In the time between month five and month six of my Race, I remember thinking back to the book Kingdom Journeys by Seth Barnes. All us racers read it before the Race, because it discusses the stages you walk through on the type of journey we were all about to embark on. First comes abandonment. In my head, I had placed a mental check mark next to that stage. I had left home, with just a backpack full of necessities, and I was abandoning all I had known to be “uncomfortable” for a year.
The next stage on the journey is “brokenness.” It’s when you hit the end of “you” and you really start to lean on the Lord. As I sat with my squad during a time of worship and prayer in Bangkok, I realized I hadn’t hit that point yet, that point where there’s no going back, when you’re broken and you can no longer lean on yourself. So, I quietly, but boldly prayed,
“Lord, break me.”
I thought I understood the weight of that prayer. I was asking God to take me deeper, to take me in even closer to Him.
On June 1st, at approximately 12:30PM I was riding on the back of a motorbike in Cambodia with one of our ministry hosts. We had just spent the morning at the market buying groceries with another of our hosts and my teammate Erin. Traffic in Cambodia is a bit unpredictable, which I quickly learned in the most unfortunate way. As my host and I took a left turn, a truck collided with our motorbike on the left side, leaving us sprawling on the road. The truck stopped for a brief moment, then continued on. It was a hit and run.
All of the details about the accident were told to me by Erin, who was riding the motorbike behind me because, thank the Lord, I don’t remember any of what happened.
Accordingly, that afternoon is fuzzy in my brain, but there are bits and pieces I can remember. I remember screaming, Erin holding my head in her lap as we waited for the ambulance. I remember laying on my side in a province hospital while they pulled plastic out of my ankle and then stitched up the back of my knee, and I remember coming out of shock and almost vomiting as they x-rayed my arm. After all of that, I was put in the back of an ambulance to be taken to a better hospital four hours away.
It wasn’t until a day or two later that I remembered my prayer from only a few days prior: “Lord, break me.” Honestly, I laughed at myself. I hadn’t meant it literally! But there I was, laying in a hospital bed, so broken.. I had a “very bad fracture” in my left elbow, as the doctors loved to say, and I had two large gashes on the back of my left leg, with three stitches on my ankle and six on the back of my knee.
God did not make this happen, but I believe He allowed it to happen and saved me from it being so, so much worse. I prayed to be broken. Though it was not in the way I expected it to happen, it did happen. I broke physically, and as a result I had to depend not only on my squad mates, but also deeply on Him. I had to look to Him for peace that surpasses all understanding in the midst of chaos and trauma. I had to look to Him for decisions that had to be made, tough, grown-up decisions, like whether to stay on the Race or to go home. I also had to chose to look back on the whole situation during the hospital time that has followed, to see how He has protected me, how He has provided, and how His favor has reigned.
Whenever I play the “what if” game about the accident, all I can see is God’s hand in it all. What if I hadn’t been wearing a helmet? What if I had gotten hit on the right side instead of the left? I see how incredible it was that I was able to get surgery within a week of the accident, and that God has provided so many wonderful English-speaking people who have loved me in so many ways (and I’ll never be able to thank them enough). I am now recovering from a successful surgery, without a cast and regaining mobility in my elbow through physical therapy. This is only a fraction of God’s hand in this mess, and look how He’s loved me in and through my brokenness!
So, yes, I’m broken. And I have so much more brokenness to walk through, but in the paradoxical way that is our God, I am healing through my brokenness. God doesn’t bring us through brokenness for nothing; it’s always for the sake of His Kingdom to come. Like my friend Daniel told me, I was “thrown off a scooter, into a hospital bed in the middle of Cambodia for the sake of the Gospel.” The Gospel that says that broken people are fixed again, the sick are healed, the blind will see, because of Jesus Christ.
The world needs this Gospel, and only this gospel, not any other gospel. So I am stepping out in faith and staying on the Race, because I can see how much more He has for me and for the people of this world. So in just a few days, I’m off to South America, with two more metal plates, seven more screws and a whole lot more perspective than I had before.
Photo credit: Brittany Stoll
Day two of seventeen in the World Mate Emergency Hospital in Battambang, Cambodia.
