I came on The World Race expecting to change.
How can you not change after an experience like this?
I thought I would return home and my family would not recognize me. Not because I had changed physically, rather that I would have changed and matured in a way that is only possible after a year of living alongside the improvised. I would be a better person, more in love with Jesus, kinder to those around me, more willing to give out of my abundance.
Yet, the honest truth is that I really haven’t changed that much. I still like shopping at the mall and I will jump at the chance to go eat expensive fast food in town. I know that I am called to a life of simplicity, but I have a hard time letting go of my possessions. I fear that if I truly make the decision to follow Jesus “anywhere,” I will end up living the rest of my life without a husband in some remote African village. I have also learned that the struggles and temptations I thought I was leaving behind in America will follow me wherever I go, even on an 11-month mission trip. I am not perfect and I do not pretend to be.
It scares me that this journey is already half over.
What if month 11 ends and I return home exactly the same?
I realize that I came on The World Race with expectations and this entire journey I have been waiting for Jesus to change my life. I have sat around eager for God to work in my heart, but I have done nothing on my part. Sure I have felt compassion for people, I have felt sorry for them and I have cried more on the The World Race than I have in my first 24 years of life combined, but I struggle to see my emotion transfer into the rest of my life. How is it possible for me to live amongst such dire poverty, but sit in my bed at night daydreaming about my closet full of clothes waiting for me at home?
The honest truth? I am scared of change. The Gospel message is scary. Scripture is clear that Jesus came for the oppressed, the poor, the sick and I am called to give up everything and become “the least of these.” In modern America…this idea is radical. We want Jesus, but we also want the American Dream and somewhere along the way we have lost the Gospel and replaced it with something comfortable.
In his book Radical, David Platt argues, “We are settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves. ”
A few years ago, Shane Claiborne, author of Irresistible Revolution, conducted a survey of those who claimed to be “strong followers of Jesus.” Participants were asked whether Jesus spent time with the poor. Nearly 80 percent said yes. The same group of strong followers was asked whether they spent time with the poor, and less than 2 percent said they did. Claiborne’s response, “I learned a powerful lesson: We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I have come to see that the great tragedy of the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.”
I know that it is God’s desire to use my journey on The World Race to change my life, but what I have come to realize that I have to choose in. True change requires me to be an active participant in the process. The standard has been set, I have been called, will I choose to pick up my cross and follow?
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