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Life on the Race.
When someone is looking into the Race, one normally sees the great Insta posts that show how glamorous the Race can be. You can also read blogs about how people are he@|ed, someone came to Chr!s+, or how you get to love on children.
And those are all true. This month I am in Vietnam and it is great. I live a block away from the beach and I get to see and do some great things.
Here are some photos:
Here I am on one of my many walks on the beach.
Here is the Dragon Bridge. It is cool already, but at night the bridge lights up/changes color and Saturday and Sunday at 9pm it spews fire for a couple minutes and then sprays water for a couple minutes. You can see it with the flaming fire ball.
Here I am at Marble Mountain. This is where we went as a team for one of our adventure days.
But the posts you see on Insta and some of the glamorous blogs that are posted are only part of the Race.
I’m very thankful that I had an alumni Racer who talked me into the Race and then also continued helping me with packing lists, etc. She also gave me a lot of wisdom that she learned. One of them was not to have expectations (which is for a WHOLE other blog post). Another piece that she told me was that months of m!n!stry look different. Some months are impactful and busy and others you may have to create some of your own m!n!stry.
This month my team have been tutoring college students in English. It has been really great and our students are so sweet. It’s been a lot of fun talking to them, helping them with pronunciation (like how to correctly say the th sound, the sh sound, etc.–I’m increasingly becoming more aware of how hard English is to learn…), spelling, and more. However, we only have maybe 2 to 3 clubs a day and we have 7 on our team. Meaning, we have a lot of time on our hands.
It’s been hard for me in some ways because I am a purpose driven person and when I don’t really have something to do, I struggle. I can feel purposeless (which isn’t good for my mind) and I can also get really frustrated with the situation feeling like there is nothing I can do and like I am wasting time. And there is a point where frustration is okay–we have a right to feel frustrated, but sometimes I’m frustrated for a very long time and it is not beneficial. Thankfully, that didn’t happen this month because last summer I learned a lot about being frustrated.
I shared about this in a blog a long time ago, but to put it briefly, my transition home from college was really rough. One of the biggest reasons is I didn’t have many friends close to where I lived. So I was pretty frustrated for a long time with the transition and feeling like I couldn’t do anything to change my situation.
However, I learned that summer that sometimes you have to embrace the suck. Be thankful for the small things (counting it all j0y). And just keep going.
So this month I was a little frustrated and though there were hard moments (especially the first week of transition), I chose to be thankful for the good things and go to G@d. I also tried my best to be as fruitful as possible in the things I could control. I felt like all the lessons I learned last summer came into play this month. I really didn’t want to wish away my month when each month is a gift. Besides, as I heard a fellow racer say in a blog “Instead of saying there are easy months and hard months, have the attitude of calling them the fun months and the learning months.”
And honestly, it’s been a really blessed month so far and we still have one more week!
Here’s what I/my team have been doing with having more time on our hands:
-I have been diving deeper into my team. I try and do a one on one with all 6 of my teammates each week.
-I’ve been trying and spending daily time with G@d which has been really good.
-I try and go walking on the beach once to twice a day: Great for exercise and a good time for talking to G@d.
-I’ve been working on the goals I posted in my one of my last blogs.
-We have had more of a schedule this week. We do team time, b!b|e study as a team (a new thing for us this month), whatever English clubs we have for that day, and then we also make our own m!n!stry (which could be seeing where G@d leads us, talking to the wonderful women who work in our hostel, etc.)
It’s amazing what happens when you keep soldiering on and trying to be thankful for the big things and the small things. I feel like G@d is teaching me a lot this month and has allowed so much time to work on my goals.
For people in general and those who want to do this trip: The race is great and is full of awesome G@d moments and adventure, but the race is not easy and there are many moments that aren’t fun. But embrace them: G@d does wonderful things in the hard stuff and you learn so much.
*See my next blog coming soon to see what an average day for my team looks like in Vietnam.
