It was the last section of the email that made me roll my eyes so hard I gave myself a headache. Write a blog about an adventure, it said.
I reviewed the last few weeks of my life, which involved slapping together hundreds of peanut butter sandwiches, ladling soup and pap (maize meal the consistency of mashed potatoes), and coloring with toddlers who spoke only Xhosa. Our off days were full of sleep and food, because we were all starved for rest and protein.
No adventure to be had.
It took me a full minute stewing at my table in the coffee shop to remember my team’s trip to Victoria Falls in Livingstone, Zambia— the most beautiful place I’ve ever been. We rode a bus for seven hours each way, giving the 36 hours we spent there the shimmering quality of a fever dream. Maggie and I went to the Devil’s Pool at sunrise. We swam across the current of the falls from shallows to shallows until our guides told us to crab walk across the rocks to the edge. When I slipped down into the current, the water pushed me against the underwater tok wall that from the edge of the Devil’s Pool, and I leaned out over the edge of the world.
Victoria Falls was beautiful. And it was certainly qualifies as an adventure. But what made me roll my eyes at the email, what took me so long to remember the day in Livingstone, is how strange that “adventure” seems in the context of my life right now.
This stopped being about the adventure a long time ago.
The World Race stopped being about the adventure around the same time I picked my way around tepid puddles filling the streets of Jonloinga, ignoring shouts of “mzungu!” and “marry me!” and waving at solemn, wide-eyed children with distended bellies. It stopped being about adventure when our host Willie drove through a township strewn with still-smoking tires, the street full of smashed concrete. Maybe it stopped being about the adventure all the way back in Bulgaria, in Bezhanovo, when I gritted my teeth and tried not to cry as Reni told us about 14-year-old girls being married to men twice their age.
This has never really been about the adventure.
The Race is a trip of a lifetime, sure. But what I’ve learned after six months traveling the world, living out of a backpack, eating on five U.S. dollars a day, is this: if I had only been in this for the thrills, I would have left a long time ago.
The Lord is doing incredible work in the world, and I am here to witness it. But usually it is hard, sweaty work. Usually it isn’t glamorous. There is very little adventure involved in the daily act of learning how to love like Jesus.
So I don’t know if I can write a post about adventure in good faith. The story of going to Victoria Falls seems to pale in comparison to the stories of the people I worked with this month, the stories being lived every day in the unglamorous, uncelebrated areas of the world.
Meeting God there is, I think, the real adventure.
