This is something I never thought I’d be saying, but honestly, the Race hasn’t been too terribly hard.
Team leading has brought its challenges and frustrations in every possible way: communication, relationships, expectations, pressure (that was my own fault).
Ministry hasn’t always been my favorite thing on earth some months…it’s hard to see the eternal significance of cutting out paper hearts, if ya know what I mean.
Living conditions have proved to stretch me more than I thought they would (16 girls in 3 bedrooms with two holes in the ground as toilets…lots of claustrophobia and feeling like you can never escape the people…or the smells).
But there hasn’t been a day when I’ve looked at what’s ahead and said “This is too hard.”
I count that as a huge blessing. Huge. I was expecting (for whatever reason) to end my days sobbing because life was just too hard on the Race. I was expecting to be more miserable than I am, to be in a place of dread and feeling like this thing is never ending.
But here I am in Month 8, tired, yes, but overall pretty energized and ready for my final 3 months. I’ve been more joyful and at peace in some of the absolute worst situations of my life (Cambodia, for example). In a place where more negative self-talk sneaks in than ever, I’ve learned to discern and rest in the voice of the Lord and let those things be spoken over me instead. There have been miserable days, that’s for sure, but in general – even the “bad” seasons this year have been some of the more incredible seasons of my life as a whole.
The Lord has been exceedingly gracious in teaching me what healthy leadership looks like throughout the course of this year…and exceedingly patient with me as I still try to erase and overstep the boundaries that He’s laid out for me in those lessons. So as I’ve been settling in to those lessons and they’re becoming more natural instead of me feeling like I’m discovering my legs for the first time, we’re revisiting something really fun:
It’s a pretty foreign concept to us Americans. We call an hour lunch break our rest for the day. We call our weekends, often full of us trying to catch up on things we didn’t have enough time for during the week, our “rest days.” We go on vacations only to come home more exhausted than we started, needing a vacation after the vacation. We’re really, really terrible at resting.
I thought I’d gotten a handle on this thing – choosing to begin my day in a place of rest and work from my rest instead of for it…all those things.
And then I came on the Race and I wanted to do all the things.
Off-days became more exhausting than they were restful.
Lunch breaks turned into “shove food in your mouth while running to find internet” breaks.
“Jesus time” turned into read, journal, read, journal, read, peace out.
Times I had originally set aside to be able to rest: whether it was actually sleeping or just doing things I find restful: writing, for example – those times became exhausting and distracting as I thought about all of the other things I had to do: C&C’s, blog, one on one’s, call home.
I walked into South Africa exhausted. Switching continents had done a number on me, and I was ready to hit the bed and not get up for a good while. We were doing Unsung, and as excited as I was, I was dreading how exhausted I knew I’d be.
Then Jesus gave me the ocean: a place that has become the most natural resting place for my heart and soul in the past years. By the grace of God we spent the majority of our time in South Africa living beachside in Durban…in an apartment right on the water where I could do the one thing I had forgotten to do: sit. I sat daily for hours just listening to the ocean crash against the shore. I learned what it was to just sit again, and it was beautiful.
And then the question was asked if I wanted to take a break for the next month…and I wrestled for a few solid days about it, asking the Lord, asking myself and even talking to one of my coaches about it. Eventually, the answer was no. I didn’t feel like I needed the break and I didn’t feel like the Lord was calling me away. After spending a month have to relearn how to just sit, I really did feel stupid telling my squad leader I was good to continue on instead of taking a month off…and so off we went to Swazi….
Part two coming soon (I mean seriously soon…like 5 minutes)
