The World Race is over.
I had to repeat this to myself several times, as I watched the sun set and the sky grow dark on our flight across the Pacific, “This is over. I am going home.”
We spent the last week of our Race debriefing in Thailand, and I walked with a friend to the beach the night we got there. I watched from the sand as the ocean rocked back and forth, its wave in a rhythmic dance of pulling towards the sky, yearning to touch the moon. I felt known and understood by the natural coming and going of the water. I felt my own yearning to touch something beyond this earth, a deep pull towards something beyond my understanding- Heaven- when there’s a goodbye to goodbyes and we’re crowded in the throne room by love so big. The blue water’s push and pull brought me present to the pain and celebration of this season’s ending, mimicking the tension of my own heart’s grief and joy, my soul’s lament and rejoice, my spirit’s mourning and dancing. The World Race is over.
Every day I try to connect my head and my heart, unite all of me to know that this beautiful season ended, and the dance with God goes on. This isn’t like coming home from any other trip. Nine months of living abroad doesn’t feel like a long trip. It feels like life. Living in the same city or village area for three months with consistent community doesn’t feel like a short stay or visit. Life happened for me, and life continued to happen back home in the states. While in these places, I felt planted and uprooted at the same time. I built meaningful friendships and witness in the lives of the people who lived locally, and I continually grew closer and more in love with the people moving with me in all these places.
My every day is different now. I don’t wake up surrounded by 35 others on sleeping pads who want Jesus as much as I do. There isn’t a Monday night worship with my in-home church or a catch-up time with my team on Thursday nights. I do miss those things. I’m thankful that they were real and that they happened and that they taught me what I want my life to look like.
I’m thankful that I lived in a bustling Quito, Ecuador and on Wednesdays and Sundays I helped feed refugees. I remember meeting Wilmer Silva; he captivated my attention as one of his hands was raised during worship, and the other hand held his curly-haired baby boy close, as tears silently streamed down his face. Thanks God, that you see us.
I’m thankful for the ways my team learned to serve each other as we spent hot and crazy days on the green fringe of the Amazon Rain forest. It was during those days we met the sweetest children, witnessed the manliest man watercolor for the first time (and love it), and were spectators of the most gloriously and brightly colored sunsets.
I’m thankful for spontaneous, free worship with my people in Guatemala. I’m thankful for the salvations and the physical healings. We witnessed the most noticeable and significant growth, as individuals, as teams and as a body. I’m thankful for the community of San Lorenzo that we took two chicken buses to visit every day, and for our friends Logan and Charlie in Chimaltenango. Guatemala is divinely special, and our time there was saturated in peace, favor, and the blessings of family.
I’m thankful that in Cambodia a twenty minute tuktuk ride brought us to the countryside of Battambang, to a school that looked like an extension of my Nana’s garden (compliments to them both). It was at this school we met the bravest group of children. They are smart and capable and they are changing their community one day at a time. The three months in Cambodia also brought us unexpected hardship, as we were hit with mental health struggles, physical illnesses, and spiritual wrestling. It taught us what it really means to thrive: thriving is moving towards a goal despite of circumstances. Thriving in the spirit looks like perseverance and the resolve to hope beyond hope that God is good even when everything else says He isn’t. We fought these hard days together, and I am really, really thankful for that.
I’m trying to put each experience I hold dear to my heart on word and paper. There’s this ongoing list in my head, of answered prayers, names and faces of the people I miss, real life miracles, and moments that changed. my. life.
My World Race Gap Year has been a wonderful, beautiful, heart-breaking and building testimony of who God is.
He is-
Real,
Kind,
Wholly Vulnerable,
Insurmountably Powerful.
The deepest truth, the truth that rectifies all of this, the truth that literally raised the dead and the truth that stands faultless before all of creation, is this-
God is love.
love love love love love.
This is the biggest thing written on my heart. It’s what I have learned, heard, seen, smelled, touched, tasted- God is love.
In this transition home, these lyrics play over and over in my head, words written by two young men who actually did the race, before me:
“take what you’ve learned and what you’ve seen,
bring it back home to your family.
be brave, i know, it hurts.”
–The Upper World, Convent Bonfires
I am home. It does hurt. It hurts to live with our hearts wide open, but it’s what we’ve been created for. It is brave to live like this. I’m thankful to be home, and to bring this love- God’s big kind of love- home to my family. There is definitely an unforeseen sweetness in being here, now. I feel gratitude deep in my heart for the simplicity of making myself a matcha latte, of sitting on my back porch with my dogs, of seeing my mom and dad every day. I love that my lifelong best-friend and Skyline Chili are both back in walking distance to me. In every season, I think, there are things to celebrate and things to wrestle through.
I am taking this step by step, moment by moment, valuing each breath as a gift -thanks yoga- and giving it back to God as praise.
Thank you. Thank you reading my blogs, and commenting with sincere interest and affection.Thank you for praying for me. You have been a part of this, too. Your prayers have carried my feet, and if that is the part of Christ I have been, I could say that you have been the mouth that prophesied new life, over me, and all whom I met.
written from my old kentucky home,
good night. <3
a few photos from a dreamy thailand, moments i was soaking this all in
coffee cup ring in the sand,
shoes that my feet slipped into all over the world
all of us, gathered in the sand,
for story telling and talent sharing
when God talked to me about endings and beginnings
I can look up at God and say, “This has all been for You.”
And I hear His humored reply, “I say the same to you.”
