Leading the squad meant making decisions that weren’t popular, like reshuffling teams during the ninth month of the Race. “I’m sure it was awkward for them at first, but it ended up being the best thing we possibly could’ve done. For many people, it revitalized the Race,” he says. “The things they had been limited to…suddenly got blown out of the water as they’re with the new team.”
He had ample practice in applying Paschall’s advice. “Over and over again, throughout the rest of the Race, [I was] gonna take it, fall on the sword,” Weston said. Most of his leadership, if not all of it, was done by example. “We [squad leaders] tried to just model what they [team leaders] should be doing with their team,” he says. His response when they gave him and his fellow squad leaders feedback that was hard to receive was, “Thank you.”
Over time, there was fruit borne from his ministry; Weston points to the sixth and seventh month as the point where “things really started to click for the squad.” The squad wasn’t just the squad leaders’ ministry but the entire squad was the squad’s ministry. “That was just a beautiful time,” he recalls. “Our squad is amazing.”
As different as his race was from his squad, he still gained a great deal from his journey – things like the confidence to be himself and to lead, training in leadership, and the freedom to share doubts, similar to the kind he had before he began the Race.
I asked Weston a question several Racers have been asked – would you do the Race again? He initially responded no, then paused and asked me to clarify what I meant. When I clarified (at least, I think I did) that I wanted to know if he would repeat the experience, he said he wouldn’t. He “absolutely loved it,” he made clear to me, but “you go on the Race and you garner the things that you can from that experience.” He went on emphatically, “then you need to move on and garner those extra things somewhere else.”
He concedes, “if it was for the first time,” he would go on the WR. “But I’ve taken away the things that I was supposed to take away.”
In Weston’s view, “the Race doesn’t change people; it changes your perspective.” He asks, “Are you seeing yourself as God sees you?” That was his main takeaway, he points to that shift as the change. “The things in Scripture, the things that people have said time and time again,” he says, “they become real.” Reading about and knowing about God’s love in his mind transformed into reality in his heart.
As Weston sees himself the way God sees him, the way he lives is changed. “Nothing really changes with me, it’s that I view myself differently, I view the people around me differently,” he notes. In the past, he may have loved people because of what they were able to offer him – a winning personality, a great sense of humor, their company – but now, “just loving people for who they are is the biggest change.”
In true teacher fashion, Weston made a pedagogical analogy. Just as student travels through levels of understanding and depth of knowledge of any given subject – like, say, photosynthesis – Weston’s understanding and depth of knowledge of God’s love and grace grew. Through life and experience on the World Race, “the veracity of” Scripture was “more and more proven.”
For example, it was one thing to know about faith, but “actually walking in faith in something and it actually happening,” Weston explains, “I just experienced it and now I understand it a little bit more.” He readily admitted the difficulty in fully articulating how he understands more. “I didn’t just read from a book – the Bible – that I should love my neighbor; I actually went and loved my neighbor and now I get it.”
I asked him to tell me about a time when he grew closer to God. Weston had to pause for a bit to answer that question but it didn’t take too long for him to remember.
He’s sitting at a church in Guatemala. The worship was “amazing” and back then, in his head, he’s pointing the American church to the church in Guatemala. Weston doesn’t understand Spanish, so during the sermon, his journal’s at hand and his Bible’s open.
As he reads, he begins asking God, “Why?”
“Why me? Why was I chosen? Why do I get to go on this Race, [get] the life pursuit of God whenever [sic] there’s so many people on the streets at this very moment, while I’m sitting at a church?” he asks Him. “They’re drunk, they’re crippled, they have problems, they’re getting raped, they’re getting abused, all these [things] are going on, ‘Why me, why me?'”
This goes on for about forty-five minutes then the worship starts again. “We’re supposed to be missionaries all into it [but] I’m kinda in this pissed off mood,” he remembers. He reminds me of the doubts he wrestled with pre-WR – “is any of this even real?” – which are coupled with these questions.
In the midst of worship, he just asks God, “I want something…an answer… just gimme something.” This is when words seems to fail Weston in describing the response he gets.
“It wasn’t a picture, it wasn’t a feeling…”
“An impression?” I offer.
He agrees with the word choice, and continues, calling it, “an impression of the word, ‘grace.'”
He goes on to describe how God communicated through that impression, “That’s the point, Weston, ‘grace.'”
He realizes the inexplicable greatness of God’s grace. “That moment I will remember because I actually was in those pits of…not angry, but not happy at all,” he says, snapping his fingers when he goes on with his realization that, “I don’t deserve [it], that’s the point – is that I am no better than those people in the streets. That’s not what defines them…they’re all the same and I don’t deserve it. I can’t explain it – why me over them – but that’s grace. That’s how great grace is.”
That was just one moment of many along his eleven-month journey. “The Race was a story that I was able to write and not just read,” he says. “I got to live that God is love.”
