Month 2 of my World Race is officially in the books. Yesterday at 5 AM my team and I said goodbye to I-Squad and to the small town of Draganesti-Olt, Romania and hopped in a van headed for Stara Zagora, Romania. My time in Draganesti was chock full of highs and lows. There were moments when I felt so contented to be living with my squad that I could have stayed there for an eternity. There were moments when all I wanted in this world was to not be in a scarcely populated city in Southern Romania, living in a house that was accommodating 43 other people. There were days when I was so emotional that I couldn’t even tell which of the previously mentioned emotional states I was in.
This month stretched me in a lot of ways. I found myself more times than not having to do things wayyy out of my regular spectrum of operation. And this really threw me for a loop at times. Which is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, did I really expect to go halfway around the world and not have every aspect of my daily life change? Based on how I handled this month, apparently so.
Example 1: I am about as introverted as they come. I thoroughly enjoy people, but I have to have alone time to recharge. I love people, but not nearly as much as I love being alone. Anyone who knows me can attest to that. As it turns out, solitude isn’t extremely easy to come by when you share a house with over three-dozen people.
Example 2: Because we had so many Racers working with one church, we were separated by teams and placed with different partners in the ministry. My team was paired with the head pastor of the church, Raul Costea, doing from administrative work from his office. Now I have a lot of ideas about what I’d like to do for a career after the Race, but I can promise you that being in an office setting is the last thing on that list. And yet there I found myself; typing emails, printing out information for other teams to use while doing ministry in the field, and answering Raul’s phone. I’d be lying if I said I was super pumped about pencil-pushing in an office while the rest of the squad did what seemed like “real” ministry from my perspective.
Example 3: Before the World Race I was one month removed from picking back up the guitar after eight years of not playing, and the thought of singing in front of a human being was the stuff of nightmares. I was only bringing it because I figured I would be one of at least a handful of people on the squad with a guitar and I could learn along the way and help out with worship if need be. That wasn’t quite how things turned out. During All-Squad month I led worship at least once a week; sweaty palms and shaky voice in full swing.
So in summation, almost every aspect of my time in Draganesti-Olt had me in way over my head, doing things I truly had no business doing. Ironically enough, I’m heartbroken to see that month end. This month-long process of being pushed, pulled, twisted, and contorted into actions that have forever been foreign to me taught me a lot. Naturally, it showed me that I have the ability to do a lot more things than I previously realized, even if those things aren’t in my area of strength. But the most glaring thing this month taught me was gratitude.
You see, I thought I had this gratitude thing down as recently as halfway through this past month. I thought that I was just so contented in being on the Race that nothing could occur to take that from me. Now you may expect this is the part where something terrible happens and shows me how to be grateful on a new level. That didn’t happen. But that didn’t happen because I realized something. I realized that I didn’t even know how to be grateful in the first place.
I was convincing myself that I was so grateful for every aspect of my life, but when I took a step back, I noticed that my actions didn’t reflect that in any way. A large chunk of my time I was spending working at my ministry trying to make the best of it and taking time to pour into my squadmates to really relish my time with them. But an even larger chunk of time I was spending envying other teams who had more hands-on ministry than me, and sitting locked away in my mind thinking about the laundry list of things back in the States that I was missing out on.
I had one crystallizing moment when I realized how much I was idealizing every situation that wasn’t mine. I remembered a specific day from back in March, when the Race was still just this cool adventure I was planning on doing. Sitting at a coffee shop with my headphones in, I was studying my bible. Playing from my phone was an app called “Rain Rain” (S/O to Michael Craig for revealing this beauty to me). Essentially Rain Rain is a simple noise app made to help people sleep or decompress, jam packed with all sorts of endless nature/ambient sounds. At that time I had created a channel mixing the sounds “Rolling Thunder” and “Rain on a Tent”. I did this because I wanted to imagine myself sitting in a tent during a rainy day in Thailand on The World Race just spending time with Jesus, because I thought that was just the coolest thing, right?
Welp. Fast forward to this last month and here is the channel mix you would have found under my “Favorites” tab:
[Rain on a Window/Thunder Cracks/Clothes Dryer]
I was sitting on a bunk in Southern Romania, on an adventure the likes of which I’ve never come close to experiencing, living out of my backpack, and spreading the Gospel with some of the most incredible people I’ve met on this earth; and I was trying to recreate a soundscape that would make me feel like I was sitting at my home in Dacula, GA.
God didn’t bring me on The Race so that I could point out every situation that wasn’t ideally tailored to me and my preferences, strengths and comforts. He brought me here so that I could take inventory of all these things and see the beauty in each of them.
It was insanely difficult on my introverted psyche to live in a house with 43 other people with limited privacy. I learned how to not only cope with that, but how to let down the wall I’d built up and actually bring other people into those struggles. That’s something that would not have been possible had I not been put in this position.
Doing administrative work for the majority of the month was painfully frustrating and cabin-fever-inducing, but in that time I learned that I’m called to do ministry even when I don’t realize the impact I’m making and that I am more than able to perform outside of my skills and strengths simply because it’s work that needs to be done.
Leading worship last month was nerve-racking beyond words and threw me into the place where I am by far the most uncomfortable and vulnerable. But as a result of being dealt that role, I grew more musically this month than I had in the 8 years before The World Race. In that month God showed me that He didn’t need me to have incomparable talent to lead my squad in worship; just an incomparable jealousy for Him.
In month one I learned that discomfort breeds growth. In month two I learned that discomfort breeds growth, and in turn, growth breeds gratitude.
Gratitude is not evidenced by how much I think it but by how much I show it, and I plan on looking for every chance I get to show that in the next nine months.
