.:.What blankets, shovels and weeds have in common.:.

Sometimes I wonder if the things I do each month are worthwhile. 

When you prepare for this journey, reading all the blogs you can and imagining what this year will look like, you often think of doing things like hugging and loving orphans, building houses for families in need, helping prostitutes out of the sex industry, etc. 

One of the very first things they tell you at training camp is to let go of every expectation you have, and in my opinion, this is the very best advice you can give to a future World Racer. 

You see, our team has gone through three “rest” months in a row. Our ministry in Albania consisted of sitting on a blanket for a couple hours in the morning talking to any student who was brave enough to come up to us. Our ministry in Romania was shoveling the never-ending dirt piles for two hours each day. This month, we have been tearing through the ever-growing forest of weeds around the Beam house, in which we live. 

Three months of ministry, but sometimes I feel like I haven’t done anything. 

Lately I have had an unsatiable hunger to be in the Word. Every free moment I have I spend pouring over scripture, taking it in and using it. This hunger is likely attributed to the fact that I went a very long three months without a bible of my own because I gave mine away to a man very much in need of one as we crossed the border traveling into Bolivia (Maybe I’ll tell that story later). Either way, I stumbled across a verse that I didn’t even realize I needed to hear until today. 

Some days I feel like weeding is the last thing in the world I want to do, but every day I get up and do it because I know that even though it’s not snuggling orphans or fighting the sex industry, it is not useless. Even though I’m not building a house for a family or interacting with the locals, the work I am doing is going to bless someone somehow, and I need to trust God’s plan even if I don’t see the end result of it. 

Nothing I do for the Lord is ever useless.