There’s a weird numbness that comes with the in-between of training camp and launch, it’s a period of time that’s full of this excitement for the journey ahead, but a fear of leaving home and leaving your comfort zone, attached with the pain and sorrow of saying goodbye to your friends and family and your normal life.
You can’t explain this numbness at the moment, and looking back on it now I can still barely describe it, but I can at least understand it now.
The price of the kingdom is everything, it takes your entire heart and soul and the Father will ask you to drop everything you’ve ever known and follow Him somewhere you have never been before. Paying this price takes an insane toll on your mental state, and that’s where the numbness comes from. Listening to the command of the kingdom is beyond difficult.
But I did it. And now I’m in Costa Rica doing it.
And this command is hard to wrap your head around and it’s even harder for the people around you to understand, not because they don’t want to understand or because they don’t want to be there for you, but because the journey is so different for everyone, and it’s hard for someone to try and wrap their head around what your doing, so you get stuck.
Stuck between two worlds, the life you’ve always had and the new life your about to begin. Everything is going to look different the second you get on the flight to leave home, and you have to say goodbye to your home, and your people. Let me tell you, this hurts, it’s hard, the in-between is hard, leaving home is hard, and while that may sound heavy and overwhelming you have to look at the good side of it.
I get the opportunity to say goodbye to my old life, and tear it down day by day, in order to rebuild it in the name of the Lord, in His image, not my own.
He has placed me in this new beginning, and brought me forward to a new calling;
To pick up my cross and follow Him.
Leaving training camp I knew in my heart this was my plan, without a doubt, but when you are having to say goodbye to your friends, your family, the job you adore, the church you call home, in order to go to a country you have never been to before to serve people you have never met, doubt creeps in.
Numbness creeps in and makes it impossible for growth, you rely on the roots you have already planted to carry you through a season of nothing.
No good but no bad either, no revelations, and no movements.
We were warned of this, our mentors from the race tried to explain that this was normal and wasn’t really going to get better until you were gone.
So has I stood in the PDX terminal, alone preparing to get on a plane and leave everything behind, I felt more peace than I had felt for months. I understood the pain of leaving my home and my people, but I could feel the excitement of what was next finally creeping into my heart for the first time in months.
I knew in the aching beats of my heart that the goodbyes and the tears would be worth it and that this trip was going to wreak me in the best way possible, and not only would I bear fruit, but I would be able to plant seeds.
So thank you Jesus, for giving me a community that is so hard to say goodbye to, thank you for a life I love and a world that I feel comfort and peace in.
But more importantly thank you for giving me the courage to leave, and the fire to abide in your commands.
Thank you to everyone at home for believing in me, and supporting me in everything.
I’m alive again down here in Costa Rica. I feel the father pressing his thumb down on me, and I can feel the blood rushing through my veins again, like the way it did at work crew or during my weekly worship at Bridgetown.
Thank you for pushing me to this point and for giving me the courage to not look back. Month one is going to bring abundant gifts of revival and I could not be more prepared for it.
