We were asked to write a blog about how we were called to
this mission trip. Here is my story…
I first heard about World Race a couple of years ago, when Ginger,
a girl I knew from InterVarsity at Northern Arizona University (NAU) asked us
at the last IV of the fall semester – the senior farewell night, etc. – asked
us to be praying for this eleven month long missions trip she was leaving for
in January (and yes, I am thinking of the irony of the fact that I am doing
this three years after her). I informally committed to praying. I signed up for
updates on her blog to keep up with where she was going and what she was doing.
What I expected was that once Ginger came home, I would have
done my part, and that would be the end of it. I’m sure God just laughed at me
for saying that, but it’s true. I didn’t think there would be anything else to
this World Race thing. Yet after she came, I was still looking around the site.
I started keeping track of other teams, praying for them. I even signed up for
the World Race monthly newsletter. God used these things and others to help me
remember World Race existed. But when I started to apply over a year ago, in a
fit of determination to figure out where I was supposed to be going and what I
was supposed to be doing once I left Flagstaff,
God told me to stop. He said that it wasn’t time, that I needed to wait, and
there were things I needed to learn at home before I could go off into the
field.
So I stopped. I stopped everything, pretty much. I stopped
checking the World Race site so frequently. I let go of the World Race,
expecting to never see it come up again. My awareness of missions didn’t dim. I
grew up on stories from my grandmother about what it was like to visit her
sister and her sister’s husband where they were serving as missionaries in North
Dakota, and how her brother had come to think the only way to eat a banana was when it was completely ripe after serving in a
place where bananas grow plentifully. It’s never been far from my mind, but not
in the capacity of me going for any more than a few weeks at a time – like to Dearborn
this past summer. Or to serve on Catalina Island over
Spring Break.
World Race did come up again, about a month and a half ago.
An evangelist came for a revival at my church, and one of the evenings, he did
an altar call for those whom God had called. When I went up there, he looked at
me and said something to the effect of, “God is telling me He’s called you to
missions, young woman.”
I felt like I had been stabbed in the chest. Here I was,
working where God told me to work, supporting friends out in the field, trying
to be flexible and maybe go when He told me too… and I got called out.
So I went home, and I prayed. Then I started searching for
missions opportunities in the next year or so. You’ve probably guessed by now
that World Race came up in the search. I finished the application I’d started,
praying to God to take this away if I wasn’t supposed to go. He didn’t, and now
here I am.
