Hello everyone! My name is Claire Hilton and in just a couple of months I will be joining many other young people with a desire to serve God on the World Race Gap Year! I’ll be traveling to Thailand, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Ecuador to do the Lords work for NINE MONTHS! How cool is that?! Now, I’m new to blogging so bear with me. I’m going to tell you a little bit about how I got here in the first place. Until recently I thought that I would be going off to college right out of high school like most graduates, but apparently God has a different plan for me. As I was closing in on the end of my senior year I started having some serious doubts about what I was doing with my life. I knew I wanted to go to college but I wasn’t sure that the timing was right. That was when some of my friends began helping me create a list of things I love doing and one of them mentioned mission work. See, I’ve gone on a handful of mission trips throughout high school and I loved each and every one, but is mission work really something I’m interested in enough to put college off for a year? I wasn’t convinced. The conversation moved on and some pretty crazy ideas were thrown out there, but in the back of my mind I kept coming back to mission work. I’ve never been one that could hear God speaking to me but this time it felt like He was. I went home, still struggling with the idea of going to a college I wasn’t sure I’d be happy at. I saw that there was a new email in my inbox, one I had been waiting on for a while now. It was my housing assignment for Montana State University. I had been placed in the one dorm that I didn’t want. And I know it sounds whiny, I get it, but when I was already not sure I would be happy there, this was just the push I needed to change my course. I told my mom and she could see that I was clearly upset about it so we had that conversation. The awkward, “I know we already put a non refundable $450 into this school but I don’t think I want to go there anymore” conversation. And instead of getting upset with me, we talked it out and she pointed me back to Adventures in Missions. I had already thought about doing this before I even started my senior year but decided that it wasn’t for me. Jokes on me, it was, I just didn’t know it yet. So I applied, set up my over the phone interview and we waited. What are the odds that I would even get accepted, right? I applied literally two days before the deadline, this trip takes off in September and at the time I had only about $6 to my name! Not exactly a recipe for success. Well, I was accepted anyway and I couldn’t be more excited to see what God has in store for me. It’s going to be an absolutely crazy journey and I’m going to need all the help I can get whether it’s monetary donations or your thoughts and prayers (which will be greatly appreciated). So this brings us to the end of my first blog post. I’ll be posting updates of my journey on here, so if you would like to donate or just be kept up to date, this is where you can find resources for both of those things. Thanks for the love and support!
-Claire
