After spending the last nine months on this thing called The World Race, if there is one thing I can tell you, it is that it’s really not for everyone.
You will be stretched, wrecked, emotionally unstable, and thrown into some of the saddest places and leave pieces of your heart in all places of the world. This isn’t a trip that’s all adventure and fun. Its not a usual mission trip where you build a house and leave. It’s an experience that will change your life forever and destroy the way you currently see the world. It will show you what it really looks like to follow Jesus with radical faith.
The World Race looks like screaming off of a roof in Thailand because you just can’t understand why there is so much brokenness around you. It’s sitting in a room for four hours crying, arguing, and learning to love and understand the people you have been living every moment of you life with. It ’s learning to be humble, forgiving, and grateful for the small things you have. It’s picking lice out of peoples hair for two months, being heartbroken every time you leave a ministry, trying things you have never seen, making a fool out of yourself trying to learn a new language. It’s wondering why the heck you thought signing up for this seemed like a good idea.
So,
If you are signing up for adventures and fun pictures, look for another trip
If you are looking to just get stamps in a passport, backpack Europe
If you are signing up to be a good Christian, volunteer at a shelter
If you are trying to run away from something, go find somewhere else
because if you come for any of those reasons you will be utterly disappointed and be quite miserable.
However,
If you want to work with kids who have HIV and completely fall in love with them
Cry more than you have in your entire life
Sand down doors with the wrong supplies
Live in a village and learn how to catch your dinner
Spend Christmas painting a classroom
Teach kids who don’t want to learn
Get lice for two months
Get peed, pooped, and puked on
Meet lifelong friends
Fall in love with the Lord like never before
Learn what it means to fight for a community
Then take the leap and keep your eyes wide open because you won’t want to miss a second of it.
My race was hard, really hard, but it was worth every moment. So, if you sign up for this, just know you have no idea what you got yourself into because nothing can prepare you for what’s about to happen.
Sincerely,
Lillian Son.
