Leaving the United States feeling a huge disconnect from God, it was my prayer that He would meet me in Ecuador in great and obvious ways. I stepped foot in this place and felt God oozing from everywhere; from the members of Team Favoured, from the Tias working here at the center, from the amazing children that live here, from the random people I sat next to on the bus or walked past in the market, from the vast expanse of mountain ranges and the twinkling of billions of stars above.
For most of my adult life (okay probably all of my adult life), my life has been defined by relationships. Relationships with family, with friends and with guys. While those relationships aren’t always bad, there has always been something lacking, something that people just cannot fill in my life. I have been told by many people that a relationship with Jesus would fill that void; that I could have a relationship with Jesus that surpasses everything that I thought a relationship with a man could give me. Over the past few years, I have longed and strived for a relationship with the Lord like everyone describes. A relationship where I can turn to Jesus with all my fears, worries and accomplishments instead of to my family. A relationship where I can turn to Jesus when life gets hard instead of running to the arms of a man. A relationship with passion and unimaginable love that only God can fulfill! I longed for these, and yet never experienced the type of love that others promised. Lying on a trampoline, listening to Matthew West’s song “Nothing else” ( posted below) and looking up at the stars in the middle of Ecuador, I realized why: I didn’t believe that a relationship with Jesus could actually satisfy my heart more than a relationship with people could (I mean how could I possibly experience the embrace of a great hug from a God who isn’t standing right in front of me with arms wide open?). The problem is I was never willing to try. I had proclaimed that I wanted to fall in love with Jesus, but had never believed that I could. My prayer that night, in the words of Matthew West, was simple, “So take the place, the place of you. I’m tired of searching, those days are through, so take the place, it’s made for you!” My desire for the World Race is to fall madly in love with Jesus and this is just the beginning!
