My call to live for The Lord has been a long and drawn out process, beautiful in a sense and frustrating at times.
I first accepted Jesus at a middle school church summer camp. At the time, it sounded awesome. But in all honesty, I didn’t quite understand it all. Two summers later, my family drifted out of the church as we moved from Florida back to the town I grew up in, good ole’ Seabeck, Washington. From 2003 until 2010, I would consider myself a lazy Christian. I believed in God, but didn’t live for him. I rarely opened a bible, I rarely attended church, but I listened to the local Christian radio station regularly. After a relationship with a non-believer, I put God further from my mind. When that relationship failed and I moved back to Washington, I began my fourth year (of seven) of college in Bellingham, Washington at Western Washington University. I began to attend The INN University Ministries, one of the college ministries I had heard great things about. The INN radically changed my life – I grew closer to God for the first time in years, I grew in my faith, I found amazing mentors (shoutout to Lindsay and Willow!), and I finally found a community of believers whom I could trust with anything. That spring, June of 2011, I was re-baptized in a local lake amongst so many incredible friends.
In the fall of 2011, The INN announced mission trips for spring break. I chose to spend eight days on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona. My world was rocked! I experienced culture shock without leaving the country. We went nearly the entire trip without access to running toilets or a shower, we rarely had cell phone service, and we lived amongst people who spoke fluent Navajo with some broken English. It was the first time I had experienced sharing my testimony with more than a few close people. It was the first time I experienced people taking such great joy in things I regularly took for granted. I came home changed.
The following spring, March of 2013, I spent ten days in Huehuetenango, Guatemala through The INN. Again, my world was rocked! Again, I experienced culture shock. We spent ten days working on projects in the house where the ministry roomed teams, running VBS camps in small villages, attending church services where everything had to be translated from Mayan to Spanish to English (or just Spanish to English) for us to understand, painting local churches, and experiencing Holy Week. Again, I experienced people who felt great joy over things I regularly took for granted. I came home changed again.
This past spring, March of 2014, I spent just five days at YoungLife’s Malibu Camp for college work week. A couple hundred college students from colleges across Washington State spent the short week cleaning up the camp in preparation for summer when thousands of high school students would attend camp. We did trail maintenance, organized the camp store, cleaned out the cafe and kitchens, served each other meals, and cooked for each other.
Through these short mission trips, I fell in love with serving others. I never imagined God would put this so strongly on my heart until this fall when a mission trip I had signed up for through my church fell through for a second time (the first for not enough people, the second for Ebola). I had been following Katie Ruther, currently on the Race, for several months on Instagram. Each time I saw her posts, I got the feeling it was important but never asked why and didn’t do anything about it. When the mission trip to Ethiopia was cancelled for a second time, I was frustrated. I wanted to go serve. Katie put the hashtag #11n11 on all of her posts. I clicked into it and began scrolling through photos. I saw photos of those currently on the Race and of those preparing for the Race. I decided to check out what the World Race actually was and ended up spending several hours on the World Race website. Immediately, I knew I had to apply, that this is where God was calling me to go. This is His path for me, and that this is the reason why other plans I had for my life (a year-long internship at The INN and the mission trip to Ethiopia) had fallen through. He had plans for me, great plans for me. I knew He wanted me to boldly say YES to this incredible eleven-month long mission trip where I get to serve ‘the least of these’ all over the world and see the glory of His kingdom.
