Reader’s note: I have entered into a season of reflection and processing. Specifically, the season of my 11 months as a racer on the World Race and the four months where I went back out on the field to pioneer the Squad Content Manager position. I’m also looking back at my first two mission trips in Haiti, in 2013 and 2014.
To process this season, I’ve pulled out old journals and writings.
Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be posting “flashback” blogs that give a look back at where I’ve come from and tell stories that I lived but haven’t yet told.
This blog post is directly from my journal in December 2013, exactly one week before my first mission trip to Haiti. I was living in Evansville, Indiana and working as a morning news anchor at WEHT/WTVW as a 30 year old.
December 21, 2013
How do you prepare for an experience you know will change you?
I’m so blessed, thankful, and humbled that God chose me for this journey. I’m so glad I followed where He’s leading me. I know we are all children of God with special purposes in life, but it feels so good to feel God’s love and to discover His unique plan for us. How special we feel when we realize we are individually unique and that God has a tailor-made plan for our lives, and has created us uniquely for it.
I can’t wait to be the hands and feet of God. I can’t wait until I touch with my hands little faces, little hands that so desperately need love.
I know my heart will break a thousand times when I see the struggles of those in Haiti.
I don’t understand why we are the lucky ones – what we did to deserve to live in the greatest nation on earth. We could so easily have been born someplace where poverty is extreme and the norm. Where evil lurks on the street. Where it’s sometimes hard to find hope.
These Haitians are our brothers and sisters. The “least of these” are flesh and bone – feelings just like us. They don’t deserve to be forgotten. And I won’t forget.
“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” John 14:18
Haiti one week from today!!
