Month eleven has officially began, and let me tell you month ten was incredibly hard to leave. Not once on The World Race has saying ‘goodbye’ been an easy thing to do and to be honest it is probably one of the hardest parts of being on The World Race. Tears falling and long embraces happening all around me, my team and I all load on to the bus full of emotion as we were questioning “why can’t this be our last month?.” Two long days of bus travel completed, well almost completed, as we arrive to Managua, Nicaragua, waiting for a five hours to catch our next hour long bus ride to Jinotepe, Nicaragua.
Not knowing what to expect has been one of my favorite parts of being on The World Race, because it’s when we least expect some thing that God usually gives us some thing grand. For a majority of my World Race I would look up every bit of info that I could about an area, before we got there. I didn’t realize until month nine that researching was stealing every bit of the experience from me. Going into month ten I decided to give up the research on where I would eventually end up at and trust that the Lord would have some thing amazing for me, no matter where I would be for the month. The Lord has blessed me these last two months with being in Honduras and Nicaragua.
Pulling onto the large compound property of Brazos de Amor (Arms of Love) I could already see that this was going to be an amazing place, especially with how much cooler it felt than it did in Managua. Our host, Ted, had already greeted us with so much enthusiasm back at the bus station and was so welcoming to a few other teams on the squad needing a place to stay for the evening. This month my team and I are working at a children’s home that serves children in the area that have been abused as well as working together with the community to make sure the children in the area are prevented from abuse. We sit down our first morning here to meet with Ted as he tells us about Arms of Love and I am filled with so much joy for what the Lord is going to do this last month of my adventure on The World Race. He also shares with us that the property that we are staying on used to be a old coffee plantation, which also made me happy knowing I’m sleeping where coffee grows.
All this to be said is that some times when we least expect some thing to be grand and glorious, God places beauty right in front of our faces, we just have to open our eyes to what He has for us. We stepped onto the property of a village after our meeting with Ted and things that used to just look like a village to me month one, now look like grand things to my eyes. I can’t step into month eleven thinking it’s not going to be great because month ten was so great, just as I can’t step off the plane in Atlanta in twenty-five days thinking that America is going to be crappy in comparison to my eleven months of traveling around the world. Going back home is pretty weird to think about and I have no idea, what to expect, just as I didn’t know what to expect from Jinotepe, Nicaragua, but I have to do it and I have to do it with faith that the Lord will show up, whether it be on a old coffee plantation or in the beautiful state of Tennessee.
