It all started out as one big joke.
I was out with a friend who I hadn’t seen in a year. (My sister’s best friend had just come back from her World Race a month or two prior.) And my friend- we’ll call him Mountain Man- just kept talking about how cool he is and how he backpacks with a 35 lb. backpack, alone, in the snow, without shoes, with nothing but his wits and a pair of tweezers. (Ok, so I embellished most of this. Anyway…)
It doesn’t matter what he said. The point is I wanted to be cool too. So after he said all of that (ok, some of it), I thought to myself, “I’ll show him. I’ll go on the World Race… Haha! What a funny joke I just made.”
The next few days I kept making this joke. And then, I felt compelled to check out the World Race. I was terrified that maybe God would be like, “Haha sucker! Joke’s on you!” After I read through the site I was so relieved. “I can’t do that crap. Girrrl, please.”
The joke was officially over.
The next day, I went back to that site. This time though I was convicted about looking at everything from a more positive and encouraging perspective. If I legitimately couldn’t do something, then ok. But, I had to be positive.
So when I read through it again, I was positive that I legitimately couldn’t do any of it. Then I remembered working in the international dorm at my college. Couldn’t do that at first, but I got the hang of it. I couldn’t run through a Curves circuit at first, but I eventually could. Couldn’t do Zumba, but now…
You get the point.
So I applied, waited, interviewed, waited, got accepted, waited, and now here we are. I still get really bogged down in discouragement. What do I have to offer? What gifts do I have to help? I can’t talk to people in English, much less Spanish! People know this about me; what crazy people would fund me? Who will believe in me?
I’m still learning, but I know now that the Lord doesn’t ask that I have faith in myself. I’m not meant to have faith in what I can see, and what I know or believe to be true. And trust me, every discouraging remark I’ve made is the truth. But that’s my vantage point, and its incomplete.
Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding but in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your path straight.”
My understanding is the opposite of God’s. I have to make a conscious effort to rely on Him and force myself to believe that what I know as truth- nothing to offer, no gifts, no people skills- is not His Truth.
After wading through all of this discouragement, I found out that girls typically gain weight on the race. From my positive Proverbs mind, I said, “God, I don’t think You thought this through.”
