Every month on the Race is completely different. When I pictured the World Race, I never expected that we’d be living so close to expensive resorts and the shiniest malls I’ve ever seen. I also never expected to sit in a cubicle all day long. My image of life on the Race was a little more rustic, a little more bush-team rather than beach-team. I thought our ministry would have a lot more to do with human interaction than with staring at a screen all day — or at least, we’d be doing manual labor and have the opportunity to talk to each other. I knew I’d get tired and weary; traveling is tiring enough, and adding ministry AND 24/7 community to packing up and leaving every couple weeks is still something I can’t really believe I signed up for. But I thought I’d still be able to link figurative arms with my teammates and we’d somehow hold each other up as we fought for stronger relationships with each other, with our ministry hosts, and with our God.
We’ve definitely lived in more rustic situations. (Andean foothills/edge of the Amazon rainforest sounds almost romantic. But it’s not.) And I’ve had about equal amounts of people ministry and manual labor ministry. This month is an anomaly for sure. But for a few months now — this month especially — it’s been so easy to coast. Life has become “comfortable” (más o menos). I never imagined that it could become so… normal. We travel every month to a new country, a new ministry, a new contact: and we’ve done that eight times now. It’s almost routine. Obviously, I knew the Race would be incredibly rewarding and there would be amazing adventures. And there have been! But it’s also just life so many days. World Racers don’t escape life when we step foot on our first flight out of Atlanta surrounded by forty people who are just as crazy as you. We still struggle to wake up ahead of time to do our devos… we still struggle to wake up to go to ministry. We still get in ruts of complacency with our relationship with God. We still get frustrated by the people around us and want to crawl in a hole and hide.
I thought that just being on the World Race would change things for me. I wouldn’t be lazy about being intentional with my community. Quiet times/devos/whatever you want to call it would be easier. I’d be able to hear God’s voice… I’d even believe that He wants to talk to me every day and that He’s proud of me. Every day would be a new adventure, and every day would bring new growth and depth. But that hasn’t been true for me.
Life is still life here. People are still hard to understand, let alone love. Day-to-day ministry can be an awful lot like a day job that I just have to get through. It still feels like God is far away sometimes.
But what I’m learning to do on the World Race is to choose not to give in to the easy way. It’s easier to maintain a distance between me and my teammates; it’s easier to fall into a bad attitude; it’s easier to stop pursuing God because I think He’s just not going to meet me today. Especially at this point in the Race, when we’re tired of being told to choose each other over and over and when we’re tired of listening to everyone who says that, it’s so much easier to relax into complacency, thinking that it counts as well-deserved rest. This Race, however, is not a sprint but more of a marathon. One of the phrases plastered on our World Race t-shirts is from Hebrews 12:1: “let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us“. We are called to persevere, to endure, to choose not to listen to fear and shame because of the identity our Father gives us.
I can’t say that I’m doing a particularly good job at this. But this post is both a challenge for myself in the last three months of the Race and a challenge for you, wherever you are. You don’t have to be on the World Race to learn a lot of the things I’ve learned; it just so happens that God is using the World Race in my life to teach me about Him and the world He’s placed me in. The Race is almost easier in a way — it’s such a drastic change from your “normal” life, at least at first, that it’s easier to throw yourself into pursuing God and what He has for you. People talk about the sacrifices we’ve made, but I don’t think of the Race as a sacrifice at all (and I never really have). On top of it just being my life, it’s a blessing and an honor to be able to travel around the world with forty people who are just as crazy as I am about trying to understand who God is, who we are, and what we’re doing here on this earth. Even when this World Race thing is over in three months, the Race marked out for us isn’t finished. Continuing to persevere, endure, and choose to love others will probably be even more difficult than it is on the World Race, and that terrifies me. But I guess we’ll get there when we get there, and the first step is to choose in now.
