Ask my friends from college, and they will you tell you I am most certainly a creature of habit. I like to find a routine and stick to it. Change and I have been casual acquaintances who would interact when we were forced to, but never friends.
Then I came on the World Race. Eight months ago, I started a journey that goes against all of those ingrained tendencies to fight change with everything in me. I knowingly and voluntarily chose to participate in a program that revolves around change.
And it’s not small changes either. We’re changing countries every month. For the first seven months, that meant changing languages monthly. It certainly means moving to new places and meeting new people. And even within our squad, we’ve undergone team changes. My life for the past eight months has seen much more change than consistency.
The weird thing is that after eight months change is beginning to feel normal.
I think my whole squad started this journey with an excitement that comes with thinking about traveling the world and seeing so many new places. But one of the themes we’ve discussed at our month 8 debrief is finding rest and recapturing our sense of wonder.
After making that change eight times and realizing that you have to do it three more times, the excitement can wear off and the wonder of going to a new country can become routine.
I hate that. I hate that this big adventure that I came on can sometimes feel like something I need to be reminded to be grateful for on days when I just want to stay in bed instead of getting up to use my minimal Spanish skills to try to communicate. Or on weekends when we are making the rounds at three or four different church services, and I’m just thinking that at home I’d go to church and come home for an afternoon nap.
On those days, it doesn’t seem to matter that I’m doing those things in Argentina or Botswana. It has become part of my new routine.
As I head into month 9, however, I’m realizing just how quickly the months are going by and just how soon this adventure will be over.
I’m learning that lesson in the context of the World Race, but I feel like that’s something we do everyday of our lives. We wake up and go through the motions because it’s our routine, not because we love it and appreciate it for the gift that it is.
But that’s what life is, whether you’re doing it in America or in a different country each month. Life is a gift, and it is an adventure.
When even something as exciting as traveling the world to share God’s love can become routine, I think that reveals that it’s not our circumstances that create wonder and excitement. It’s much more about how we approach those little daily adventures.
In one of our sessions this week, we sang a song that repeats the line, “May we never lose our wonder” over and over again. That is my prayer as I go into these last three months, and as I get ready to go home to the next adventure, that I never become numb to the greatest gifts that each day offer. That I would wake each morning with a heart full of gratitude that I get to go love people like Jesus. Whether that’s in Chile or Peru or Oklahoma, may our eyes be ever open to the wonder that each moment brings.
