I’m officially a third of the way through the race, which blows my mind. It feels like I just left yesterday. I realized how quickly this has been going by when I got to Honduras. So lately I’ve taken careful notes of the things I’m learning throughout this experience. I’m going to look through my notes and share some of the things that I thought were noteworthy.
1.) Drawing near to God and in response, Him drawing near to you.
– Pretty self explanatory, but let me share a story and go a little deeper. As a middle school student one of the highlights of my year was church camp, the great escape. A place where you could swim, tube, and mud wrestle while getting closer to God in the same week. Something that really stuck with me happened when I had just finished 7th grade, when Andrew Larsen had recently become the youth pastor. Every church camp has the night where the worship is killer, and then the message is strong and calls people to start their relationship with the Lord, or for people to rededicate their lives to the Lord. The point is driven home, and everyone cries during the worship after. That happened on the last night. But, after that session where everyone cried (including myself) Andrew sat everyone in the middle school youth group down. The first thing he said was “I have a love/hate relationship with these moments.” My 13 year old mind was baffled by that statement, wondering what he could possibly dislike about people getting rocked by Jesus. He continued by talking about how often times when these moments happen, students would go home and then nothing would be different. They drew near to God in their few days away from home at camp. But when they got home, they would go right back to the way things were prior to their great escape. I now have a better understanding of what Andrew was telling 7th grade me. We should always strive to keep intimacy with God, and when we change for the better we should do our best to stay that way. It’s as simple as James 4:8 – “Come near to God and He will come near to you.” That excerpt is just as true for a 13 year old at church camp, as it is for a 19 year old missionary, or for anyone at any stage of life. On the race, I’ve made more of an effort to get into the word and sit with God often, and I’ve really felt God drawing close to me.
2.) Fellowship of Men.
– I’ve learned how important it is to have a group of guys surrounding you that strive to be men of God. Proverbs 27:17 says “As iron sharpens iron, a man sharpens another man.” I’ve been blessed with a group of guys here who want to be men of God. But before I go on, let me say that a lot of times a woman of God will more effectively cause a man to change his ways than another man will. But, that doesn’t discount the importance of the fellowship of men. I have a group of guys with me that I can do dumb things with: towel whip each other in a hostel in Bangkok, play murder in the dark in abandoned houses in Cambodia, chop wood with machetes in Honduras for fun, you name it. Just guys bein’ dudes. But at the same time, I have a group of guys that I can go into town with and do sports ministry with, talk about God, or talk about what’s going on in our lives. Having a balance of these kinds of things is important in Christian guys. We do dumb things, but we also need to be able to sharpen each other, as iron sharpens iron.
3.) Keeping the World Race off of a pedestal. (Shout out to Matt Blair for talking to me about this)
– Probably not what you were expecting my third point to be, but hear me out. Future racers, current racers, and world race alumni struggle with this. The world race is a once in a lifetime opportunity to pinpoint your life’s focus on your relationship with God, and ministering to people in third world countries for nine months. That’s incredible. People change lives on this trip, and in response their lives are changed. We get to be vessels used by God to advance His kingdom and our hearts are changed in the process. That’s awesome. But this is nine months of my life. This isn’t anywhere close to even being the majority of my life. One thing I was told by an employee of AIM (world race) is that the point of this trip is not to get people to be full time missionaries. The things that were stressed the most at training camp were intimacy with God, community, and missional living. The point of this trip is to make these three things priorities in your life. You take the intimacy you’ve gotten with God by spending time in His word, you take the things you’ve learned from living with 30 people in one house with two toilets, you take all the different ministries you’ve done whether it be teaching English in Cambodia, or doing sports ministry, construction, or working in a special needs home in Honduras, and you bring it home with you. You apply what you’ve done for nine months into your life at home in America. Which will be much different from your nine months spent overseas, but you can still apply all three of the main focuses of the world race into the rest of your life with your relationship with God, your career, your family, and your community.
