Blood
Sweat
Tears
Ant bites
Mosquitos
Tarantulas
Cockroaches the size of my hand
Mud
Dirt
Sunburn
Early mornings
Late nights
Chickens crowing
Dogs barking
Flees
Bees
Lice
Bumpy roads
Motion sickness
Diarrhea
Bucket showers
Rationed water
Always questioning the water you drink
Squattie potties
Sleeping on floors, in airports, in tents, in mattress pads
Eating rice and beans lunch and dinner for days straight
Eating lots of “mystery meats”
Killing and plucking chickens to eat for dinner
Sweating some more
And some more
Hand washing laundry
Homesickness
Hard goodbyes after a month full of building relationships
Community living
Zero privacy
Hard conversations
Feedback, feedback, and more feedback
More sweating
More bug bites
Suffering for the Kingdom is a beautiful thing and this is minimal suffering compared a lot of other believers out there enduring for His name.
The world race isn’t a vacation.
The world race isn’t a free trip around the world to 11 different countries.
It’s not all fun and games.
This is the real deal with long days and hard work.
Don’t get me wrong, we have fun and we make the most of our days. But I just wanted to let everyone back home know that pictures can often be misleading because they only show the good moments. What you don’t see is all the stuff I listed. I love being on the race, I love how I get to experience real, hard everyday life with 11 different communities and cultures over the year. I love that I get to do life exchanges with them in how they do life which turns out is way harder than any other way I’ve experienced before.
Something the race has taught me is the power of being present. Having weeks upon weeks of intense manual labor in the blazing heat while having no running water or periodic electricity and eating food that may gross you out with bug bites on your bug bites. But choosing to not letting it get the better of you. Choosing to not count down the days till the next month in hopes of better conditions. Because that’s not realistic. Life doesn’t stop when things get hard and the conditions become rough. It keeps going. And what are you gonna do when things get uncomfortable? When you think you can’t take it anymore? Are you gonna throw in the towel and wish the moments away or are you gonna dig deeper into that mud pit and find out what you’re made of? I want to be made of substance, of the stuff that counts when the going gets tough. To be so sure of my God and my identity in Him that nothing can get me down.
The Race is hard man. If you’re looking for an 11 month vacation to a bunch of different countries then you’re looking in the wrong place. It will push you in ways you didn’t know you could ever be pushed and exhaust you physically, mentally, and often spiritually. But it’s in those moments of exhaustion where you find out who you are and who your God is especially when He’s all you got. And let me tell ya, He’s all you need. There have been a few times on the race so far where I was at my breaking point. I wanted to throw in the towel and call it day. I made it a few months, learned some good things. That should be enough right? No, not even close. It was in those moments where God showed up the most. How He brought me here to be the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been in my whole life only to take me to places that I’ve never been with Him.
“If you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you’ve always had”
