So here’s what’s up ladies and gents- I moved to Georgia!
Three other girls (including my team mate Eliza) and I are living with Bill Swan, the director of The World Race, and His family! We all moved in on Friday, spent the weekend getting to know the area and each other and then monday was our first day of class.
It blows my mind how fast these last 2 months went by, and I seriously don’t say that often. One second I was in Miami on my way home from Costa Rica and talking to God about what he had intended for my season at home and now here I am. People keep asking me how being home was, what it was like adjusting, and living out everything I learned on the race and a big part of me just wants to skip over that part, that weird seemingly empty space in between. Especially here, where it is so easy to pick and choose what I do and don’t tell you. It would be so easy to say that life at home was always great and I didn’t struggle with past sin issues, or that I made the best use of my time and was always obedient- but that’s not the truth.
Let’s be real.
It was hard y’all. I struggled, I doubted, I wrestled with God. Before coming home God had told me that I was going to lead with vulnerability within my family. And at first I was like alright, vulnerability had become so easy within my team and I didn’t expect it to be any different off the field, but boy was I wrong. It was hard and it was so easy when people asked to just tell all the fun stories, or talk about the kids instead of talking about the hard things that God walked me though, especially when it most often seems like those are the kinds of stories people want to hear.
In complete honesty I messed up a lot. All the things I said I wasn’t going to do when I got home seemed to be the easiest things to slip back into. That routine of time with Jesus and nights of prayer that I told myself I would never let slip went from being my everyday norm to the biggest chore. Life felt like it sped up all around me and I felt like I was somehow stuck in the whirlwind of it all. Life in America is weird and uncomfy always feeling guilty for never doing enough but somehow constantly feeling like I never let myself just sit and be with God anymore. Some days I spent filling time and numbing emotions with friends and cleaning jobs, and some days I allowed myself to sink so deeply into emotions that I would just hide out somewhere and allow myself to sit in it.
I have this habit of making time with God into the biggest chore when I am in the most pain and need Him to hold me through it. It became so easy to let one morning slide by without talking to Him and then another and pretty soon I realized that I was completely straight arming Him, I stopped giving thanks, I stopped talking to Him and more than anything I had stopped listening. There was somewhere in the back of my brain that just thought “I’ll just figure this all out when I get to Georgia”, all the while another part of me felt such conviction and this kind of yearning for my father’s embrace.
When ever I come back to God after I know I have messed up, I have this tendency to get so frustrated at myself for wasting time. I have never doubted God’s grace but I so often question why and refuse to let myself receive it. The first night in Georgia I sat down to do just that, already with head hung in shame and prepared to criticize myself. But all of a sudden God invited me to rejoice with Him instead, He said “Rejoice that you are my daughter no matter how far you wander. Rejoice at the sight of my open arms and the promise that they will never be closed off to you.” And for the first time in my life I feel like I finally let myself feel His beautiful unfailing grace. And He gave me this poem.
I’m drowning in grace river, like flood’s torrent it rages
Lifts me from shame’s valley, and the edge of doubter’s cliff.
The waters rise, swell, deepen
as grace waves lap playfully at my legs.
And I fall back into grace waters sweet embrace.
It swirls, softens, whispers “Forgiven. Forgiven. Forgiven.”
I rest easy as grace rivers hold me afloat,
calms all the tense, soothes all the striving.
And as current flows steady, at river’s end I find vast ocean called Him.
In grace river’s current
Home sweet Home
Ocean of love eternal
Alyssa Clark
