I’ve been home about 3 months now. My Life looks drastically different from the race and even from before I left. People often ask me questions like “can you sum up your race for me?” “What was it like?” “How did the race change you?”
I could never view the world again through the same lens. God broke my heart for the things that broke his. The Race was the most humbling experience, and one that forever changed my life. My perspective of the world will never be the same again.
You haven’t seen the mud houses, the 10×10 brick buildings with tin roofs that sleep 8-10 people. You haven’t seen the malnourished children, whom more than half of probably have AIDS, or life threatening illnesses. You haven’t seen their hand me down tattered clothes with holes or their rough bare feet full of sand spurs. You haven’t seen the flies that encircle them because their odor is so strong. You haven’t seen the wash basins with dirty stagnant water they use to wash their dishes in. You haven’t seen their wet clothes hanging on fences, bushes, and tree stumps waiting to dry. You haven’t seen the concrete floors they sleep on or the cobwebs filled with spiders that decorate their walls and ceilings. You haven’t seen the African mud caked to their legs and their face, or the dry snot that has streamed out of their noses. You haven’t seen the women and children walking for miles with bags, boxes, and barrels of corn on top of their heads. While they carry their babies on their backs.
For most of them, when it gets dark, they have no light, when the food runs out, they don’t eat, and when they get dirty if they don’t have a water supply, they don’t bathe. When it gets cold they are probably huddled together shivering because most of them don’t have blankets. When they get sick, they have no doctors. Most of them have probably never seen a doctor.
You haven’t seen the man in tattered urine covered clothes sleeping on the street corner. You haven’t seen the blind woman singing under a pavilion trying to earn money. You haven’t seen the children 4-8 years of age tugging on your shirttail begging you for just a dollar or a morsel of food. You haven’t seen the hundreds of impoverished villages we visited that are full of hopelessness. You didn’t notice the men, women, even children who pick up trash on the street to cash it in for spare change. You haven’t seen the looks. The tears. The people of this world left alone, abandoned, and afraid. You haven’t seen the trafficked victims being sold for sex. You don’t know what it’s like to see people finding their meals in garbage bins.You don’t know what its like to be completely surrounded by people yet feel so alone. You didn’t see when me and my teammates had arguments and spent hours and tears sorting it out. You didn’t see the sickness from parasites that kept us up at all hours of the night. You didn’t see me cry myself to sleep most nights because I was so homesick. You don’t know how it feels to watch life happening across the world and feel forgotten.
This was my life for the last year. It wasn’t what I expected but was more than I ever hoped it could of been.
When I signed up for the race I thought all year I was going to be a super missionary. I imagined healing people, seeing people delivered of shame and demons, and witnessing some crazy, unexplainable, supernatural things.
Well quite the opposite is true. The race is over now now, and I can look back and recall on two hands the amount of people I’ve seen miraculously healed, or delivered of a demon, freed from oppression, or even receive salvation.
But this year wasn’t about meeting a quota, checking boxes off a list, or saving the world. This wasn’t even about me. It never has been. I had it wrong all along. This is and always has been about JESUS. He called me. He equipped me. He was by my side working in and through me the whole time. I was just more focused on me and less on the kingdom.
I came on a mission trip prepared to change people’s lives. But I received a hard reality. The people I met changed my life. I can look back and remember each month, who I met, conversations I had, and divine God encounters that forever changed my heart. It wasn’t me changing them. It was Him changing me.
I was silly to think “I could change them” to begin with. It’s never me who does the changing, it’s Him and the spirit inside us.
God brought me on a journey, to restore my love for Him, for myself, and for his people.
Loving people shouldn’t be complicated. Love is the premise of the first two commandants.
Love the lord with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.
And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself.
If you love you God FIRST, loving people should be a natural overflow. But my mission wasn’t necessarily to love anyone, it was to feed them, build things for them, and spend time with them. “Loving” them was truthfully not my point of focus.
Scripture says, “They will know you are my disciples by the way you love them.“
God showed me along this journey it doesn’t matter how much money you have and it’s not about giving free handouts. It’s about spending time with people. You can share your love with someone by spending time with them. Time is something you freely give away, and something you can never get back.
God showed me on the race how to see the unseen, how to love the unlovable, and how to be Jesus with skin on.
The race required abandonment, which led me into a state of brokenness which I’m not sure I’ve fully recovered from, brokenness led me into a greater dependency on the Lord and taught me what really matters in life.
Where as before I thought it was about 4o1ks, having a great job that paid 80k a year, finding the perfect guy getting married, having kids, and simply living life…
God taught me it’s about the person right in front of you, It’s about knowing a man that died on a Cross to save the sins of the world, and sharing that truth and love with everyone you meet. It’s about spending time with people and actually caring for them. It is about realizing this life should be less about us and more about Him. He taught me everything costs something. The costs seem extreme sometimes because we miss out on important things. BUT the benefits far outweigh the costs. On the race we get to see places people will never see, and meet people we never knew existed. We get to feed the hungry, hug the widows, and tickle the orphans. We get to bring hope to places where hope is not felt, and we get to share the name of Jesus where his name is unheard. The benefits far outweigh the cost of sacrifice. But the truth of the matter is the CLOSER we follow Jesus the more we will have to sacrifice. I learned that every part of the Christian life entails sacrifice.
I knew these truths to be true before I went on the race, but when I actually experienced it, that’s when it became real. I saw Jesus in a new way for the first time in my life. Not as a distant God but a close friend, to me and to the brokenhearted.
Like I said, because of the race I could never again view the world through the same lens. Jesus gave me a new heart, a new pair of eyes, and a new desire to love people like he does. I don’t think you have to go on a mission trip for this to happen, the race is just the tool he used to transform MY life personally, and because of it I will never be the same.
