As I begin my journey as a World Racer, I can’t help but look back and reminisce over the past year and the events that got me to this point.
At the beginning of 2017, I began the year studying abroad in Alcalá de Henares, Spain for three months. During this time I took classes that revolved around Spain’s history and culture. It was in one of these classes that it was brought to our attention that Spain has a very high unemployment rate. This seemed absolutely absurd to us since everything we had seen so far from our travels was nothing but hard working locals.
On one of our the last weekends in Europe, a classmate and I decided to go a little out of the box and take a trip to Casablanca, Morocco. Our professors in Spain warned us that this was not a smart decision but we chose to take the risk and make the trip anyway. We so desperately wanted to get away from the normal European cities where all the tourist go and find out what it was really like to be in a place where you could actually see the daily lives of people who normally live half a world away. While Casablanca is one of the more popular tourist destinations of Morocco it was so clear to us that the people there were struggling. This was the place that had all of the hustle and bustle of a large city but was filled with beggars and homeless people on the street. I’ve been to large cities before but none could have prepared me for Morocco. They had children playing in the streets; streets that smelled of nothing but urine and alcohol. You couldn’t walk one block without seeing twenty stray cats roaming around looking for food.
This is the point where I felt God calling me to be His hands and feet. He showed me what it was truly like for these people who were living in complete despair; He opened my eyes to a world I had only heard stories about. He gave me the desire to step out of my comfort zone and see what he wanted my next step to be. That weekend God called me to be a missionary.
