One of my brother Scott’s comments has stuck with me for the past few weeks we’ve been here in Dublin.
On one of my blogs from Romania, he wrote, “Stay the course and keep your focus…we’ve been praying that you and the group will have an awesome month in Ireland, but evil is abundant…”
As we started into the month, everything was going great! We were absolutely loving our time here – the contacts, the ministry, the atmosphere, the weather – it was all going better than we could have asked. Our ministry at DCM and the Lighthouse were awesome, and any spare minute I had I was out and about enjoying everything that Dublin had to offer. Spirits were high to say the least. I found myself praising and glorifying God like crazy, from when I woke up to walking around the city to God surprising me with the little things like banana fritters that I’ve been craving since I left home at the Chinese buffet. Family camp went extremely well and then we were back to Dublin for our last week of ministry before going to the Awakening Conference with the rest of the World Race teams.
After we got back from camp, it seemed like everyone was drained. At first we figured it was from being so on-the-go with family camp, and that we just needed more rest. Well, enough days went by that if it was rest that we needed, we should have been back on our feet by then. After taking all of this to God, we came to the realization that this was more than just us being tired and feeling blah.
Aside from the blah-ness that seemed to be going around, there were also some issue’s within our teams that seemed to be creating more of a division among us. It got frustrating, and we kept taking it upon ourselves to figure out what to do about it…or keep pushing blame on others or justifying why we were each right which as you would imagine, didn’t help the situation at all.
Satan doesn’t always work in ways that we can see so clearly that we know that it’s him. Sometimes he sneaks in without us even noticing. He can turn people against eachother by bringing up petty things. He creates division among God’s children by getting them wrapped up in something doesn’t even matter in the big picture. He causes people to feel lethargic and lazy so that we’re unable or less likely to go out and do God’s work. He causes people to turn against eachother because a team divided is much less effective than if they were all working together.
This morning we prayed about all of this and asked God to take over and get us back to our normal selves.
Satan’s a sneaky one. So sneaky that you don’t even realize what he’s doing as he’s doing it. After some prayer time about this, we’re starting to feel more like ourselves again. Our teams took all of our issues to God and He provided the clarity that we needed to move forward.
We had lost sight of what really mattered. We lost sight of Christ within eachother. Everyone has good days and bad days. In normal life (normal life, as in not the World Race), you choose the people you want to surround yourself by. Most of the time your friends are pretty similar to you. When we chose into the World Race, we chose in to living with 6 or 7, sometimes 15 people that you just met or are just getting to know. Some are very similar to you, some could not be more different.
Living in community, you have two choices, 1) You see your teammates as people that you will or won’t get to know, depending on how much you have in common right off the bat. You let little annoyances get to you. You keep to yourself with the people you may not spend time with if you weren’t on the World Race. Or 2) You choose to see who God is in them and what He’s doing through them. You encourage eachother to be the men and women that God created us to be. Your intentional about getting to know everyone, and you embrace your differences in order to grow into a deeper understanding of who they are, who you are and who God is. You give eachother feedback daily so that your consistently moving forward, so you’re not holding things in, so relationships aren’t broken by things that could have been discussed and figured out. You hold back judgments in order to create a safe environment for everyone to come forward with what’s going on inside them. You break things off of eachother so that we’re becoming more free in who God made us to be. You choose in to whatever comes your way as an individual, as a team, as a squad, as a family.
We choose option 2. One way we begin this process is by each of us telling our teams our story- birth to where we’re at now – the good, the bad and the ugly. By knowing where people come from, we’re able to give them grace in things that they’re working through, we can encourage eachother , and we can walk together in whatever struggles we’re facing instead of taking it on alone. I think God created us to live in this type of community. The most common answer you’ll get to the question of what the most challenging part of the race has been is living in community. Sure, it’s uncomfortable at times, but the most growth comes in uncomfortable situations. You push past it, and true community is built and strengthened. People no longer have to hide behind insecurities.
When we take challenges, struggles, petty arguments on ourselves to figure out we go in circles. Division takes place. Community is broken.
Our teams were all eventually at a point where we realized God was the only one who could move us forward, and that’s exactly what He did.
If you have a relationship that needs mending. If someone needs forgiveness and you’re having a hard time moving forward in that, ask God for help. If you need boldness, strength, encouragement or wisdom to know how to fix a broken relationship, ask God for help. He’s ready and waiting. At no point is a relationship so broken that God can’t redeem it.
After facing our challenges, our teams were brought closer than ever. Think of a relationship that needs God’s redemption. Pray about it. Put action to it. Get uncomfortable. God can handle it.
