It’s day one of the Awakening and Weston Belkot and his squadmates are officially alumni of the World Race (WR). They began their journey in October 2009 and end their Race with over 260 WR participants, staff and alumni. Over lunch, I pepper Weston with a few questions.
Weston was born and raised in the land of Heinz ketchup and the Steelers – Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. As he was graduating, he was looking for a service-oriented opportunity that would engage him in leadership, something that would be more than just graduate school or just a job.
He applied to Teach for America (TfA) and was accepted and taught from 2007-2009 in St. Louis, Missouri. Weston spent those two years trying to bridge the achievement gap in the face of systemic problems, inner-city violence, division among school staff; he expended most of his energy and time on classroom management than academic instruction, which made it challenge, he says, to uphold high expectations without letting them drop. Weston describes the first year of TfA as “the hardest year of my life.”
He found out about the WR after his first year. “I just felt like I really needed some discipleship, which I had a lot of in college, so I started looking for something that summer and came across the AIM [Adventures in Missions] website, the WR online,” Weston recalls via “good ol’ Google.”
He waited towards the end of his TfA commitment to apply for the World Race, which was circa February, March 2009. “I remember really looking forward to the community,” he says. “That was a big factor in why I was interested.”
“I was excited about the opportunity to serve,” Weston also said of his anticipation of the WR. His TfA experience helped gauge his expectations of the WR. “TfA… presents [themselves] as about one thing but they’re so much more about the rest of your life,” he explains.
“I taught for two years and I felt like I made pretty much no impact,” Weston openly admits. “So to go to one place for a month, I was like, ‘How the heck am I gonna really make that much of a difference?'” With that, he had already realized on the WR “that it’s not just the missions that you’re gonna be doing.”
Weston says of the months leading up to training camp, “I was probably at the most confident with Christianity in my life.” He had read The Reason for God by Tim Keller; in it, Keller addresses “the most frequently voiced ‘doubts’ skeptics bring to his church as well as the most important reasons for faith” (per his website).
Weston lights up as he lauds the book. “It just explains things in a way that makes the absolute most sense to me. But then I ended up just relying on that, so I completely intellectualized my faith,” he tells me.
Weston found himself doubting God’s very existence and brought this doubt with him to training camp. At training camp, World Racers are given the freedom to engage with God in ways that are new and unfamiliar to them. A number of World Racers come in with limited experience with the gifts of the Holy Spirit (or even the Holy Spirit himself) and Weston fell into the camp of “I believe in it, but I’ve never really experienced it.”
He openly expressed his doubts. “When Michael Hindes was like, ‘Is this weird for anyone?’…and hands go up,” Weston was taken aback. “I just wasn’t used to people very willingly being like, ‘Yep, this feels weird for me,'” he remarks. “Usually it’s this, ‘Oh, I’m okay, I’m good.'”
“From day one, it’s attracted me… the raw honesty,” Weston says; the impact of that week of training camp, particularly the bonds that formed quickly, caught him off-guard. “I undoubtedly went home telling my friends, ‘Oh my gosh, you have to do the WR,’ – I haven’t even left yet.'”
His World Race began a couple months later in Guatemala. Weston and his fellow team leaders went to Antigua a day earlier than the rest of the squad. The WR offers adventure, community, ministry and self-discovery, and at the outset, he wanted all these things. He had wanted to “go and do the thing that’s different…[to] serve people and to be able to do it in a community” and was “very focused on the ministry aspect.”
That first night, however, Sean Smith and Andi Wendel, his squad leaders, redefined his understanding of ministry. “We [ the team leaders] just saw their love for us, how much they were pouring into us, even within…that short period of time… I saw how much he loved us, that we were his ministry,” Weston says. “It was a natural trickle-down: my team is my ministry – I’m not just leading them, I’m obviously here to do the ministry as well – …that they [my teammates] have the absolute best Race possible…had…become my Race.”
Leading six teammates wasn’t easy. In addition to navigating the journey for himself, he was tracking with his teammates, each of them with different priorities. About the second month is when Weston says the “honeymoon” was over. Even then he embraced getting his hands dirty, dealing with conflicts as they arose within his team.
Yet as challenging as it was, Weston grew into his role as leader. “Whenever we’d go into worship times, I’d walk across the room,” he recounts. “The time was for me, but I also couldn’t help but focus on the six other people on my team, wanting to spend time with them, making sure they were having the most for their race.”
Then he was chosen as one of three squad leaders.
Becoming squad leader was a welcome challenge for Weston. His first month as squad leader was the transition period, spent getting caught up to speed on the legwork of squad leading, for example, preparing the details of the upcoming squad-wide debrief. As a self-proclaimed planner who likes to work things out in advance, this first month was his hardest as squad leader.
The rest of Weston’s story continues in the next post.
