I'm impulsive. Applying for this trip was exciting. I was coming out of a difficult season in my life and the anticipation of the race gave me something to look forward to and made the mundane tasks of everyday life seem more exciting. Raising support was a challenge which I gladly rose to. It was making the jewelry I planned to sell, and selling it affirmed both my talents and my trip.
However . . .
the spontaneous, adventurous side of me often forgets that the decisions which were easy to make on impulse may not be so easy to follow through on. And the World Race, my friends, is no easy follow through. NOPE. This is a year of my life.
TELLING people I going away for a year to spread love and hope to people around the world was fun and easy. But the butterflies that invaded my stomach as I pulled into training camp brought with them the realization that I was leaving the country – my friends, my family, my job, my bed, my comforts, my life, and most likely ice cream – for an entire year.
As I went to training sessions I heard stories about sleeping in the back of a semi truck with street kids, falling out of a raft into the Nile River, 40 hour bus rides with 50 people sharing 23 spaces, missing trains, losing tickets, throwing up, and worse. But what I heard even more loudly than all of that was the peace of God reminding me that none of this was about me or my comfort. He had brought me here "for such a time as this," to go and share wit the world the abundant love and hope that He has so freely given to me. If I have to spend 40 hours on a bus with no air condition, no food, and no bathroom that is a small price I am willing to pay if it means bringing hope to the hopeless. For, as Mr. Magorium challenges his apprentice, "[Our] life is an occasion, [we must] rise to is."
