After being home for almost two months, I think I’m finally ready to write and post a blog. The issue wasn’t that I didn’t want to share my thoughts and experiences with you all, but that I didn’t yet have enough perspective to see my return for what it truly was.
Recently, God is speaking a message of vulnerability and openness into my life. So I’m going to be as honest here as I can be. And honestly, I struggled a lot coming home and I am still struggling today. Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled to be home after missing the people (and mountains) I so love. But I now understand the meaning of culture shock. I’d been out of the States before the Race, but a few weeks away on an international missions trip or vacation did not prepare me for the turmoil I went through facing modern American culture after escaping it for so long.
Everything brought me grief at first: the rude barista at Starbucks, the disgustingly explicit lyrics of songs on the radio, and the culture of addiction to numbing distractions, to name just a few. That’s not to say I didn’t experience joy and peace and the Father’s love in that time. They just slowly began to feel more and more distant as I became increasingly weighed down with the world.
After three weeks I headed back down south to Gainesville, Georgia for Project Searchlight. PSL, as we call it, is a retreat organized by Adventures in Missions to returning Racers. It is a time to reunite with friends, process the life changing experiences we had, and figure out how to continue to live radical lives right at home. I enjoyed myself to some degree for the first three days but I was feeling somewhat distant from God. On our last night there I was baptized. A few people spoke over me and what they said impacted me so deeply that I had to leave the room.
In the moments of my baptism, God broke me down and opened my eyes to the way I’d been living. I’d been limping along for weeks (and perhaps months) telling myself and everyone else that I was fine. I was adjusting to life at home and remembering how to fit in with my family and friends and western culture.
I had forgotten that we are not called to “fit in”. Returning home had proved too much of a temptation for me and I was falling back into old habits, letting the world tell me who I was. I can hardly describe my despair and horror in those moments, realizing just how far I’d run away from Jesus. As I sat there sobbing, I wrote this in my journal:
“I [regret] most of all that I believed the lie that it is okay to be familiar with the world: to sing its songs, to know its petty drama, to try to be a little like it. I [regret] spending more time with a world that is ignorant of me and degrading to my mind than with my Father who not only knows me and is always thinking of me but who loves me and wants to speak to me and hear what I have to say.”
To some of you this may not seem like such a big deal. After all, I hadn’t done anything drastically wrong. But then again I didn’t see the danger until God showed me that this was the path to much more serious destruction. I grew enormously on the Race in every way and it chilled me to see how much of that growth I’d lost in the span of a few weeks.
In other words, I was broken. Broken and vulnerable and terrified and confused as to how I could ever be put back together again.
I’ve recently been rereading Kingdom Journeys, a book by Seth Barnes, the man who created Adventures in Missions and dreamt up the very first World Race. In his text he emphasizes the importance of taking a physical journey to find God and highlights what makes this journey something that changes you forever. He has quite a lot to say about brokenness, actually, and rereading his words helped me come to understand my own situation:
“We practice brokenness – this discipline of emptying ourselves – so that we can be filled with God’s life. The same things we experience on our journeys happen in real life – over and over again. You won’t be broken once. You will be broken again and again and again. You won’t have to surrender once. You’ll have to surrender and surrender and surrender. When you get home from your journey, you may expect everyone to be interested in what you experienced. When they’re not, you have yet another chance to empty yourself. When life comes at you with all its monotony, you get to break again.”
I’ve always been scared to admit my brokenness until I think I’m healed. Now I’m beginning to understand that there is nothing shameful in being a complete mess. I don’t have it all together. In fact, I might be more broken now than I was before I ever left on this trip. Thank goodness for that, because being broken time and time again is exactly what made me grow on the Race.
In the midst of this struggle I agreed to preach at my church. Lacking the spiritual confidence to boast of my international accomplishments, I decided to preach on the hard times I faced on the Race; I spoke about my insecurities and doubts and (gasp) boredom. Strangely enough, preparing that sermon eased my current worries as I remembered how completely God showed up in my times of need over the last year. If you’d like to watch a video of my sermon, here’s the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcM13Ghr2dM&feature=youtu.be
So the title of this blog is true: I’m not okay. I’m still trying to find out what it means to be a radical and righteous child of God even when I don’t feel like one. I’m learning to admit that I’ve got quite a lot of faults and a lot of fears, but so does everyone else and there’s really no use hiding it.
And finally, a massive thank-you to those who supported me financially. I am humbled by your outstanding generosity. I hope you all know that your donations allowed God to send me on a journey that utterly transformed my life (and hopefully some other lives as well). I also want to thank you all for reading my blog. It still blows my mind that you people take the time to read my musings and stories. Thank you. Your continued support gives me motivation to write, knowing these words could be exactly what someone needs to hear. Praise God for how cool He is to use me like this.
So, if you liked reading my blog for the past year or if you just get extremely bored and want something to do, I have good news. I am going to continue blogging on a different blog, but with a different style. I’ll be writing fables (allegories, fairy tales, legends; call them what you will) about issues I’m struggling with or thinking about. For me, fiction is an excellent way to symbolically deal with the real world in terms that are somewhat easier to understand and depict. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, stick around. I will be posting on this blog the link to my new blog with my first fable in the next few weeks (hopefully).
Once again, thank you all. You inspire me to be greater.
