When I tell people that I am going on a year-long mission trip to 11 different countries with only a backpack, most immediately tell me how brave I am. When I tell people that I am quitting the salaried, full time job that I received right out of college (which can also help me pay back my student loans) and I am going to raise funds to be a missionary, some think it does not make any sense.
But the last couple of years have not exactly looked like I thought they were going to in terms of finishing college and starting life after graduation. I have never really known what I want to do with my life. When people asked me what I wanted to do after college, all I can could say was “I don’t know, but I want it to involve people and some type of ministry.”
I spent my last two years of college trying to find something that related to those. From that searching, I ended up applying for a summer internship with the Willow Creek Association. I was accepted into the internship and spent my summer at the WCA. Towards the end of the summer I was offered to come on part time for my senior year by a different department.
Towards the end of my senior year, I was offered a full time job with that same department post-graduation. This job was salaried, came with benefits, and it was with people I already knew I loved. I was so excited and could not believe the way God had provided for me, especially when so many of my other fellow graduates did not have a job lined up after graduation.
But there was something in the back of my head that was curious as to why this was the path God had laid before me. I have been so confident for so long that I was not called to live a “typical American life” with a 9-5 job, great income, a nice place to live, and basically everything I needed. Those were not the things that were going to fulfill my life or the call God had put on it.
I knew deep down that my calling was to serve those in other countries/cultures and be the love of Christ to them through relationships. Now, I had no idea what that actually meant or how that would actually play out for my day to day life. But I knew it was not in this life of comfort and normalcy.
Well, it turned out that I was right. This was not where God was going to keep me for long. A few months after I settled into this new way of living, the discomfort came back. I knew that that discomfort was God nudging me to something that was more aligned with the call He had placed on my life, which is what eventually led me to the World Race.
So, my biggest fear in all this is to not go on the World Race. If I stay where I am at now, I will have security, stability, and very few “worries”. And a lot of times I do start to think about giving up all of that and I get scared. But those fears do not override my biggest fear of not being in the center of God’s will for my life.
