I don’t brag on my team enough. My team could easily be the biggest blessing God has gifted me with since I started the race. We are seven women who come from different homes, cities, states, states, denominations, are different ages, have different passions and talents and are just so freaking different. But the Lord makes it work.
Living with Christian women my age is something I have never done. At home if I wanted perspective, accountability, or a spiritual discussion I would have to either call, text or drive to see one of my Christian friends. Living like that made it really easy to hide sins in my life and for a long time I really liked it that way. This made the first month on the race very uncomfortable. I was suddenly surrounded by young single women like me who want nothing more than they want Jesus. It amazed me how much of my life I hadn’t let Jesus into. These girls want to know me for me. They want me to know them. They want to apologize and ask for forgiveness when they wrong me. They want to walk in honor and service for the sake of our God. They laugh the hardest laughs and cry the heaviest tears with me. They pursue me because it’s what Jesus does and they know I don’t like being pursued. But they aren’t satisfied with part of me or most of me. They want all of me because that’s what God wants. They fight for the health and peace in our team even if it’s 12:30 am and we have to get up early for ministry. Because this is our family and community for 11 months and it is so very worth fighting for.
After living, working, eating and sleeping next to someone for three months you realize they know you better than you may want them to. These last two weeks have been really hard. I hate when people see that I don’t have it all together. I hate when I cry in front of people, I hate when I’m feeling so sick that I can’t walk up a flight of stairs. I hate when people can see that I’m not as strong as I have tried to get them to believe I am. I hate that they might know that I am very easily hurt and definitely don’t want to talk about why.
On Christmas Eve I had a minor/major mental breakdown. My team has been pretty good about encouraging me to step back as translator and letting them figure things out so that I don’t bear so much of the communication burden. Unfortunately, I like to be in control. I like to make sure things are going the way they should and being the translator gives me a way to do that. Feeling that perceived control was great for a while until I began to feel like things absolutely could not get done without me. I went to ministry so many times when I truly wasn’t well enough to go. I began to resent my team for their ability to stay back when they were sick. I didn’t think I had that option. When things got especially tough, days got extremely long, and I had to have uncomfortable conversations because I’m the one who can communicate, things began to fall apart.
I was standing up in the 9 am service on the morning of Christmas Eve, after we had gotten up for the 6 am prayer meeting and I couldn’t figure out why I felt so angry. Why I couldn’t be joyful on this joyful day and enjoy the music that was being played. Tears began to flood my eyes. I realized I was tired. Absolutely exhausted. My teammate Taylor looked at me as she was clapping along to the music and without skipping a beat said, “go to bed.” Bed?! This is the most important ministry day of the year. I can’t leave church and go to bed. WHO WILL TRANSLATE? But I realized I wasn’t going to be able to stop crying and I walked out. I stayed in our room all day. Sometimes crying, sometimes talking, sometimes yelling. My team listened. They rubbed my back. They let me cry on them. Not one of them made me feel bad for walking out. In fact, they wouldn’t let me go to ministry that day. Even though today I was to translate our preaching message, our skit, our games, our songs and our dances for 100s of kids, they told me to stay back. As they were leaving and I felt like I was failing my team for staying behind Taylor looked at me and said, “I’m proud of you for staying back.” And I cried again.
I love that.
I wish I had learned from that day. Yesterday we had a really hard travel day. Three of my teammates were physically ill from altitude sickness and no one felt 100%. I had been warned by multiple people to make ONLY slow movements and to keep drinking water. Taylor told me: “If you try to exercise I will kill you.” Message received. But when three of my teammates were so sick they couldn’t carry their own backpacks I felt like I couldn’t take my own sick day because I wasn’t the one throwing up in the street. And when our squad’s bus driver kicked us off our bus in the middle of the journey on the way to Peru, I didn’t think that was the time to step back from being the translator. And after we all made it through immigration I thought I was going to vomit. I could barely stand and I rode the rest of the way to our hostel with my head out the window, bracing myself for the inevitable.
Once we finally arrived at the hostel, I lugged my pack up the two flights of stairs to my room and fell onto my bed. My lips were purple and I was so nauseous I could barely walk to the bathroom. My team went out and brought me back dinner because they insisted that I try to eat a real meal. They brought it back without silverware because the restaurant didn’t have any disposable forks and they knew I wouldn’t have any issues eating cold chicken with my fingers. As I’m eating, my teammate Kimbra came into our room to say goodnight and she told me this: “I came in here to tell you guys goodnight and that I love you. But I mostly came in here to tell Katie that she is not allowed to get out of her bed until noon tomorrow. You can get up whenever you want. But you are not allowed to get out of your bed until the afternoon.” Kimbra knows me. I’m a ball of nervous energy in the morning. I get anxiety about sleeping in past 7:30. And I was so sick. And today I did it. I stayed in bed until 1 pm and it was glorious. I’m so thankful for her. She loves me so well. She makes me do uncomfortable things, like resting.
My team is so great, I really can’t say that enough. Hopefully I’ll write a more in-depth blog about them in the future, by name. If you haven’t already, you can click on their names on the side of my page and follow their journeys too. I want you to know my sisters and the joy they bring me and the rest of the world.
I’ll leave you with this. When I was feeling nauseous and sick and tired and like I had failed at being the rock for my team, Taylor turns and looked and me and said,
“Katie, you’re a really good missionary.” And I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know my heart longed to hear that. And to hear it from someone who has been by my side in all of my true failures and victories and continually for three months gave it so much weight. Man. Jesus is so good. He is so much better than the best thing this world has to offer, including my team. I’m so thankful he chose them for me and wrote out our stories together. I pray each of you reading this has someone in your life that loves you the way he does. If you don’t, I would love to pray that he would bring you that person or people. We weren’t meant to do this life alone. We were meant to do it with Jesus first, people second.
