Pain is Beautiful, Right? (Part One)

And the past few days have been some of the most excruciatingly painful I’ve felt in months if not years. The kind of pain that feels like it has no end, that only leads to despair. And yet that pain is only because of the wonder of what God has done, and the beauty of what He is doing.

Over the past year and a half God has protected and and brought life to one of the most incredible friendships I’ve ever experienced. And whatever happens, I want to share the story of what God has created. Neither of the two of us have shared much with anyone except with our closest friends until I’ve written this; we don’t know how to label the depth of what we never foresaw. And yet I don’t ever want the opportunity to declare what I’ve seen to go by.

Summer and I met while training for the World Race in Georgia. And the first significant memory I have came two months later, as I jumped over to the free window seat next to her just before our aircraft pushed away from the gate at two in the morning for our flight from Los Angelos to Hong Kong. For fifteen hours we stayed awake, me sharing all of the details of how the 747 worked, and the two of us enjoying movies and one another’s company while she laughed and smiled non-stop until we hit the runway. That laugh would eventually cause my heart to ache more and more as I unknowingly began to love her from the first day we were put on the same team four months later into the race. And finally two and a half months before the race ended, I realized that I’d fallen for her, and the the looming end to our deepening our friendship once we returned to the United States seemed unbearable.

There were so many opportunities for both of us to run away from our friendship over the past year and a half.  I think had either of us known that other people saw us as a “couple” even during the very beginning of the race, our friendship would never have flourished. Yet neither of us knew of all the chatter going on amongst other people on our squad until days before flying home. And we never foresaw or had any hope that what we had could ever become anything more than a simple friendship. Yet we increasingly encouraged each other in our burning desire to share Jesus in remote and closed countries, realizing that the desires that God placed in our hearts were created for a purpose. She encouraged me to see the Holy Spirit in a way I never saw before, and to go to a depth with Jesus I was longing before but never actually saw anyone try to live or heard anyone describe. We were able to speak into one another’s lives what God was showing us about each other. All within the bounds of what I thought would never go beyond simply appreciating somone to enjoy life with on the World Race.