“…So, how was your trip?”
My go-to quick answer? “It was… well, it was all of the adjectives. All of them.” Now that sounds like a snarky answer but I promise it isn’t. As I’ve learned through trial and error, this response has proven to be the best way to communicate the wonderful, messy, impossible complexity of the experience that was the World Race.
When someone has more than a few minutes to talk, the next most-asked question is “How did this experience change you? You can’t possibly come back from that kind of trip the same, right? ”
Usually, with a sheepish laugh, I’ll say “How much time do you have?”
Because oh yes, it did change me. It flipped my life, my identity, and my future upside down in ways that pre-Race Sarah never saw coming. What exactly did it change?
My understanding of God
I’d always seen God as sovereign. I’d always seen him as good. I’d always seen him as infinite. I had the Sunday-School picture of him down to a science, and it wasn’t necessarily wrong but it was far from complete.
But as I watched him orchestrate moments that couldn’t have been coincidence, saw him heal a woman on death’s door right before my eyes, and sat on a mountain staring in awe at the most glorious display of stars I had ever seen that I finally experienced all of these things I knew about God on a personal level.
He is so much bigger, so much more powerful, and so much more than I had ever known, and more than I ever will know.
My view of the spiritual and physical realm
Regardless of whether or not it was intentional, my liturgical Presbyterian upbringing left me with some presuppositions about spirituality. The physical and the spiritual worlds were separate unless God himself intervened. Spiritual gifts weren’t the same today. Prayer and scripture were the only ways to connect to God.
Then I was in South Africa, where I spoke in tongues while in private prayer. Then I was in Swaziland and stood on the battlefield of unmistakable spiritual warfare. Then I was Mozambique and Nepal, and witnessed actual demons. I could certainly go on, but it all comes down to this: I have seen too much to not believe that the spiritual and physical realms touch and intertwine at all times.
For this reasons, the ways I interact with God and the world around me has changed. I don’t see much through sacred/secular goggles these days, because if God is in everything, there isn’t as much of a distinction as the world would like it to be. I’ve traded “personal devotional time” for an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and listening with the reverence he deserves, but not necessarily the rigidity I used to think was necessary.
My calling, whatever it looks like
Now, if a door opens for full-time ministry, I will go straight towards it. For now I’m in training to be an emergency medical technician, starting a profession where I can care for people and perform meaningful service. But as for a plan for the “rest of my life,” as far as I’m concerned my only calling is to be where God puts me, and be there fully.
My physical, mental, and emotional self
I came on the Race with a lot of baggage, and I’m not talking about my 50-pound backpack. I started with anxiety, depression, bitterness, unhealed wounds, improperly healed wounds, and a whole mess of other things that should have destroyed the Race for me.
At times I thought they would. I had the worst anxiety attack of my life in Nepal and emotionally deteriorated all the way through Vietnam, culminating in a Defcon-1 level meltdown on Christmas Day in Cambodia. I hit rock bottom, not just by the standards of the World Race, but by my own overall life.
Jesus wasn’t going to let me stay there though. When I had nowhere to go but up if I didn’t want to go home, he brought me back to a place where I could thrive. He healed my brokenness, he restored my devastated heart, he repaired my distrustful soul.
And guess how long it’s been since I’ve had a panic attack: ALMOST ELEVEN MONTHS! I still feel anxious from time to time, I still get nervous when I have to do intimidating things sometimes, but I haven’t let it overcome me. I haven’t been depressed. I’m lighter, because I left my baggage behind. The Race forced me to confront it and make a choice – would I let it control me, or would I surrender? I’m sure you can tell which one I picked.
You can’t go on the World Race and not come home at least a little different. Ask anyone, and they’ll tell you. But I feel so lucky that I got to come home more than just “a little different.”
I came home transformed.
