Expectations, in general, are really just a load of crap, and I’m tired of dealing with them.
Day 1 of Thailand we take what seems like 18 buses to finally arrive at the YWAM base in Chiang Mai. We are picked up by taxi and plan to spend a couple of days in the hospitality house there to recover from the long trip as well as go through some orientation. We arrive at the house around 10 AM, exhausted from an overnight bus. We are pleasantly surprised by an extremely nice home, and definitely the nicest place I have stepped foot into on the World Race.
This house had a huge kitchen, tables for team dinners, a ping pong table, a Wii, a PlayStation, a big screen TV…you name it, they have it. These couple of days were very restful and needed, but it completely changed my mindset on the rest of my month. Before, I was so excited about the village, but seeing this house made me long for the city and a comfortable place to live. We got on a bus a couple days later to head to our ministry site in Fang. We met David and Gan, our hosts for the month, sat down and talked over our schedule for the month.
Leaving this meeting, my team felt overwhelmed by the schedule for the month as we would be moving to live in 3 different places and the longest we would be in one place was 7 days. That longest place was described as a village about 20 minutes away, but it had absolutely nothing around it. Going from Chiang Mai to that village, we thought every whiney and complaining thought imaginable. Our expectations were that we would have a very hard time this week, that if we could just make it through this week, things would be better the rest of the time.
The Lord showed me that week to just go ahead and get rid of any expectations I ever have about anything else because His plans are always far better.
This village I thought was going to be a struggle for my team turned into one of the very best months of the race. Our team joined together in unity. After the week was over, all we wanted to do was stay longer, but the Lord is good in that as well because it would have broken my heart even more to stay just one more day. After 7 days of living in our tents, taking bucket showers, using squatty potties, doing more manual labor than I have all Race, I had fallen in love. I fell in love with our hosts, their hearts behind what they are doing, and their hearts for us. I fell in love with the 6 cutest kiddos known to man who loved us well and we had so much fun with even though they speak very little English. On day 7 when it was time to go, I wept like a baby. It was so sad to leave these people that had become family in the shortest amount of time yet. However, the Lord was not done yet.
After leaving the village, I had low expectations for the rest of our time in Thailand because I was convinced nothing could get better than what just happened. Once again, the Lord showed up and showed out. Our original hosts, David and Gan, came back from their vacation and showed us equal, if not more, love than we had been shown the first week. Once again I fell in love with their family, with their hearts for ministry, and with how they followed the Lord.
Every month I leave a country where I had a good month, I lower my expectations thinking there is no way the Lord could do any better than what He just did. Leaving Nepal, I thought I had found my favorite country on the Race, but Thailand out did that month by far. You see, the Lord does not work off of our expectations, and praise Him for that. If the Lord worked off my expectations, there is not much that would get done in this world and things would not be nearly as good.
So as I leave Thailand and move onto Malaysia, I want to only have one expectation. It is not going to be about housing, or hosts, or food, or absolutely anything I can control.
My only expectation is that the Lord is going to show up.
In my opinion, that is the only expectation worth having. If God shows up, and I know He always will, then absolutely nothing could get any better. One thing I have been learning on the Race is how kind and gentle the Lord is towards His children. If He wanted us somewhere different, He would have us somewhere different. Moving forward from Thailand, I want to be wherever I am and with whoever is around me knowing there is absolutely no better place or no better people to be around me or the Lord would have me there. And I don’t want to just know it, but I want to live my life as if I am fully believing it.
