A few days ago, as I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized myself. So much so that I took a minute to examine why I looked more like a stranger than the girl I once knew.
My hair was a little crazy. I let it air dry and go pretty natural these days. It's also short. I cut it off a few months ago, now. I had barely any makeup on, so my face was fresh and natural. My teeth weren't as white as they once were. My face was a bit fuller, too.
As I stood at the sink of our outdoor bathroom, the sun was hitting my face. It revealed the imperfections on my skin from the months of travel, dirt, and sometimes, a lack of water to even wash my face. Yet, they didn't make me question my appearance… anymore.
But it wasn't just my appearance that was different.
A few minutes before, I had taken a cold shower, outside. Remarkably, it didn't really bother me. At least it doesn't anymore, I guess I should say.
As I stood there thinking about these things, trying to figure out who I was staring back at me in the mirror, I drew a simple conclusion.
I didn't recognize myself, because I'm not the same girl that came on The Race.
For a moment, I wondered if I liked who I saw staring back at me in the mirror. And again, my answer was simple.
Yes. I like her, very much actually.
She is more free, more loving, more gentle, more Christ like, more confident, and well, just more.
It's amazing what Jesus does when you let Him run wild in your life, shatter your expectations, reveal lies from the evil one, and correct wrong perceptions.
For example, I once thought that I actually knew something about God, life, ministry, etc. The reality is that that isn't true at all. “The more you know, the less you actually know” is something I say quite often now and if you ask me what I learned on the Race, I'll probably say that what I learned is that I actually don't know anything.
I'm serious.
I also used to operate under the lie that if I wasn't perfect, people wouldn't love me. It sounds silly when I say it now, but this is legitimately a lie that the enemy used to contain me and control how I acted. I thought I had to be a certain way and look a certain way, otherwise people wouldn't want to be around me. In reality though, everyone already knows I'm not perfect and they love me anyway.
At least we are all on the same page now.
The list could go on, but I hope you get the idea.
Now, I feel like I'm more of who God made me to be. It's hard to describe the change that's happened in a way, but the simple version is that as I've searched for more of God, I've in turn found more of myself.
I'm more of who God intends for me to be,
but in order to find more of me,
I had to find more of Him.
And find Him, I did, in the dancing church in Rwanda, in the nightly conversations with a prostitute in Thailand, in the laughs of the children of Nicaragua, and in the friendships of my squad mates.
I'm not all the way there though. In the same way that there is always more to God, there will always be more to me. There will always be more freedom to receive, more refining to do, more growing to do, but I'm excited that there is more.
More to God and more to me and more to this crazy journey I'm on.
It's a beautiful, never ending story that I get to be a part of,
but it's also a story that I have the opportunity to share.
That's one of the reasons why I write. I want you to hear the stories from around the world, I want you to see what I see, I want you to experience the same joy that I do, but most of all I want you to hear how God is moving whether it is in the slums of Honduras, the back country of Kenya, or just in my life.
However, I withheld the one story that I was too scared to share,
mine.
But sometime this month I felt a little nudge and a silent whisper in my spirit saying,
“It's time.”
(To be continued in Part 2)
