Month four of my race, came more quickly than I ever thought it would. Its almost over and that comes with so many weird feelings. This was a really hard month for me. It wasn’t hard for just one reason, or anything really huge honestly; it was the combination of a lot of little things.
We moved to a new place, a new country, a new continent. As exciting as that was, coming from a culture where everywhere we stepped we were welcomed and had the freedom to talk about Jesus immediately to a place where you have to take months of getting to know someone before its even accepted to mention the name of Jesus was really hard. Trying to find the balance of being culturally appropriate but also freely giving these people the good news was really confusing. It calls for a lot of discernment and patience and those are things that we can only get directly from the Father. And to be 100% real with all of you, before a couple of days ago, my relationship with the Lord has been REAL AWKWARD this month. I say awkward because I know He’s there, but when we would spend time together it was just weird. I’d sit down with my Bible and journal and beg the Lord to just let me feel something. Because this whole month I’ve just felt BLAHHHHH. I hate blah. I can work with broken and I can work with anger and I can work with absolute joy, but stagnancy? Complete numbness? I can’t work with that and thats what this month has been for me spiritually. The frustration that that causes, I can’t even completely explain it. It’s also really hard to talk about this with all of you. People from home ask me how I’m doing or whats been going on or what the Lord has been teaching me, it’s really hard to answer honestly when the answer is “life is hard right now. I haven’t learned anything new this month except that the World Race isn’t as glamorous as everyone thinks it is. Jesus is right in front of me and I know it but I can’t seem to connect with him so I haven’t really learned much.” It’s not easy to be in that place or for those to be my answers. Don’t worry though guys, I know He’s there. I just have to keep digging. The more time I spend being determined to get back to the intimacy I know the Lord and I can share, the less awkward it is and the more I find myself desiring Him. So maybe its been a little awkward because I just got comfortable with having Him that I stopped truly desiring Him and He needed to get me to a place where I wanted nothing more than to be His best friend again.
Ministry also looked so much different here than in Guatemala. Ministry in Guatemala was consistent, and while everyday there were surprises and twists and turns we had to deal with, we knew that we had ministry everyday. Here, in Thailand, the first week, we had really consistent ministry. We did manual labor for 6 hours everyday. It wasn’t relational and that was different, but I still knew the vision behind the people we were working with and I knew that we were building kingdom, so I was happy to knock down buildings, paint walls, sand gates, and shovel bricks. But the next week hit and we had Monday and Tuesday off for Christmas Eve and Christmas. The next day we didn’t have ministry scheduled until 7 at night and it only took us about an hour and a half. We had a solid four hours of ministry the next two days, but then this week rolled around and we had New Years Eve off. We did ministry yesterday, but today is another one of those days where we only have like an hour and a half of ministry scheduled at 7 tonight. I leave on Friday for debrief and I feel like I’ve done the smallest amounts of ministry. I feel like this month was just here. I felt purposeless. I felt more like a tourist in this country than a missionary and I really didn’t love that feeling. Its all about perspective though, and I’m getting there with the perspective thing. God gave me this month to rest because I’m almost halfway through the race but I still have a while to go and He wants me to finish just as strong as I started. He gave me this month to allow me to spend so much time with Him so I could get out of this gross rut I’m in with Him because if I wasn’t spending as much time with Him it would just be getting worse. He gave me this month to remind me what home will look like. When I get back in June, I won’t have scheduled ministry everyday, so I get to choose to go out and be Jesus instead of doing it because it’s just whats on the schedule for the day.
Community is also really hard. I have been told many times that I need to branch out and spend time with other people than just the few that I normally do. So this month I’ve been really intentional about trying to do that, and it hasn’t really gone great. I’ve felt a good deal of rejection and frustration because I wanted to grow and take the feedback I was given, but every time I tried nothing happened. People either were busy or didn’t want to leave the hostel or just would rather spend time with other people. Guys, the community I’m living in is amazing and there’s so much grace. Nobody was trying to reject me. I wasn’t trying to live like a secluded hermit. This month has just been hard (for everyone honestly). But because the Lord and I were off and I was emotionally and spiritually in a bad place, I let that effect me even more than I should have.
So yeah, this month has been pretty hard, but month five is a week away and “joy comes in the morning.” Excited to see what new parts of His heart Jesus wants to show me in this next month.
(also I know none of you noticed, but my last several blogs have been titled country music song titles, but that ends today because I couldn’t find one that I liked for this blog. really incredibly sad to end that journey.)
thanks for reading. Love you guys.
K
