At first it sounded fun just for 6 hours of promised silence. On the World Race, silence and alone time are quite rare. A 6 hour silent prayer hike through the forest of Hungary was a surprising day indeed. One other teammates and I took on the challenge and headed into the National forest silently repeating “The Jesus Prayer” – “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.”
Now, I’m not one to be silent and I’m also not one to repeat the same prayer for hours on end but I wanted to try. After the first 45 minutes, I was physically exhausted but felt a rhythm with the prayer so I continued to repeat it. The idea was to repeat this while, for the first part of the hike letting God speak to you about your sins. I figured I knew my big sins and had already guessed what would come to mind but God clearly had another plan. I finally realized that the root of my displeasure with life and bad attitude andthe overall changes that I’ve made negatively in the past couple years largely circle around my deep ungratefulness.
Wow, how did I miss that giant elephant in my life? It’s true- I was not thankful for much of anything for quite some time, not even the World Race, something I’ve wanted for years. I’m sure there’s emotional and psychological reasons but none of that matters, it’s just sad that I have become such an ungrateful person, especially with the amazing life like I have.
After stopping and reflecting, enjoying the beautiful nature, we continue the same pattern but this time we reflected on virtues we need to put on. I won’t get into this too much but it was so good to see how much of my discontent was because of lack of self-control. Having whatever you want, whenever you want it may seem great- until you can no longer have it, this goes for anything, even just control. Welcome to the Race!
The last part of our beautiful hike, where we are supposed to ask the Holy Spirit to be more present in our lives, started with us getting lost and me at first feeling frustrated. I was immediately overwhelmed with gratitude like I haven’t felt in such a long time and just started thanking God for every little thing I could think of and didn’t run out of stuff until we got home over an hour later. My sister on team Sozo are helping me now continue in this spirit of gratefulness but I won’t say it’s easy, which makes me grateful for grace!
