** Considering the race, but in a relationship? Read this.
** My boyfriend, Eric, wrote this for my readers.
So, your girlfriend is going on the race.
I’ve been dating my girlfriend for a year and 3 months. She has had the calling to go on the World Race since before I met her, and she just finished her first month on the World Race. This blog is from a guy’s perspective, but I am going to try to make this applicable to anyone that has a girlfriend or boyfriend currently on, or thinking about going on the World Race.
Before Nicole (my girlfriend) launched in August, everyone would ask me:
- are you going to stay together while she’s away?
- are you sure you can handle being apart for so long?
- you know she’ll be a different person when she gets back.
- how will you talk to her?
- are you just going to let her go?
- why do you have to put your life on pause, just because she is choosing to?
- Do you not feel like it’s selfish of her to leave you?
- and my favorite: are you okay with her going?
In order, yes, yes, yes, email, yes, it’s not, no, and yes.
When we first started dating she would mention curiosity about the World Race. I could also pickup on some of the anxiety about what that would mean. I could tell that she was afraid of the answer to all the questions people would ask. I want to think that I tried to be the loudest voice encouraging her to sign up and go. You might be saying, “why?” “how?” “I don’t get it.”
The World Race is a unique experience where your significant other will be pushed to their limits, and if they are lucky, completely broken. The World Race teaches everyone humility, service, honesty, conflict resolution, communication, problem solving skills, and cultivating deep intimacy with God and the people around them. These are traits that I think make a strong marriage. Your significant other will have learned to communicate with you on a personal level to help identify each other’s needs to best serve and love one another.
Your girlfriend or boyfriend will change. They will be more like who and what God made them to be. They will make great life partners and unbelievable parents. They will seek to grow more and more personally and towards the Lord. Love will radiate from them. They will know how to give support and encouragement when life brings us down.
Sure, my girlfriend is still on the World Race. Maybe we won’t make it the eleven months she’s away. I don’t know if I will benefit from the results of her transformation, but I know she will. I know she will have seen, felt and experienced the Father’s love which is so deep that she will seek to keep filling her heart and overflow it with compassion and love. In the end that’s all I could want for her, with or without me.
Trust her and let her go.
