Hi friends and family!
As some of you have heard, I have some big plans for next year. I was accepted into a program called the World Race, which is a gospel-centered Christian mission organization in which teams of people go to 11 countries in 11 months, one country per month, and share the good news of Jesus Christ. What type of mission work we do varies depending on the country. In India, for example, we work in an orphanage with illegitimate children from the Red Light district. In other countries, we might be working with kids in another way, doing humanitarian work, or evangelism.
Right now, I am on track to go to these 11 countries, leaving in September: Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Nepal, India, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Thailand. There is a definite possibility of my “route” changing, depending on the needs of the program.
Since I will be gone for 11 months, I will be posting on this blog to update y’all on how and what I’m doing. For my first post though, I want to explain how and why I came to the decision to do a program like this.
Some of you may be thinking, “Wait, didn’t Caitlin want to go into the medical field?” The answer to that is yes, and I still hope to one day. My major was Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise, focused toward pre-med, and I will soon be a certified EMT. This past fall, I was at the point of applying to Physician’s Assistant school. I love medicine, but something was not quite right. I have always been driven, but when it came time to apply to graduate schools, I couldn’t. I can’t explain exactly how I felt, but overall I felt discontent and not at peace about that path. Realizing that the Lord may have something different for me than my own plan, I prayed a lot about what else I could do.
For the past 3 years, I have already been doing “mission work” about 25 minutes away from Virginia Tech in a little town called Shawsville, where I lead WyldLife for their middle school. Although there have been times where leading Young Life was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, it has by far been the most rewarding and fulfilling thing I have ever done. Getting to share Jesus with someone and watching their hearts and lives change—going from insecurity to confidence, pain to joy, death to life—is indescribable. It is assuredly one of our divine purposes as humans, to show others the love of Christ.
God has instilled in me a deep passion for the world to know its Savior, and I believe that my prior discontent with applying to grad schools stemmed from this passion. The Lord has been so good to me and done crazy things in my life. This “life to the full” is available to anyone and everyone. All 7 billion of us. Yet some people don’t have the chance to follow Christ and know of his goodness because they don’t know of him. This breaks my heart, and I want to change it.
The concept of “calling” is an ambiguous concept. I admit, I often doubt when people say that they are “called” to something. Without a doubt though, I know that God has called me to the World Race. After months of tortured prayer of what to do after graduation, the Lord placed an indelible conviction in me. Suddenly, the World Race wasn’t something that I had heard of, it was staring me in the face, extremely real and inevitable. I could envision it happening before I even knew exactly what it was. I was excited, terrified. It was real. I can’t say that this kind of conviction had ever happened to me before. All I knew was that I had to do it!
There is an unfortunate point that I want to make clear, though. I am not going on an 11-month vacation. Yes, I will get to travel to exotic countries, see different cultures, and take cool Instagram pictures. Overall, this trip will be the opposite of glamour. I will be away from my family and friends for an entire year, living in third world countries. I was reading a blog earlier from another World Racer and this is what she said:
“What you don’t see is what is behind the pictures. You don’t see that half the team has stomach issues. You don’t see that there is no running water. You don’t see that the team lives in a shipping container. You don’t see the rats, mosquitos, beetles, and cockroaches that live with us. You don’t see that community is really really hard.”
Reading that makes my stomach twist, because I already know that it is going to be so hard. I am giving up pretty much every worldly comfort I have for the chance to share to gospel with someone whose culture may have otherwise prevented it. And guess what? It will be so worth it.
“I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through Christ who gives me strength. “ Philippians 4:13
Again, throughout my journey, I will be posting updates on this blog. I would love your support in encouragement and prayer! If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading!
With love, Caitlin
