If I am completely honest, the World Race is crazy. It is HARD. You are living out of a backpack with a few sets of clothes and necessary items. You are a nomad bouncing from place to place, ministry to ministry. You are thrust into INTENSE community, and it is intense because these people on your team are hardly EVER away from you. You eat together, sleep next to each other, work together all day doing ministry, run errands together, and sit beside these people in the middle of your quiet times with Jesus. It’s difficult enough to be learning hard lessons from the Lord and being taught SO many things about yourself (good and bad), but to do this in an environment where you can’t truly ever be “alone” or get away for too long, can get a little tense. Sometimes you’re just sweaty and tired, missing “normal” (what is “normal” again?) food, and wanting to crawl in your own warm, cushy bed back home. These days are long, filled with last minute details, and riddled with opportunity to walk in the gift of the Spirit of patience! Some days are frustrating and overwhelming, but others are amazing and filled with a JOY in Christ that makes you want to relive that day continually.
If I’m completely honest again, to the same degree I think the Race is sometimes insane, I LOVE the Race. I am thankful to Christ Jesus for establishing this organization and creating a journey like this that people can become a part of. It is crazy, and I love it. These conditions of abandonment, change, travel, life-on-life with strangers who become your family, pouring out in ministry, and pursuing deeper relationship with the Lord in the meantime are a LOT to be in the middle of. And yet they apply the pressure needed and that the Lord uses for you to be challenged and GROW, for you to come to the end of yourself and truly DEPEND on Jesus for the next hour of energy you need or the grace to forgive your teammate for dropping your toothbrush on the ground or whatever it is! It has been a journey like no other, and I am only 5 months in! I’m still walking right into the middle of this process (quite literally, since my race will be close to halfway over at the end of this month..), and some days I want to scream and run away from everyone around me. But some days, like yesterday on the big bus as we all traveled from Cambodia to Thailand as a squad, I couldn’t help but grin like a big goofball as I sat in the back row of the bus looking at these radiant, messy people who have become my FAMILY. I was hearing laughter and stories of what God was teaching individuals, seeing people dancing with their seat-neighbors with shared headphones in their ears; some of them were drooling on their pillows and others were catching up on our year long Bible reading plan. MAN, it’s a lot going on, but it is so BEAUTIFUL to live life with people in pursuit of the same things as you, abandoning what they want for the sake of Christ and what He wants of them, surrendered to what the Lord has planned each day to look like. And it’s why I get teary-eyed on travel days taking in the BEAUTY of the redeemed, broken vessels around me that I get to call brothers and sisters. (see part of their sweet heads in the photo below).
SO, if you dislike:
-being challenged and called up higher as an individual to grow and life in a way that better reflects Christ
-being encouraged in the ways God loves and reveals Himself through you
-being empowered to self-govern and address the WHY’s of what you do
-learning from others in areas where you are weak and teaching others in areas where you are strong
-becoming family with people who were originally a group of strangers
-being a traveling Body of Christ meeting needs of ministries and people in many nations, LOVING and serving alongside those committed to the vision Jesus has given them for a specific people and area long-term and long after you will leave
-learning more and more about who this Jesus is as you see the people He created and His grace and love for them
-being overwhelmed by the joy of the Lord as you worship with brothers and sisters in the global Body of Christ who are doing this “following Jesus” thing with their whole lives too and experiencing the sense of belonging, love, and commonality in the midst of such diversity there
-being freed from past hinderances and shallow, selfish distractions that kept you from following the Lord most fully
-being awakened to the truth that this life is about something and someone SO much bigger than you (that’s Jesus!)
-being shown, experiencing, and beholding MORE AND MORE AND MORE how much the God of the Universe, our now Father through Jesus, LOVES YOU and gave everything for you to know Him and for you to be His
-investing a year of your life to walk through difficult physical, emotional, and spiritual places that ultimately will help you understand what true, abundant life in abiding in Jesus and serving Him well can look like
If these are things you dislike, my friend, the World Race is NOT for you.
This is a chapter of my life journey that I know will be one of the most challenging I have ever walked through, AND I know it will forever be a moment in the scheme of my lifetime where I wrestled and prayed and fought and broke down and rejoiced and truly DOVE IN to knowing more of Jesus, enjoying His creation and His people, and discovering who I am in Him, better grasping that my life, so precious to Him and cherished, is meant to be about Him and inviting others to the same adventure of a life.
Here’s a crazy thought:
What if you said yes to a year like this in your own life?
OR even better, what if you began to ask Jesus, the one by whom you were created and FOR WHOM you were created, what He has meant all along for you to be a part of? In this day, in this moment, and for the rest of your life?
