Maybe the World Race wasn’t such a good idea….
In the middle of one my countless teary-eyed moments in the last two months, I found myself thinking this. I even began to say it out loud to my friends and family back home. It’s not that I wanted to leave The Race really, it was more that I simply couldn’t keep seeing so much brokenness – I couldn’t carry it anymore. All my life I have chosen to take sad things and push them into very deep places, to bind up the emotion and move on. Actually, it’s not just sad emotions I’ve bound, it’s everything. I’ve muted emotions like joy and love and even anger, usually under a mask of heavy sarcasm and cynicism. I haven’t let myself fully feel anything since I was a child. My team has been amazing at helping me put aside the sarcasm and choose to be childlike in life. To love and to feel and to cry. But that’s another post. Back to the brokenness that was breaking me.
It’s what I get, I was the one that prayed for it to happen.
When we left Albania at the end of March, I was ready to skip the next month of Europe, and head straight to Asia. It’s not that I didn’t love my time in Albania, I really did. We met the most kind and generous people, ate delicious food, had typical Western amenities like running water and toilets and even a washing machine. But that was exactly the problem, I no longer felt like I was on a mission trip, it was too… comfortable. Hear me, the ministry we did in Albania was incredible and Way of Peace Church is having a huge impact as it brings the gospel to a people group that has only been allowed to even choose to practice a religion since the collapse of the communist regime in the early 90s. Many of the younger generations haven’t ever heard of Christian teachings, or any religious teachings for that matter. So it’s not that the work wasn’t important and necessary, it was just…comfortable. I was ready for the sweltering heat, squatty potties and the unnerving awareness of being a minority I knew we’d experience again in Asia. I know, I know, I can hear you saying now, “those things are not what makes mission work, missions,” but my mind was having a hard time framing things without them. At our end-of-the-month debrief, I was processing this out loud to a few of my squad mates and together we prayed that during my next month in Serbia, God would open my eyes to what He saw there, to see the people through His eyes.
Looking back, it was a dangerous prayer. I never could have imagined just how much He truly sees people and desires to redeem and restore the brokenness we’ve created.
We didn’t have a typical ministry host in Serbia – in fact, we didn’t have a home at all. Instead, we were asked to travel throughout southern Serbia and look for Christian organizations that already had a presence there, to find ‘unsung heroes’ already doing Kingdom work and see if the World Race could perhaps join in partnership by sending them teams in the future. We would pray about where to go and who to talk to in the downtime between finding ministries – an approach called ATL – Ask The Lord. From the beginning of the month, I could feel God starting to give me his eyes and his heart. Serbia has a tumultuous history that has often left it in the middle of warring empires, even through the 20th century. Many of you back home will remember when this Balkan region was home to Yugoslavia, the dismantling of that nation, and the conflict over Kosovo that still continues today. I experienced a heaviness here that I hadn’t before – people trying to live a good life, but still so connected to a legacy of pain and hurt. Southern Serbia is almost entirely Orthodox, so regularly we found people in the churches, standing before paintings of saints, praying to them, kissing the frames, paying to burn candles and incense. These people are crying out for help, for peace, but forever missing the true desire of the Lord – intimate relationship without the need for an intercessor other than Christ.
For me, the darkness was very real, almost void of the light and the lightness I had come to recognize in accepting Jesus’s yoke in place of the world’s yoke. Almost. God was graciously showing me little lights, burning on his behalf. Jesus followers simply trying to love people well, standing shoulder to shoulder with whomever God brought to them, believer or not. Living a life that was different, one that put others first, one that makes others feel seen and invited in, not scorned or judged.
- People like the YWAM team taking photos of people throughout Uzice with signs stating truths about their identity, “I am beautiful” and “I am loved.”
- People like Wendy and Dan opening up space for children with autism and their parents to gather and have fun in Kragujavec, to learn about how to live life more fully in a country that typically hides them.
- People like Jovanna who travels hours to visit with refugees in Belgrade, practice English with them, giving them hope bracelet mementos.
