21 days until I leave behind the comfort of what I now call home. 21 days until I leave all of the people I love and cherish most in life. 21 days until I step into the unknown. Everything about this trip has felt like a dream. A dream in the sense that it is so unreal to be doing what I know the Lord has called me to, and a dream in the sense that I just feel like it will never come. Until last night, I still hadn’t come to the reality that I would not be going off to college with all of my best friends. This year has been one of the hardest years of my life, with struggles that I thought I would never have to face. If you ask me if I would turn around and change that, change my behavior, change all of the hurt and shame, I would say no. I would say no because I know I wouldn’t be here now. About to step out into the unknown, scared, but so overwhelmed with joy in seeing what the Lord will do. If you have not seen “Depraved Indifference” by Eric Ludy, watch it. If that does not change your perspective on the way you live your life I don’t know what will. In the video, Ludy puts it like this: you have a child, a son. He is lost, suffering, starving, and fighting only to survive. He is in Liberia. A million anxious thoughts are racing through your mind. What would you do? You would do possibly everything in your power to get to him. Take the first plane, call all of your friends, take a boat. Anything. After all, he is your son. When you finally reach him he is abandoned and broken. You run to him, pick him up, and waves of sudden relief wash over your shaken body. You have found your son. God’s response: that’s my child. Don’t you think this is how he thinks of us? There are so many people in this world that are lost without anyone or anything to turn to. He is looking to us to defend the poor and fatherless. Its not that we don’t care; we care, but we can go home today forget all about this. How is that? There is an indifference naturally born within us. You see the ones who have nothing and no one, Jesus says they are the prized ones in his eyes. “Christianity is taking what has been purchased on the cross, the nature of Jesus Christ and transplanting it into the heart of men and women here on this earth so that they behave not like this world, but like heaven.” We should be willing to spend ourselves for the weak. This isn’t head knowledge; its life abandonment. God is waiting, longing for an advocate to stand up and say, “I am willing. Burden me. For our king we will rescue the orphans.” This message is what made me do the World Race. What made me know there was something more. What made me believe in something.
