Disclaimer: this is a long one
“Just 8 days ago I was in Atlanta with family, friends, and a roof over my head. Now I’m carless, homeless, and in Washington D.C. about to face down the largest blizzard in recent East Coast memory…and I’ve got work on Tuesday. What is this? The Hangover Part IV?! Is my life being directed by Zach Galif(no spelling suggestions beyond this point)?”
Those are the kinds of thoughts no one would have blamed me for having three weeks ago – the kind that part of me thought I might be insane for not having. But somewhere in my heart, a steady, quiet voice just kept saying
Just kidding. Thankfully I did not hear a digitally animated, deep sea, amnesiac fish voiced by Ellen DeGeneres on repeat during my time of need, or I might actually have gone nuts.
Instead, the voice in my heart was one of peace. God was telling me to trust in Him and to follow His lead and promising that everything would turn out ok. And I believed Him – not because I’m some giant of faith or because I’m prone to blind belief, but because He had shown me his faithfulness time and time again in the days preceding this. He never fails to bring provision to those who rely on Him, and He was teaching me this lesson.
If The Hobbit is an apt analogy for this year long jaunt I’m about to go on, minus the slaying of hoards of mythical pursuers (although if left with enough time I could find something in the World Race analogous to that), and putting in my application was the equivalent of trying the knob on my front door to the outside world of adventure, then everything in recent weeks has been the equivalent of first steps. Let’s just say, the road rose up to greet me. With force and vigor. And it’s already been a wild ride.
And how, you may ask, is the raging polar vortex that threatened to freeze my southern blood and forever entomb me in an icy sepulcher of snow supposed to be provision? We’re getting ahead of ourselves.
First, let me show you how amazing God’s provision was before the snow storm. I needed to raise $5,000 by January 8 and I also needed a job to make ends meet between then and when I launch. Right after Christmas, I got a call out of the blue from my old intern supervisor offering me a temporary position at their think tank in D.C. until I leave for the World Race. I was stunned. The pay was more than I could have dreamed of for a job that would only last a few months, and it was totally unexpected. But I would have to leave Atlanta, leaving behind friends and family I had wanted to spend time with before I go abroad for almost a year.
Then, as I was trying to figure out how to raise more funds, God spoke to my heart again. “Sell your car.” I felt a peace about the idea, and I was pretty sure it was really from Him. No doubt sensing that I needed just a little extra nudging to go through with it, He repeated the idea twice – once through another world racer who is also selling his car, and again through my dad who suggested it during dinner conversation.
It was settled then. I knew God really was telling me to sell my car and I had a peace about going through with it. The next three days were taken up by the Passion Conference, which I talked about in one of my earlier posts. Fantastic and needed as it was, the time the conference took left me with only a few days to get everything ready for D.C. which, besides packing, included cleaning, detailing, and selling my car and securing a place to live in D.C. as well as a backup plan in case plan A for a living space fell through.
Well, of course, the very day I was going to get my car washed and change out the spark plugs, the malfunction light on the instrument panel flickered on in all of its dull, yellow, defiant glory. And it stayed on. Tempting fate, I continued on my way to the local car parts store to buy the spark plugs. The ride back was a bit like Han Solo’s piloting of the Millennium Falcon in The Empire Strikes Back – a lot of troublesome rumbling from the engine, a fair amount of shouting, and a few repetitions of “Come on, baby, hold it together.” By the grace of God my engine did not fail, and I sailed triumphantly into my driveway and came back home only to find that the blog post I had worked on for several hours that day had been completely deleted – gone without a trace. Much like my car, I was about ready to blow a gasket.
In the next 48 hours I had to replace all the O2 sensors in my car, fix three oil leaks, wash and detail the car, get it sold, buy a plane ticket to DC and find a place to live. And I had to rewrite my blog. Needless to say, I was feeling the pressure. I swung between two extremes – total faith that God was going to bring it all together and help me put all of these affairs in order, and near explosive frustration that all of these challenges seemed to be stacking on top of one another like linkin logs in a speed building contest. That, and it seemed to be costing me an arm and a leg.
But God was faithful. At 4 p.m. on the second day, one day before I was to leave for D.C., I negotiated a price for my newly repaired and detailed Jeep Wrangler and sold it. The price I got for the car helped me to reach my second fundraising goal well before the deadline. In between fixing and washing the car, I found several potential places to live and narrowed them down to two, both of which I arranged to view the day I landed in D.C. The sigh of relief I let out probably could have inflated several balloons. Despite the frantic rush of the past two days and the short window of time I had, God had not only helped me get everything done but He’d also brought in more funds than I imagined would come in that short amount of time.
