“What are you most excited to experience next year?”
Ever since being accepted to be a part of the World Race way back in February, this is probably the question that I have been asked the most. Family, friends, friends of friends, friends of family, strangers that just happen to ask me what I’m doing with my life, etc. Name a person that I’ve interacted with over the last year, and the odds are good that they have asked me that question. Even though February doesn’t seem like it was that long ago, I’ve had over half a year since then to ponder my answer. Depending on when I was asked over that time, my answer might have varied a bit from person to person. From what I can remember, though, the baseline, at least recently, has always come back to community.
That is not to say that I’m not excited for the other parts of the experience, but this is something that I have been looking forward to for six years now, and I’ve had a lot of time to think about my ‘why’ since then. My answer way back at the beginning was drastically different from what it is today, but thinking back over those years, I imagine that if I had dug deep enough into it, something related to community would have come up eventually. There are much more obvious answers that I have given over the years, most of which are still driving factors in my decision to follow this all the way through. These include my heart for missions, my ambition for travel, and my longing to do God’s work as well as I am able to. Community, though, is intermixed in all of that, and the more I think about where I’ve come from and what I’ve experienced since first finding out about the Race, the more sense this answer makes.
I’ll try to keep this summary as short as possible, because where I’ve landed is so much better than where I’ve come from. I grew up in a church where I didn’t fit in. It took me a long time to realize I didn’t fit there, and by the time I realized that my spiritual growth was being hindered by my decision to stay, the harder it was to leave. There are two church communities that I have been a part of over the last four years that fueled that realization: The first was in Mexico City, where I lived for a summer as an intern at an orphanage, and the second was in the Netherlands, where I lived on a semester abroad for six months. Coming home from both of those experiences made me realize more than ever how starved I had been for people at home who I felt truly understood me, and people that would consistently stretch and grow my faith in new ways.
Through all of this, the World Race was lingering in the background as a desire that I knew would fill that hole in the most incredible way. God continued to open doors to push me in that direction, and He finally opened the last door in the form of an acceptance call earlier this year. The months that followed were filled with planning, fundraising, and messaging my teammates that would become my community – my family – for the duration of 2019. The more we talked, the more excited I became, and, last weekend, I finally met them all for the first time.
Leading up to these first interactions, I was nervous that I wouldn’t get along with any of them, which, if you know me, is kind of an absurd thing for me to be worried about. It was there nonetheless. Another concern was that I was about to join a group of people who were far more spiritually mature and disciplined than I was, and that I would feel inadequate, and like I couldn’t bring anything to the table. I was also worried that, somehow, training camp would not be what I was expecting at all, and that I wouldn’t be able to get anything out of it. All of these, and several other, smaller concerns, proved to be wrong in the most beautiful way.
Words cannot properly describe the way I felt when we all started arriving at training camp on Monday. Even if you asked me in person, I still don’t think I could do that feeling justice. It seemed as though every person that I met was better than the last, and I was overwhelmed (still am overwhelmed) by the desire to get to know all forty of them in a deeper way than simple, surface level conversations. There is more to come on that later, but I want to experience the full ten days of training camp before I dive deeper.
I have felt at home in plenty of places, but all of those past feelings were dwarfed by such an intense feeling of BELONGING the moment we all came together as one family to worship and grow on that first evening. I have never felt so comfortable, so quickly, surrounded by a group of people meeting in person for the very first time. I have never felt so absolutely certain that I was right where God wanted me to be. And I had never experienced anything close to the raw community that I have been surrounded with over the last four days. God has been leading me to this place ever since I first had the faith to step out into mission work, and still I feel like this journey is just beginning.
I am writing this at the end of just my third full day here, and it already feels like I have known my team for years. We have listened to just a handful of speakers and messages, but I already feel l have grown more in the last several days than I have in quite awhile. We still have a week left, and I am beyond excited to see how God continues to grow and prepare us for the year ahead.
