There are many hardships on the race, but I personally think the hardest one is conquering your fears. Each month it seems there is a deeper level and another emotion you have to uncover. Another fear that you have to overcome. It seems like for so long I have covered my bullet holed fears with simple band-aids and now those band-aids aren’t healing those wounds. Well let’s be honest, they weren’t ever healing the wounds I just got really good at masking the fears. All of this to say I am about to conquer the thing I was scared the most about on the race, hiking through the mountains to tell village people about Jesus.
The physical side of the race has always been a HUGE obstacle for me. I am definitely not the most fit person or even close to being the tiniest bit fit. When they told our team we were going to be trekking through the mountains everyone seemed pumped and excited, and all I wanted to do was cry. Well, I did cry. A lot. The morning we were leaving to head to our minsitry site I sat in a coffee shop with two of my teammates just sobbing. I played it off as being emotional about missing my family, team changes, and blah blah blah. But deeper down I knew it went much futher than that, I was afraid of that freakin’ mountain that was about to be in front of me. And then I got sick. We get to our ministry and for 5 days I laid in the bed sick to my stomach. 5 DAYS IN A BED. Those days were the worst 5 days of the race for me so far because I knew that this was a personal attack from the devil and my body was shutting down. The last “sick day” for me was an emotional one. I spent a lot of time that day in tears. I knew that my body was shutting down from more than just being sick. It was the consuming fear and stress.
This fear of the physical all stimulates from an accident three years ago that has left me with mild pain in my hip and shoulder that is pretty much constant. This fear is about not liking to put myself in a place where my body can get hurt again and not feeling I am as fit as I was before that time in my life. So here we are, 3 days before I am about to trek that mountain. Days before I have to face the physical things that frighten me. Face the fear of holding my team back because I don’t feel as fit as them. But guess what, I am going to do it. And yes it is going to be hard and there will be times when I am just going to cry. I am not going to let this fear rule my body anymore. I am taking my body back from the devil and letting Jesus protect my steps. And I am going to climb that freakin’ mountain for the Lord because those people need to know the love of Jesus.
I am going to conquer my fear and it won’t be easy, but the bullet hole needs to be sewn up to heal properly and to do that I have to climb that mountain. As I face this fear I invite you to pray for me and I challenge you to face your own fears.
