It has been quite the journey.
The crazy process has taken about 2 years of my life.
From the first moment I pulled up The World Race website and felt my heart skip a beat, to the nervousness of my 1st phone interview, through the process of fundraising,
the crazy unforgettable week at training camp,
and the insanity of the hardest and best 11 months of my life….I have been wrecked.
Now dear friends, this season is about to come to an end. I have entered the final weeks of my time abroad. This crazy radical trip around the world has just become normal to me.
The ‘romance’ of traveling went away about month 4, its just simply my life…a life I adore, but just my life. It has become normal….
-to sleep on the floor on a sleeping mat,
-to eat food that you would never dream of eating in ‘real life’,
-to get stared at by everyone,
-to wear the same 3 outfits all the time,
-to spend 24/7 with a group of 6 other people,
-to take cold bucket showers accompanied by many bugs,
-to pack up all your belonging every month (sometimes every week),
-to learn to love people and leave them,
-to see some of the most beautiful sights you have ever beheld,
-to use charades as an everyday form of communication (please imagine trying to ask for toilet paper)
-to talk in detail about bowel functions (even on occasion draw out diagrams of them),
-to have lice and worms,
-to not look in the mirror for weeks,
-to sleep on ferries, planes, bus station floors, border crossings…and the list goes on.
Some of these things I will miss, and some, not so much. I will have a real bed, I will have clothes that aren’t stained or full of holes, I will shower with clean warm water, I will unpack for more then a month, I will sit down on a toilet, I will eat healthy food and not have to worry where it came from, and well, things will become normal…right? Yes and no.
You see, being comfortable living out of a backpack and having messy hair isn’t the only way I have been changed.
I have been changed on a deeper level and then again on a deeperER level. It has become normal…….
-to pray healing over people(….to rejoice when it happens, and be comfortable in the mystery of God when it doesn’t…)
-to see poverty day in and day out,
-to fall in love with people before you know their names,
-to see what ‘need’ really means,
–to be heart broken at the thought of leaving a country when there is so much to do done,
-to LOVE so deeply that people see Jesus on you even when you can’t speak His name,
-to love people WELL by ‘doing life’ with them…even seemingly mundane tasks
The things I have seen and done, and the people I have loved have wrecked me for ‘ordinary’ life…..but I would not characterize the year by those things alone. These things have drawn me deeper and deeper and deeper into the ocean that is my Fathers heart. It has become normal……
-to talk about God as my Papa,
–to dance before Him as I worship Him in song,
-to hear the voice of the Lord,
-to get visions,
-to proclaim truths over people and places,
-to speak the hard things out of love and call our the greatness in friends,
-to trust His Spirit to lead moment by moment,
-to walk with confidence and authority because I know who my Daddy is.
And these are the things that are unshakable. Many things will change in 25 days, but THOSE things will not.
They won’t change because my God stays the same….I have simply been discovering more of who He is and who He has made me to be.
