At the end of all of this, when I finally come back home, what do I want people to have taken away from my journey?
I have always loved telling stories. As a kid, I wanted to be an author, and I would spend hours laboring away at my dad’s laptop cranking out pages and pages of what I thought were the greatest ideas anyone had ever written down. They are probably still saved somewhere, and I’m sure they’ll be pulled out eventually for me to relive as an embarrassing childhood memory. At this point in my life, I’m sure my ten-year-old self was certain I’d be published and famous, and I’m pretty certain he’d be disappointed to learn that I had all but given up on that dream.
Even though I’ve grown out of that phase, my love for telling stories has never faded. I’ve always had the unique ability to turn a five-minute occurrence into an hours-long exposition, and whether that is good or bad has always depended on my audience. I left training camp last month with hours and hours’ worth of material, ready to unleash it on anyone who was brave enough to ask me how the last two weeks had gone. My biggest fear coming out of events like this has always been that people wouldn’t care enough to listen to all I had to say, but I am incredibly blessed to have parents and friends who are genuinely interested in this journey. Because of their care and curiosity, I have been able to relive my camp experience over and over again – each time as a new blessing.
Building off of this, and the fact that I currently have a job as a writer and editor, the camp leadership team identified me as the one that should take the lead on curating and telling our squad’s story throughout this yearlong journey. There are plenty of leadership roles that were handed out to several members of our squad towards the end of camp: we have finance managers to make sure we don’t run out of money, logistics coordinators to make sure we don’t get lost or stranded, worship leaders to make sure we are staying spiritually active and healthy, and several others. I ended up with the position of squad storytelling coordinator, which, had I been given a choice from all these options, is the one I would have volunteered for in a heartbeat.
The primary purpose of my position is to encourage my squadmates to use storytelling as a ministry, and to find creative ways to share about the work we are doing with people back home. A point that was hammered home several times during our ten days at camp is that most people who are supporting us to go on the Race have never had, and will never have, the opportunity to do something like this. They will, however, have the chance to be a part of what we are doing. Their role is to send, and our role is to go, but even further than that, we have the responsibility to share our journey with them. This is not a see-you-in-a-year-let’s-get-coffee-when-I’m-home responsibility. This is ongoing – from the time we leave to indefinitely after we return to the States.
In light of all of this, the question that I opened with is one of the most important inquiries I could make of myself before launching in just over a month, and trust me when I say I do not take answering it lightly. Going into any trip, especially one this extensive and complex, without first giving this question some thought, has the potential to be very damaging to the way the trip as a whole is perceived by those observing from home. The reason this is so important is because it hits at the very core of why I am doing this in the first place. If my reasons were selfish in nature – if all I hoped to gain from next year was a few more stamps in my passport and jealousy-inducing photos all over my social media profiles – then that is what would end up bleeding through in my stories, whether that be through the content in this blog, or the more personal interactions of text conversations and phone calls. I could try and mask those motivations with good intentions, but in the end, I know myself and my audience well enough to know that it would never last.
Asking myself what the purpose of this trip is should always be done in an outward-facing way – phrased as ‘What can I give?’ rather than ‘What can I get?’ When I am gone next year, and you are reading my squad’s story, I want you to be able to say with confidence that I am following the former. If I ever stray to the other side, I hope that I have surrounded myself with people who would call me out and give me a heart check. This is so important to my role next year, because I can’t in good conscience take this leadership role on my team – encouraging others to truly use their stories as a ministry – if I haven’t figured out on some level how to do it myself.
This has been, and continues to be, a learning process for me. When talking about this trip, it’s easy for me to get caught up in dreams of whitewater rafting on the Nile and walking around the Taj Mahal, but that has never been the reason that I signed up for this. Through all of my interactions with people over the last year, answering questions of how I got here and why I’m doing this, I have done my best to steer my answers away from anything that might make this sound like a vacation. It absolutely is not. Will we have days away from our ministry work to relax and debrief? Absolutely. But we are going primarily to work, and work hard. We are going to face heartbreaking realities, and have to come to terms with the bubbles we have all grown up in. We are going to learn to live in a way that we have never lived before, and we are going to learn to embrace the freedom that comes with that. I think, for the most part, I have worked past any of the harmful motivations that might been driving my decisions at one point or another. If there ever was a doubt in your mind about my reasons for taking this step, I genuinely hope that this helps to clear that up.
Friends and family, when you read my squad’s story, I want you to see love. I hope that you see this through the way we interact with each other, with our ministry hosts, and with those we are going to minister to, wherever in the world we might be. I want that love to shine brighter through our story than anything else ever could, because at the core, love is the reason we all ended up here in the first place. We are answering this call to GO, because we want to show love to those that have never known it – to those that have known nothing but sorrow and heartache. We want to share the love that God has for His children with those who don’t even know yet that they have a Father. We want to demonstrate just how far we are willing to go to live that love out, so that anyone watching will have no choice but to question what the source of all of this must be.
When you read my squad’s story, I want you to see freedom. We will be going to some dark places in the world that are in desperate need of God’s light – places that have never known the true freedom that God has to offer. I hope that, as we bring that freedom to these places, you feel that redemption from across the world. With every chance we have to share the Gospel, and with every salvation that comes from that message, I hope that celebration rings loud and clear from our lives to yours, through whatever means of communication you might hear about it. I hope that you see freedom not only in the lives of those we minister to, but in the lives of everyone on my team. The person that you know that is leaving the country in January is not the same person that will come home at the end of the year. God is already working on setting us free from so much, and that work is only going to get more evident as we move further along in this journey together.
When you hear my squad’s story, I want you to see hope. We live in a world that seems driven by negativity. It’s so easy to turn off the noise because all that’s coming through is news of war, poverty, displacement, disaster, famine, and the list goes on and on. We will be working in places that are experiencing all of these tragic realities, and I hope that, through what you hear from me and my squad, you can start to see that there is still hope for the world to turn around. It might seem impossible, but that doesn’t mean that we stop trying. I want you to see that there is hope for the refugee family fleeing war in their home country. I want you to see that there is hope for the child orphaned as a result of the AIDS crisis. I want you to see that there is hope for the women living in prostitution, trying to support her family in the only way she knows how.
I want to tell all of these stories and more as I travel and do ministry because the stories of love, freedom, victory, and hope are the ones that never seem to make it through the noise, but they are the ones that so desperately need to be told. Someone needs to break through the negativity and show people that God is still at work all over the world, not just here in America, and we are the ones to bring that message. In the grand scheme of things, it might seem small. But in the lives of those reading our story, it might be exactly what they need to hear.
Storytelling is a ministry because those we will encounter on the field might have never had the chance for their story to be told. We might be the first opportunity they’ve been given to have an audience, and for their voice to be heard. Those we are leaving behind might never experience these things firsthand, but we will. Those we are leaving behind might never hear these stories that have the potential to change their lives, if not for us telling them. We have to remember that both sides of our lives next year are important. We cannot simply forget about our lives back home – running away from our problems for a year hoping that they will disappear while we are gone. We have been given a unique opportunity to minister on both fronts, and passing that up is one of the biggest mistakes that we could make.
So, friends, when I tell you my story, whether that starts now or some point along the way, I pray that you hear love. That you hear freedom. That you hear hope. And that God speaks to you through all of that in a way He has never spoken to you before. This is why I am going on the Race, and I am beyond blessed to have been given this platform to share it with all of you.