- People like Jess, who live life next to the same refugees day in and day out, standing in solidarity with them, giving a voice to the voiceless and incredibly forgotten boys looking for peace.
These little lights were shining in the darkness, but there was so much darkness trying to cover them. By the end of the month, I was hardly holding it together. I didn’t know how to process these pieces of Gods heart that I had asked to see, the people within those pieces trying to understand why they were so forgotten by the world. My team ended the month with a few rest days we had planned for in Budapest, but it was all I could do to convince myself to go out the door each day. I found myself in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and all I wanted to do was be alone and hide. When I did go out, I typically went places alone, and places conducive to hiding, like the library or a walking trail to a lookout point. At best, my team would have said I was reserved and grumpy, but in all honesty, I was a moody and often angry mess. To top it off, I felt guilty about how poorly I was treating my team, so I was angry at myself, too.
By the time we flew off with the squad to Thailand, I was emotionally exhausted from trying to contain everything. I was constantly on the brink of tears. And now, we were doing bar ministry in the red light district, a place full of brokenness both in the women who work there and the men who seek them out. After our first night there I couldn’t take it. I had met my limit. The next night, I stayed back by myself and curled into a ball on my bed, sobbing. There was simply too much injustice in the world. I knew Jesus’s death and resurrection had redeemed us all, but nothing around me seemed very redeemed at all. It felt so broken, and it’s jagged edges had broken me too.
The damn of my reservoir of suppressed sadness, fear and hurt had cracked and as the water started to run through, it split the crack open wider and wider and wider. I cried about everything, current and past. I wept for hours on Mother’s Day for a friend that had miscarried this winter and would have been 7 months pregnant. For my aunt whose Mother’s Day will never be the same after losing her son this year. I stifled my cries in my pillow after my teammate showed me a tribute to nurses caring for terminally ill patients, mourning all over again both of my beautiful grandmothers whose final days were so agonizing. I sobbed when I heard the news about how inhumanely the refugees in the barracks were treated when they were forced out of their homes, sprayed with insecticide, corralled onto busses and led away from the only companions they had.
The World Race no longer seemed like a good idea – it was simply to much to bear. We were processing more things than most people process over years at a time in just a few weeks. I didn’t want to go home, but I was no longer very excited to continue. I cried out to God, “I don’t want to see any more of your heart! I can’t hold all of this…” I could feel His compassion when He replied that I didn’t need to hold it. That’s not what He was asking of me – it’s His job to hold it. He was simply asking me to see it, to see His people, to see their brokenness. He was asking me if I truly believe He is restoring it, right now. Asking me if I truly believe that He is all-wise in the timing and the ways He is choosing to restore it. As I wrestled with this, I found that I could get behind the idea that He is restoring all things, redeeming all things meant for evil. But I still thought there must be a better way to do it, that His ways and His timing needed to be adjusted.
Why so much suffering when He could easily fix everything in an instant?
That doesn’t seem very loving, to let us suffer, even if the end result truly is redemption. The means matter too, right? And He lovingly, patiently, assured me that they did matter. That’s why His means involve so much free will. He guides us and invites us, but ultimately He will never force us to choose him. That’s not what love does. Instead, we have a choice in how we live our lives, and our inherent connectedness with others makes things inefficient, messy, and incredibly broken. But God works all things for good. Even broken things or things meant for evil. And his ways and his timing are perfect, whether they feel that way or not.
I’m still wrestling with all of this. I still find myself in tears easily. I still see new brokenness in each new place we visit. Sometimes the truth of God’s goodness is easy to embrace, sometimes it’s not. Either way, I am so grateful to see more and more of His heart for all the nations, and so grateful that He has placed me with such a loving squad to walk with. I listened to a Ted Talk recently by Lucy Kalanithi, who shared the story of her young husband’s reaction to his terminal cancer diagnosis. She has a beautiful perspective that I’m clinging to these days.
“Being human doesn’t happen despite suffering, it happens within it. When we approach suffering together, when we choose not to hide from it, our lives don’t diminish, they expand.”
