Vulnerability is a fun word that Christians like to throw around a lot, but I’ve never seen it played out quite like I did last week.
The World Race is far more than a mission trip – it is also a year long discipleship program that just happens to take place on four different continents. Because of this, our weeks are broken down into three areas. We have ministry days (obviously) where we do work with this month’s ministry host (read my last few posts if you want to know what those look like). We have adventure days, which are our two off days each week that we can use to explore the city and surrounding areas (I’ll be posting about these later this week). And finally, we have teaching days, which make up the discipleship portion. On these days, we have teachings from our squad mentor and squad leaders, and we have the chance to dig deeper into God’s Word, and learn to live what we believe. Learning and growing never stops on the Race, and I am doing my best to lean into every opportunity I have to stretch myself.
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Three months ago, I met my squad for the first time. All forty of them. Meeting people for the first time, especially groups of people, is exciting because you get to be whoever you want to be. If you don’t like the person you are with your other friends, who have known you for far too long for you to get away with changing your behavior and personality, you can start all over with these new people. It gets even better when there is no potential for cross-contamination. If you decide to change who are you are with some new friends, there is often the danger that your other friends might show up and expose you for the fraud that you are. In my case, I ran off to Colombia with my new friends, and I don’t think anyone from home will be following after me.
I thought about all of these things back in October, before training camp. I thought about the parts of myself I didn’t like, times in my past I wanted to forget about, the habits I wanted to kick, behaviors I wanted to change, and negative influences in my life I wanted to get rid of. I thought about how everyone back home knew about all of that crap, and how my squad remained unaware of any of it. None of them could judge me for my past if they didn’t know about it. They had yet to be around any of my obnoxious tendencies, so they had no basis yet for which to avoid spending time with me. I was being presented with a clean slate.
The thing about living in community, though, is that eventually all of that will come to the surface, no matter how hard you try to hide it. This isn’t just the typical Christian way of referring to community, either. We don’t see each other twice a week at church and small group and pretend the rest of our lives don’t exist. We live, eat, sleep, travel, study, write, pray, laugh, and cry together every day of every week. I don’t know why I thought I could hide anything from these people in that kind of environment. Emotions are high most of the time. We practically sleep on top of each other in our cramped living quarters. Alone time and personal space are not really practical facets of our lives. On top of this, we are regularly encouraged to NOT hide anything. To be real with each other. I can only hear that so many times before I start to feel guilty for staying silent.
At training camp, we shared testimonies a lot. I was actually the one to initiate much of it, and it was a good chance for me to figure out how much of myself I actually wanted to let these people in on. I’ve had some bad community experiences in my past, and although I didn’t anticipate this turning into one of them, I still had some reservations. I still felt like I could be a better version of myself with this group that had no idea who I was. To bring my past into that environment would risk compromising my chance.
And I think that’s how a lot of people felt. No one wants to air all their dirty laundry out for the world to see, especially not people who they have only known for a few months. And ESPECIALLY not information that literally no one has ever heard before. But when your leaders lead by example, it’s hard not to follow after.
Last week, our squad mentor gave a teaching on vulnerability. I’ve heard that word a lot before. I grew up in church. It was preached from the pulpit and thrown around during small groups, but I’ll be honest – in those settings, all I could think of was that these leaders just wanted to know our dirt for the sake of knowing our dirt. It never felt important, or personal, or freeing. It just felt like gossip disguised as building community. Or whatever the popular Christian buzzword was at the time.
This teaching was different, though, and I think I finally get it. She shared everything with us. All the dirt. All the shame. All the brokenness. And most importantly, the redemption in it all. The more she shared, the more I understood, and the more respect I gained for our leadership here. This was not the first time she had shared this testimony, but I could hear the freedom in these words that had been spoken time and time again to encourage a new generation to rise up and be free from their past. This was for her freedom, and for ours. This was a demonstration that showed us that we can never truly move on if we are holding onto the mistakes of our past. This was to show us that true community, the way that Jesus intended it, starts with trust and vulnerability in front of our peers. It starts with understanding, forgiveness, and a lot of tears as chains are broken.
I sat there listening and thinking how incredible it would be to feel free enough to share all of this. I didn’t think I could do it. I don’t think many of us did. But at the end, she asked us to do just that. I realized then that this was not a sit-down-listen-and-move-on-with-your-life type of teaching. This required audience participation. We were asked to follow her example – to ask God if there was anything in our past that we needed to be set free from, and to come up and share it in front of everyone. She was inviting us into the same freedom that she had already experienced.
It was one of those moments when everyone knew they should volunteer but no one wanted to, because in all honesty, no one can receive that invitation and not immediately start recalling moments in the past that they are not proud of – decisions that no one has ever been let in on. We all had our own thoughts in that moment, but we were all thinking the same thing: Who’s first?
There were a lot of tears that day, but also so much freedom. One by one, I watched my teammates go up front and share, in front of over forty people, parts of their past that they had held onto for so long – things they had been walking in alone that no one knew anything about. Painful memories were coming to the surface. Forgiveness was given for the first time to friends and family that had been the cause of so much hurt. We all let each other in, we all came around one another in support, and we became so much closer because of it.
After taking my own turn, I felt like a weight had been lifted. I watched the expressions on over forty faces show not judgement, but acceptance. I knew in that moment that I don’t have to hide, here. I don’t have to feel alone. I don’t have to put on a face, or change who I am to fit in. I learned what it meant to walk in vulnerability and authenticity, and I will continue learning what it looks like to live that out in the months to come. Inviting people into my problems and struggles is not a strongsuit of mine. I don’t take a lot of things seriously, and most of my conversations with friends are reflective of that. Surface level relationships are not encouraged, here. We need to go deeper, and call one another higher.
This month, I have experienced the beginnings of that, and I know God still has so much more to show all of us.
