What was the World Race? What did it do? How did I change? What did I learn? What do I miss more than anything?
What were those things I swore I’d never forget that I find slipping from my mind now? What experiences tore my heart like the sting of tearing skin? What do I have in my everyday life that I would have killed for any given day of the Race that I don’t even think about having now?
Questions swirl like flurries in a snowstorm… Chaotic, innumerable. No single one discernible in the blinding white of the storm within.
On the Race, it was so easy to see how expansive your love was for me. Each new location renewed my awe for the creativity of your love. The geography of the world became the geography of your heart, and with every new desert, waterfall, savannah, mountain, and seventh wonder of the world, I charted new territory with you. Territory so spacious and life-wreckingly beautiful I wouldn’t have believed it could be all lavished upon me if I hadn’t seen it firsthand. If I hadn’t felt it vibrate in every pulse beat, if I hadn’t have wholeheartedly believed in every second that you would not only show up, but that your presence, evidenced by daily miracles, was absolutely inevitable. I never would have believed it if this wasn’t the way that life happened, every single moment of every single day.
Processing that can be overwhelming. I don’t have answers to questions sometimes. On the Race I didn’t have the answers, but it was okay. I lived on God, fully faithful to the idea that He would deliver what I needed when I needed it.
I struggled in many, many ways. The road to freedom was littered with skins that, like a snake, I had outgrown and was forced to shed. That process was painful and miserable some days. It formed in the breakdowns of Bulgaria and the endless internal battles in Uganda. It never looked civilized, was riddled with sobs I couldn’t stifle, and rarely had a definite “finish line” moment. It happened gradually, and one day I would realize that I was so much further down the road than when I began. It wasn’t always triumphant, but it led me to a life characterized by triumph. It wasn’t always beautiful, but the bitter mixed with the sweet is what makes it worth it, because all good things are upstream and the things that mean the most are defined by the battles we’ve warred to get out of our personal hells and break off our strongest demons.
Because I work in the World Race now, I often get questions about what I learned or about the heart of what the World Race really is.
I figured that I could answer those questions over the phone for one person to hear, or I could write a blog series about it and hundreds of people could know. As formative and world-shaping as the Race was, before you go, it can seem intimidating. People can misunderstand it. Participants feel called towards it, but don’t really know why because the overall theme of the Race doesn’t seem to fit the types of skills they have or ministries towards which they feel called.
There is an answer to why we are pulled towards this. The only way I know how to answer it is found within the answers I discovered while being broken and rebuilt over this span of time, against the backdrops of slums and war zones.
So, stay tuned. Next week, the digging begins.
