It
was three years ago that I started this journey in paper form, longer
if you count the months of consideration. It has been 18 months since I
returned only to find everything changed, or maybe it’s just that I
changed.
Most days it all seems like a dream, except often a smell, a sight, a touch immediately transports me to another place.
The
taste of hot chili in my mouth takes me back to a bar in Thailand with a
dear friend that I never had the opportunity to say goodbye to and I
wonder how she is and if she is still working there.
The
smell of a garbage mound takes me to a rubbish heap in Cambodia, where
children and adults alike live under makeshift shanties made from the
trash they make their “living” from.
Painting
reminds me of the walls of Michael’s Children’s Village in South Africa
and the joy I saw in the faces of children who saw for the first time a
room they would be able to call their own.
Horse drawn carts and rolling hills remind me of Romanian gypsies and being fired from apple picking.
Sometimes
a cup of coffee reminds me of conversations with people that were
unknown to me at the start of this journey and I now consider family.
Sometimes those conversations were hard, sometimes just silliness, but
it took the good and the bad, the easy and the hard to bring us
together.
But too often I forget…
I forget the moments when I prayed for someone in pain and it went away.
I
forget when God gave me a Scripture for an older woman I had never met
in the Dominican Republic to encourage her, and then when we did meet
she wept with joy to know that God had not forgotten her.
I
forget the times God gave me pictures for others and when I stepped out
in faith and shared I found that it was God and I wasn’t going crazy.
I forget standing on hillsides overlooking Haiti and declaring the promises of God over a nation.
Too often I still forget who I am and that God wants to use me.
I’ve
been off the Race for a while and some days I miss it. I’m living
overseas but it’s different without your team to challenge you and call
you on your crap when you are hiding out. It’s different when you are no
longer a part of a community that spurs you on to really take God for
what He says… that miracles are part of the every day walk, there is
nothing crazy about hearing God speak into situations of those you’ve
never met, and it isn’t insane to actually put God’s words into action.
Then God reminds me…
He reminds me that the Race was just the beginning…
