January 16th, 2020
The first 4 days of The World Race were spent traveling from Atlanta to Bali, Indonesia and included 25 hours of flying, 27 hours on a bus, and many wild taxi rides in between. At one point, myself and two teammates, Kylie and Caroline, got dropped off on the side of the road in Jakarta by our driver, not knowing where we were or how to get to where we were going. What do you do when you have zero service and can’t find the rest of your team who are split up in other taxis!? You smile, laugh, PRAY, and start to try to communicate to the locals who don’t speak a lick of English for the most part! By the grace of God, we got to our next bus and were re-united with our team. The peace I felt in the midst of that complete chaos was literally only Jesus. I just kept singing aloud “You are worthy of it all; You are worthy of it all. For from you are all things, and to you are all things; You deserve the glory.” It was the first tangible moment of realizing that worship will literally be my weapon to displace all my worries along this adventure. Thank God that reality sunk in so deeply so quickly.
God walks through the chaos with us, so long as we remember to invite Him in. And He walked through that with us. Once we finally were able to connect to a clear-enough phone call to one of our leaders, we realized we were (thankfully!) only about 200 meters away from the bus station that we were originally trying to get to! Praise God! I’ve never felt more relief to know we weren’t completely blowing in the wind in the middle of Indonesia!
Journal Entry from that day:
“As us three girls were treking down the road, loaded down with our big packs, day packs, and snack bags, every vehicle and bike stopping to try to give us rides, we look ahead to see Morgan and Rachel (my besties from the other team we’re partnered with this month) CHARGING down the road against traffic to come meet us and take some of our load off! It was the literal sweetest thing I could’ve imagined seeing; two of our girls coming after us in the middle of the mess we were in.
As silly as it sounds, as I process those words, I realize that’s what Jesus did for me, and for you. He gave His life, obedient with the will of God, so that I could be rescued out of the mess I had made with my life. He ran after me until I took enough steps forward to meet Him in the middle, and then he bore the weights I couldn’t hold on my own.
I’m thankful that my messes now exist within the realm of foreign cities that I’m traveling through on mission, as my own step of obedience to God’s will. I’m thankful that my rescuers are queens that are honored to be a part of the mess with me, all while being obedient to their own kingdom callings. I’m thankful that I’m not alone in this journey because I have girls standing beside me, chasing after me, to bear the weights I won’t be able to hold on my own this year. And I’m thankful that Jesus’ story is the bonding glue that has brought all of our stories together. What a dream this mess will be over the next 11 months. What a calling. What an adventure.”
Many more blogs to come
#wakeupthewonder #leavehope
