I’m not sure how to start this or really how to write it. If I’m honest I feel like a emotional wreck and no where capable of communicating thoughts that are linear or that will make sense to the world outside of my head. But here I go, sharing what God is showing me in the middle of it all.
We are here in our South Africa debrief. This debrief has been filled with a lot of additional changes, because this journey that I currently call life is full of major changes every month.
It is officially 1/2 way through our race so our 4 incredible Alumni Squad Leaders have just left to go back to America, while raising up 4 of our peers to take their place.
These 4 astounding people have become some of my deepest friends! They are the people you call on when your struggling, those people who you know you can always count on to be there for you and who will always point you back to Jesus. I’m excited for the people who they have raised up, I believe they are going to do an awesome job, but it’s still a major change.
Next, we also had our first set of team changes, which means the family of 6 girls that I have been doing life with 24/7 these past 6 months has been split up and I am now surrounded by 5 new squadmates (2 other girls and 3 guys). Again super excited about this new crew… I see so much of God inside each one of them and I think God has some incredible things in store for us, but I’m still having to say goodbye to my family that I am use to.
I don’t know if these changes seem significant to you, but for me I feel like I am leaving my family and friend at home all over again. My emotions feel all over the place because I feel both so incredibly sad and so incredibly excited all at the same time! It’s hard to express the duality of these two seemingly contradictory emotions, but it does exist.
So as I have been crying my eyes out I have been asking God to help me figure out how to mourn the last season fully so I can embrace the fullness of what this new season has in store for me.
God is an interesting fellow. Instead of answer my question directly He posed a different question to me. “Do you trust that I will be with you wherever you go?“
Dammit God. He knows that I don’t trust Him… He knows this is something I struggle with so deeply and no amount of will power I try to put in, I never can get myself to trust Him. And boy have I tried. That’s a big reason why I came on this race was to try to figure out how to trust Him fully with my life and not lean on my own understanding.
Knowing all of this I respond, “Why the heck are you asking this God? You know I don’t! This is not the issue I’m focusing on right now. Can’t you see I’m struggling enough with these other issues right now?“
So like a mature Christian I decide to ignore Him, ignore my emotions, just try to keep moving forward and focus on all the things happening at debrief.
It’s funny that this is still my response to God even knowing if I have learned anything on this race it has been that God is a persistent God who pursues the people He loves, he doesn’t just stop because we ignore Him.
Through the work of God speaking with other people, I have finally stopped running away and just cry out to Him. I admit out loud how I don’t trust Him, that I feel like He is going to leave me when I need Him the most, and express how I feel terrible that I can’t even trust this God that I willingly choose to follow!
My very wise friend then asks me, “When do you feel like He hasn’t been there for you? When do you feel He left you?”
“That’s the annoying part.” I say. “I don’t feel like I have had anything in my life where He hasn’t been there. I have lived such a blessed life that I have never been able to test and see if He will show up in the middle of my crap like He has in others lives. I want to trust that He will but what I really want is to have something super crappy happen and watch Him show up… but at the same time I don’t want something crappy to happen because that’s dumb to desire for something crappy to happen to you.“
After I say all of that, God brings me back to my full circle moment in Nepal.
If you read my earlier blog “How Did I Get Here?” you know that it was on a mission trip 2+ years ago in Nepal where God used a man named Bipin to show me I was suppose to go on the World Race.
On this journey, I got to go back to Nepal and have a full circle moment of going back to the same bakery where I first found out about the World Race by meeting actual racers, now as a racer myself. Not only that but I got to see Bipin again and show him that he wasn’t crazy like I told him he was. That here I am now 2 years later, a racer myself like he told me I would be.
I thought that was the entirety of my full circle moment… I mean how much better can it get! But apparently God still had more. In my blog I wrote about the picture that Bipin got when he was praying over me.
He said, “I see you walking on this path filled with gold coins. You are very strange because you just step over the gold coins. You just step over God’s blessings because you are not satisfied with the blessings, but you are just looking for Him. It is very strange but very good”.
I just thought God was complimenting me about how good it was that I was striving for Him and not for the small blessings that He gives. You know the line “love the creator not the creation” kind of thing. But here I am 2 years later with God showing me something different.
In that moment He made me realize that because I am “stepping over the blessing” I am discounting all of the times He has shown up in my life and thus can’t rely on our history to build this trust that I am so deeply craving.
*Brain exploded*
Not only because it is so incredibly accurate, but because God had Bipin tell me something that would take the entirety of 2 years before I would even understand it. God didn’t wait to give me this word through my fellow racers, he didn’t even wait to use Bipin the second time I saw him which was only 4 months ago. No, instead God knew where I was going to be at emotionally 24 months in advance and chose to plant a seed so that when I arrived here I could be blown away by Him: His goodness, His sovereignty, and His intentionality to detail.
What God did was truly “work all things together for our good and His glory!” Romans 8:28-30
So I am going back and reflecting about all the “gold coins” that He has placed in my life starting with my race specifically. I came across 2 that really blew me away that have to deal with you people back home…
1. God used 10 of you, different people in my life, in a one year period to take me from believing the race was a crazy dream that could never be a reality to getting me here on the race!
2. Secondly, I am not a person who is surrounded by affluent people, yet God used 55 different people to fund the entirety of my race! 55 people to raise $17,000… that’s absolutely insane to me.
Since this is a long emotional story I want to give you 2 main take away points of why I am willing to share all of what God is doing in my life right now.
First, as encouragement that no matter where you are, what you are feeling, or how you have done that you can take it to Jesus! That we are all humans who do stupid stuff… don’t let that stop you from coming running to The Father with your problems.
Secondly, don’t downplay your weaknesses. They are actually where you can see God show up and as you focus on them you actually see more and more of The Fathers goodness on your life. I think this is why the Bible says:
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:9-11
