Coming into the race, my one main goal was to look more like Jesus by the end of these 11 months. Right away, the race puts you into a culture of spiritual growth. You’re living in community and serving others daily, so you’d think this would be easy to do on the race. An 11-month mission trip should be the perfect place to grow spiritually, right?
Well I’ve tried to grow spiritually in the past 6 months, and I’ve honestly put a pressure on myself to do so. But in recent months I have found myself comparing my walk with the Lord to others’ walks in so many ways. And what I’ve found was that this didn’t push me any closer to God. It just made me harder on myself, and I felt more distant from God than ever, even while on a mission trip.
In Rwanda my team started doing “coffee chats”. We would gather around with our (instant) coffee, and discuss different topics of what we believed and why we believed it. It eventually made me question everything I believed. I was reminded that I didn’t have all the answers, and that scared me. But God is showing me that He is bigger than that. God is outside of space and time. He is outside of our human understanding, and he doesn’t need to fit in our little box of comprehension.
Just like that, the times we feel closest to God aren’t restricted to the boxes we put Him in. I’m realizing more and more that time with Jesus isn’t restricted to morning quiet time reading the bible and praying. God isn’t restricted to Christian worship songs. He can speak to us in so many different ways. All my teammates experience God in different ways. I’m learning that’s what is so beautiful about God. He is bigger. He is more complex than we could ever understand. And we can see Him in so many more places, more people, more ways, if we just pay attention.
The past 2 months, I haven’t experienced God radically in my quiet time. I haven’t felt the Lord speak to me strongly in prayer or worship like I usually do. But I have seen Jesus more than ever in the people I have encountered.
In Rwanda, I saw Jesus in the pastor I worked with all month, in the way she loved her community, in the way she took in orphans, and in the way she cared for my team like family.
This month in Ethiopia my team is doing “Unsung Heroes”. That means we don’t have one contact that were partnering with. Our job is do go out and find people and organizations that are doing amazing kingdom work, and see if they would be good for World Race to partner with in the future.
This also means we have had to trust God more than ever this month. Our first day in Ethiopia we didn’t even know where we were going to sleep that night. But of course, God has provided in huge ways. And through that he has shown my team and I so many incredible organizations and inspiring people that are doing awesome things for Christ.
I have been utterly amazed by so many of the people we have met in this first week already. So I want to share their stories with you this month.
To do that, I’m committing to blog weekly, because I really want to tell you about the incredible people God is working through here. I hope you will be encouraged and inspired by them. And I hope that like I have, you will see Jesus in them. I hope that through their stories, your understanding of God will go a little farther outside the box.
God is doing incredible things through some rad people over here in Ethiopia! Stories coming soon!