Now it was time to make my venture into the frozen wasteland of D.C. (and yes it is a frozen wasteland! It’s been in the 20s all weekend. Virginia may be in the South but D.C. is a wormhole to the frozen tundra of Canada.) In all the rush of preparing everything, I’d barely had time to pause and consider how I actually felt about leaving Atlanta so soon. Of course I was and am very grateful for the job. I had imagined I would have to take a retail or restaurant job since I would only be available to work for a few months, so the chance to do something mentally stimulating for a cause in which I believe and for more pay than I had hoped was truly a miraculous blessing.
Now that I finally had time to take a breath, the reality of my situation hit me like a ton of bricks. I remembered how my church family had reacted when, on my very first Sunday back in Atlanta after my internship in D.C., I told them I’d be doing the world race – shock which gave way to a brief hint of sadness, and then a lot of encouraging support. None of them had any clue that I’d been planning on doing the World Race, so of course it surprised them to hear that soon after my return I would be leaving again, and this time for a whole year. I’m bad about springing news like that on people I love, partly because I prefer to do it face to face instead of over text, and partly because the past few years have gotten me used to flitting from place to place at a moment’s notice, to a degree.
And of course some of them felt sad to hear that I would be going. As excited as I am about this upcoming adventure, I’d be lying if I said the prospect of leaving my church family behind didn’t sadden me as well, to say nothing of my immediate family. I may only be 23 years old, but in my life I feel like I’ve already had to say too many goodbyes and it never gets any easier. In fact, it just gets harder.
I only wanted to hear encouragement and excitement greeting my announcement, but I realize that is because deep down I knew that having to leave my family and my church family – and they are family – hurts, and seeing anyone else saddened by it makes it impossible for me to downplay.
To the credit of my amazing friends, they showed me the same love and encouragement then that astounded me the first time I ever met them, which was at a very difficult point in my life and is a great story for another time. It’s a depth of love that only comes from Christ. At least I had a few months to spend with them before I would launch. But then God called me to D.C. after New Year’s.
I won’t pretend to fully understand why God does things like this in my life. I can only say that I believe wholeheartedly that He works all things for my good, as He does for all those who love Him. And I believe He is intimately aware of how hard it is for me to leave the ones I love. In fact, I don’t think he’d want me to feel any differently about it. I will also say that while what and who I leave behind grieves me, that which is ahead, the adventure and the work and the people to which He has called me, fills me with an unspeakable hope and an incomprehensible peace – the kind that come with knowing I am on the right path even if I cannot see exactly where it leads. God called me to go, so I am answering with a joyful “yes.” All my chips are on the table and I am all in.
So I packed and said my goodbyes as best I could and my family and I shared a wonderful dinner the night before I left. The next morning, which was a Tuesday, I was on a flight to D.C. At this point I still did not officially have a place to live. I had arranged to stay with friends for a few nights and planned to have a place to stay by Sunday. That evening I visited the two potential apartments I had found earlier in the week. The first one was perfect. It was a second story apartment with a spacious bedroom and a balcony with stairs that led to a nice green backyard with a grill. Rent was on the expensive side of what I could pay, but within my range.
The second place was…much different. The smell that greeted me when I walked through the door was unidentifiable, but, to quote the great Ron Burgundy, “It stings the nostrils.” The carpet looked like the ragged hide of some dirty beast that once lived in the metro tunnels. The room I was to live in looked like a solitary confinement cell with poor lighting. There was a cliché creepy basement that looked as though it came straight out of an 80s slasher film.
The landlord and the one tenant present then began to have the weirdest conversation I have ever heard in my life – the subject ranged from the private lives and personal flaws of all of the tenants, to which the landlord was unnervingly privy, and on to the horrendous state of the kitchen and the fact that someone kept leaving rancid chicken fat in the sink, to the depressed girl living in the basement who never came out and always smoked weed, to the politics of Pakistan and the fact that the landlord was trying to hire a new landlord from among the tenants because his uncle had just died and he was going to have to fly to Pakistan and would probably be staying there. The situation in that apartment seemed about as stable as the situation in Pakistan, which is to say it was tenuous at best. I felt like I’d walked onto the set of an episode of Seinfeld.
