I was skyping the other day, and at some point in the conversation the other person said, “I don’t understand how some people get sent on the Race. I mean, some people seem to have real emotional issues.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I don’t get it. Because we went on the Race to do ministry, and if you’re too emotionally damaged to be effective then what’s the point?”
Almost immediately, I heard a small voice in the back of my mind: how’s that log in your eye coming, Carrie?
Also: pot, meet kettle.
I didn’t say anything to the person I was skyping, and I guess I did a pretty good job of keeping a straight face, but my own hypocrisy slapped me in the face right there in a Bolivian coffeeshop.
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The Race attracts certain types of people: some looking for adventure, some looking for a way to change the world; but so many seem to be hurting. When I left on the Race, I didn’t lump myself in with the ‘damaged’ people, the ones who were running from their problems, the ones they talked about at training camp who stuffed their emotions down. But maybe I should have been paying more attention.
Because last week my mom told me about all the pain and brokenness some of my family is going through, and I went home and ate eight Pop-tarts alone in my room.
Because I still apologize when I cry in front of people, because I’m so scared that showing any negative emotion means rejection.
Because what I have learned over the course of this year is that I am broken. I believe in a God who heals, and I am still broken. I am still being healed.
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Jesus spit in mud to heal a blind man. God turned a murderous, rule-obsessed Pharisee into an evangelist. We all come from dust and to dust we return. My jagged edges are no worse or better than someone else’s, in the hands of a God who is creating mosaics from our broken-glass lives.
I am still broken. I am still being healed.
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Before the Race, I was drinking too much and eating too much and trying to avoid looking at the ragged hole in my chest that almost three years of desert faith had left behind. And then I spent a year with nothing to hold onto but the Lord, nothing to fill me but faith that had tasted bitter for so long.
Proverbs 27:7 says, “One who is full loathes honey, but to one who is hungry everything bitter is sweet.”
For a long time, I have loved the bitter taste of faith with works but without hope, of cheap whiskey on a Friday night, and of judgement on others so I didn’t have to look at myself.
Somewhere in this Race, which I have both loved and hated, the Lord started moving around in that hole in my chest and constructing a window. One with beautiful colors, made of the kaleidoscopic glass I was afraid to touch, the glass of my own soul.
And if this sounds too poetic and cliche, it’s because I have no other way to describe the way I’m coming home, changed but the same. I have no way to articulate the way my faith has deepened and grown new, all at once. I can only explain it by example, like: after eating the eight Pop-tarts, I didn’t hate myself and detail every flaw in my body the food would enlarge.
I’m thinking about going to grad school in Scotland, or Alaska, or south Georgia.
I have a vision of a church that looks less like a building and more like a body, with artists and a food pantry and free childcare, and a congregation that rubs along despite our differences, or maybe because of them.
I have stories I want to tell. And they all taste sweet. And just maybe, the Lord is saying it is good.
I am still broken. I am still being healed. Like the world.
