. But the problem with doing something so challenging at age 21-22 is you then have to keep going. You have to keep seeing what else God has for you. You laid down your life for 11 months… but you don’t get to just take it up again.
Maybe there is a you-shaped box to fill back home, but I don’t think you’ll fit there anymore. And I don’t think the God you used to put in there fits either.
The trouble with having the adventure of a lifetime so young in your life is you can’t stop there. And you won’t. You might try to go back to being normal. But you’ll always be a little different. You can’t spend 11 months in the nations, in being confronted with the brokenness of this world and the goodness of our God, and expect to return to your previous status quo.
And you probably don’t really want to. Let’s be honest. That first step of adventure was never meant to be the last. God leads us from glory to glory. To go back to before—when you will never be the same again—is irrational.
But it is easy to forget. A few months down the road and dozens of Starbucks dates later, the names of the kids at the school in Uganda begin to fade. The faces of the orphaned babies you loved start to blur together. The family in Ukraine who welcomed you in as one of their own starts to melt into other families you met along the way.
And the comfort creeps in…the readily available couches and beds and home-cooked meals and Mexican food and guacamole. You might miss your teammates something fierce but everyone gets involved in their own lives. Maybe they ache like you do but no one is saying anything so it’s assumed everyone is fine and we are all just moving on with our lives.
So maybe you decide to try something different-lead a trip or move to a new country or a new town or go back to school. And maybe you find it—what you were looking for.
Or maybe you don’t. Somehow in your mind you know the God of the impossible, the God who heals and saves and still SPEAKS is out there. But He seems distant. So you keep going. And you find Him—or He finds you. The ups and downs you thought exclusive to the mission field follow you home. Follow you to the next season. And eventually you stumble into a classroom in Spain with a glorious view of the sparkling Med and learn you don’t actually have to be up and down when you are in Christ.
And then you go put this theory to the test in the Philippines… where within a month of arriving you experience the largest earthquake in the region for many years… and 3000 aftershocks… and then you run away to Hong Kong instead of living through a typhoon, only to come back and find that while you may be physically okay and everyone you know is okay, life is not the same as it was a week ago. Or a month ago. Or two years ago when you swore up and down you were never going back to the mission field.
And yet, here you are, self. Here you are, doing something you never really dreamed of, working somewhere you didn’t know existed until six months ago… Living life in a foreign country, adjusting to the culture, the food, the work, the workload, the vulnerability of being someplace different, especially during natural calamities.
Suddenly what was nine months working for an NGO has become that much harder and yet that much more filled with opportunity.
Because, you know, you know the MORE. And even though it’s been hard to see that lately, and even though it feels like masochism to keep putting yourself out there, you know that eventually you have to rise again.
This country will overcome, and so will you. Because that is what you learned on your race, all those years ago. You are an overcomer, you are a woman of perseverance, and the only entity to surrender to is God. Not to circumstances and not to negativity and not to yourself.
Because a life laid down is a LIFE LAID DOWN. It is a daily decision. And yeah, I guess you can take it up again. But when you try, it actually gets harder… so here we go again…