The decision was an easy one. Minutes before I sent the deposit in for my choice, though, I received word that the better of the two apartments had been taken shortly after I finished viewing it. So I needed to start hunting for a place because as of then, I was technically homeless and I only had until Sunday to find an apartment of my own. Over the course of that week I viewed 6 other apartments, each more or less turning out to be like the Pakistan apartment. And then the report of the blizzard came – as much as 4 feet of snow, with drifts as high as 5 or 6 feet that would bury cars in the street and shut people in their homes and close the city completely for over a weekend. I needed a place to call my own, and now.
The calm before the storm was more like the span of a single breath before my life was thrown into full throttle fast forward. I feel like I returned to Atlanta just in time to exhale before I found myself hundreds of miles from home about to face down the largest blizzard in recent East Coast history.
The thing about saying “yes” to God’s call is that, unlike saying “yes” to a job offer, there is no period of processing and waiting before your start date. The day and time you say “yes” to His call is your start date, and just like Gandalf He’ll whisk you off your doorstep to God only knows where. It can feel a bit like being fired out of a cannon, in the best possible way. But the day you say yes to Him is the day He starts making provision for you on the path to which He’s called you, even if you don’t immediately see it.
Two days before the blizzard was to hit D.C., I decided to see one more place, praying that it would be at least a step above what I had seen so far. I was staying with a different group of friends now as I’d stuck to my word and moved out of my other friends’ place the past Sunday. That was another bit of amazing provision from God – I got to spend my first week and a half in D.C. for free with a roof over my head and a warm room to sleep in because of the amazing friends God placed in my life months before I even knew I’d be returning to D.C., much less going on the World Race. I digress. That evening, I walked to the last place I planned to view.
From the outside it looked like your typical townhome (or row home). Inside, however, were an incredibly clean and spacious living room, dining room, and kitchen. There were 4 housemates, all of them welcoming and affable. As a huge plus, they explained that this house made an effort to create and live in intentional Christian community with one another. Then they showed me my potential room and the library. It was amazing. Compared to what most of you homeowners have it probably wouldn’t look like much, but to me with a max $1100 a month budget in D.C., it looked like I’d found a palace complete with the library from Beauty and the Beast (it’s not palatial. I sleep on an air mattress on the floor. But the library does have a ladder). The fact that I might also have the chance to really live in Christian community and grow spiritually while I’m in D.C. in preparation for the World Race was more than I had hoped for too.
The roommates interviewed me and told me that in light of my situation they would give me an answer soon as to whether they would be able to offer me a spot in the house. I got the email not 45 minutes after I’d left. I was in. God had given me a place to stay before the blizzard hit and it was better than I dared to hope for.
I realize that was a long-winded tale, one that if you are still reading at this point means you are one of the perseverant few. But it was a story I needed to tell in its totality so that hopefully I could get across just how amazing and constant God’s provision and care for me has been, even during the times when my life seemed to have little or no consistency. He is Jehovah Jireh – The Lord Who Provides. I said yes to His call thinking that the storm to come would happen overseas in some distant land, sans the comforts of my own country. But I’m already in the thick of it, here in DC. I was the moment I said yes, and my faith is bolstered by the fact that God has been with me every step of the way – protecting, training, and providing for me as only He can.
And He provides not just for my material needs, but also for the needs of my heart through the friends and family he places in my life, the healing He brings to relationships, and the silent ministering He brings to my heart when I lie awake in bed and my head spins with thoughts about a thousand challenges whose ends I’ve yet to see and celebrate.
The roommates of my new house are fantastic. They’ve included me in every group event they’ve hosted or attended, invited me to church, and welcomed the chance to hear my story and, as time goes on, to share theirs. I don’t mean to gush too much here, but they truly have been the most courteous roommates I’ve had and I feel blessed to have been given the chance to share in friendship with them.
Wherever you are and whatever situation you’re in at the moment, know that God sees you. He cares about you. He laughs with you when you laugh and He cries with you when you mourn, and He will provide for you if you place your trust in Him. I am grateful that He is teaching me this lesson so that I may more easily place my full trust in Him when I launch on this World Race at the end of March. I am grateful that He has called me to a work that requires such trust, a work that would fail without His provision.
He’s called me to come out on the water, not to stay in the comfort of the boat. It won’t be a bed of roses, and there will be many times when I find myself at my wit’s end, but that’s where His provision and His intimacy often begin. And He’s not going to let me sink. Trust Him and He won’t let you sink either. If you’re at rock bottom and feel that you’ve already sunk, He can pull you back up to the surface. He already rose from the dead, so what you’re asking really isn’t that hard for Him. He’s done the same for me.
