The World Race tells you to throw your expectations out the window, and honestly for the most part I did. I didn't have too many expectations of what I was going to encounter, where I was going to live, or what we would be doing.
But oh man, I had a lot of expectations about myself. I expected myself to handle life a lot better than I have. I expected to deal with situations with maturity. I expected to love every person and every country. I did not expect to find myself so often discontent, frustrated and missing home. I expected to be the person I always had been: excited for every new adventure, able to get along with everyone, a voice of wisdom and stability. I expected to have it together. I didn't know it, but I expected to get myself through this on my own.
I never expected to be such a mess.
You know how they always say that trials show what type of person you are? Well…
I really suck.
I've wanted to give up. I've lost my excitement. I've decided to not to get a long with people. I've found myself pretty unstable and foolish. Everything has fallen apart, and I've realized that God is going to have to get me through this.
But you know what? It's okay. It's great.
It's great because I'm learning the difference between my flesh and God's Spirit in me. I think God is stripping me of who I used to be, both the bad and the good, so He can build me back up with Him as the foundation. Building with just the good things, creating a solid structure with much fewer of those bad blocks of selfishness, immaturity and the like. But He's not trying to make me into a Christian clone with no personality. In fact He wants to make me into who I was uniquely created to be. But I believe he wants to show me that those good things about who I am, those things I used to be, those things are from Him. Unless I'm leaning on Him, they won't be used for His glory, or even really be able to be used at all.
Near the begining of the race, I prayed that God would root out the sin in my life. Unfortunately to root something out, you cannot just make it disappear, you must bring it up to the surface so that you can deal with it. In the past seven months, God has rooted up a lot of things so that they could be burned up and replaced with Him. For a while I did not realize why I was struggling so much, why it was dealing with so much sin. It was because God was answering my prayers.
This process has been pretty frustrating and hard. But not for one second do I regret praying that prayer. You MUST be willing to pray those prayers and accept what God does in your life. Prayers that God would change you, consume you, refine you. Prayers that He would rid you of sin and replace it with Him. It is going to hurt. It is going to suck. But if you are serious about this God thing, you MUST pray those bold prayers. I promise, the rewards are so great that the pain of refinement will be forgotten.
If you are unwilling to give up yourself and grow, you should question if you should really be calling yourself a disciple of Christ.
