When leaving for the World Race, I had a lot of expectations. I know, the dreaded “e-word”, the one thing they tell you to get rid of, but… ok, I did. I expected to learn a lot. About community living, about new cultures, about walking in the Spirit, ad about leadership. And while those are all great things to learn, I also learned a lot of lessons I didn’t necessarily expect to learn. For example:
- Mental math: Once you’re constantly converting time zones, currencies, weather forecasts, and anything that uses the metric system, you eventually become very good at juggling lots of numbers. Unless you’re OK with being completely uninformed for 11 months.
- Pick bugs out of food: This isn’t so much a how-to lesson, rather than a change of mindset. Whether you’re draining bugs from your rice, flicking grubs off your taco salad, or picking the dead fly out of your tea, you gotta learn how to shrug it off and keep eating as if nothing happened.
- Cook on one burner: After you’ve figured out how to cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner, complete with dessert, on 4 burners and a fire pit for an entire village, you can turn any dish into a tasty one-pot-wonder.
- Love my body: On the race, men usually lose weight and women gain weight. It’s not fair, but that’s how our bodies work. So unless you’re really committed to finding time in your schedule to work out (and a buddy to do it with you, #neveralone) you have to learn to love yourself when you look in a mirror and wonder where you’re hiding under all those rolls.
- Dances/ handshakes: 11 different countries. 11 different cultures. 11 different chances to learn the cool, new way of greeting people. If you’re lucky, people will even teach you some fun, new dance moves.
- Wait: For a bus, a train, a plane, a team change, a ministry assignment, a route change, details about the next debrief… basically the world race takes it “hurry up to wait” mentality very seriously. You eventually become very comfortable sitting in the unknown.
- The world is small: Like, really small. Like, almost-makes-me-claustrophobic-if-I-think-too-much small. Whether you’re in a city in Asia, a town in Eastern Europe, or a village in Africa, you will find things that remind you of home and people that remind you of your friends. The world can easily become a very familiar place.
- Being on a mission trip does not equal spiritual high: If you’ve ever been on a short term mission trip or conference, you’re all too familiar with the spiritual high that comes with it. Well, if you’re looking for a year-long spiritual high, don’t look to the World Race. Don’t look to anything, really, I don’t think it exists. After a time, life becomes normal. Dedication and discipline still take effort, and you can expect your normal life patterns to show up.
- What I think I need is not what god knows I need: Similarly, you cannot look to the Race to fix your problems, or to teach you lessons. Only God can do that. Many of the expectations I had were broken, and I had to realize I was looking to the Race to grow me, when I should have only ever looked to God to grow me. This is a short lesson, but probably the most important one.
- How to not have friends: Now, stay with me. I used to believe that you could be best friends with anybody, so long as you worked hard enough at it. But the reality is that some relationships just don’t work, and that’s OK. You can’t be everything to everybody. With some people, you can’t give them what they need: you are inadequate if you try for them, and you will exhaust yourself if you try for you. Sometimes stepping out of it is the healthiest option for everybody.
- God is God: When I signed up for the Race, one of the main reasons I wanted to go was to experience God in different cultures. I think in a way, I thought I would be experiencing a different ‘God’ altogether. But no matter the country, style of worship, or size group, God felt very much like… God. And although I knew this before, it just made me realize how much God is the same here, there, yesterday, today, and forever.
