These words have been swirling around in my head for months…you won’t make it on the World Race.
I thought this was purely a lie from the enemy. I did my best to rebuke it and accept truth. I thought I was speaking life over myself with things like “I can do this. God called me to this and I’m stronger than I think. I will be able to handle it.”
Instead of speaking truth it was just a series of feeble pep talks.
I keep going back to my hardest semester of college. I had just returned from working at a summer camp for three months and the four months prior to that I had been living and doing ministry in India. I was trying to get back into the swing of focusing on tests and papers while I attempted to process the last seven months.
Myself and a few other summer staff from Horn Creek Camp
It all felt foreign. My old life didn’t quite fit me anymore. About half way through the semester I began to crumble. I could barely make it through a whole class without tearing up. Whether it was stress from school or just the subject matter of one of the case studies I was reading, I couldn’t keep it together. Tears would spill down my face at just about anything. I felt sick, tired and foggy. I missed India and the life I found at camp. My classes were all upper level and I was struggling to hold all the strings.
I didn’t quite know how to act or what to do with myself. When I think back to that semester, a lot of it is blurry but I mostly remember starting each morning off with a cup of coffee and 2 Corinthians 12:9-10.
I began to learn what it means to be weak. I made it through that semester with grace, coffee, and tears. I made it by learning that it’s ok to not always be ok.
Now that it’s over, I’m glad it all happened because I know, that I know, that I know I couldn’t have done it on my own. I came out on the other side a little surer of God’s faithfulness.
It was a season for me to learn that it’s ok to be weak. When I’m weak, there is more room for God.
And this is the place I find myself preparing for and even hoping for. A place where I can fall at the feet of Jesus and say, I’ve got nothing… fill me up.
So no, I don’t think I have what it takes to do the World Race but I believe that God does. Maybe this is the kind of thing I’m not supposed to be strong enough for.
Photo by Sarah Wohlgamuth
“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
2 Corinthians 12:9-10
