God called me on the World Race to love, serve, and learn.
To love everyone I encounter.
To serve God in whatever way I can, using the gifts that God has given me.
To learn more about God and God’s presence throughout the world.
I had no idea what those three things really meant or what they would look like in the field, but I placed my trust and hope in God and accepted the call to go on the World Race and began the application process.
Now six months later and four months before I launch things have changed a little bit…..
As I began this journey I searched for all the information I could get my hands on, which is a lot when every racer has a blog. I read blogs and watched videos and each one just got me more and more excited about how God was going to use me and what I was going to get to experience on the race. As a result, I began desperately praying for the people I will encounter and for the work that God will be doing through my squad.
If you haven’t read any, current and alumni racer’s blogs are filled with beautiful and messy stories of how God intervened in this broken world and redeemed it for his glory. (Seriously they are amazing and you should go read some!) But as I read more blogs, my prayers and thoughts began to shift without me realizing it.
Instead of praying for the people that I might encounter, I started praying for the people I wanted to encounter. Instead of praying for the ways that God will use my squad, I started praying for the ways that I wanted to be used. I started placing myself inside the stories of other racers and wanting the exact same experiences or wanting to experience something similar.
As I attached myself to these images and situations that I wanted to experience, anxiety slowly started to build. It crept up so slowly that I didn’t even really notice it and once I did I chalked it up to nerves and brushed it aside.
But when you ignore emotions like that, they have a way of popping back up without any warning, and that is exactly what happened when I was talking about Training Camp with a friend that has gone on the race.
One minute I was talking about how excited I am about meeting my squad and for what God is going to do in those 10 days, and then it was like a balloon being popped. All of my feelings and anxiety just started freely flowing. (Hopefully it didn’t sound as overwhelming as it felt)
I started telling her about how much I wanted to experience God in new ways and how everyone says that Training Camp is life changing and how I wanted it to be life changing too…… BUT what if it wasn’t? What if I didn’t experience God in these new ways that everyone else had experienced? What if I didn’t leave changed? What if I wasn’t _________-fill in the blank.
Up until that moment I didn’t think I had any expectations for the World Race. I mean I knew I was called but I didn’t know what God was going to do with that and I was open to anything! Right?
I didn’t realize until that point and after many truthful and encouraging words from my friend that I had placed parameters around what “anything” meant.
My expectations created a rather large box for God to move within, but it was still a box.
It was a box that limited the ways that I could experience God to the ways that other racers had experienced God.
It was a box that limited the things that God could do, to the things that I had read about God doing through previous squads.
It was a box that placed me in comparison with every other racer that has gone before me.
It was a box…And I am so thankful I serve a God that is bigger than any box I could imagine.
I am still hopeful that Training Camp will be life changing and that God will move in new and exciting ways, BUT I am praying daily that my hope for Training Camp and the World Race is not limited by the box that I had created.
I know that God called me on the World Race to love, serve, and learn, and my only expectation is that God will use me in whatever way is needed to fill the needs of his people!
