“We will be living like the natives live. That might mean not bathing for a few days and when we do, having freezing water. It means not having wifi to mindlessly pass the time. And it definitely means eating foods I’m not used to.”
This is a quote from one of the first blogs I wrote about the World Race. To be honest with you, I haven’t been living true to this. Yes, I have taken freezing cold showers and bathed in a lake. And I have definitely experienced some incredibly broken communities that live extremely simple lives compared to the United States. But I haven’t been true to my word here. I haven’t been abandoning my comfort of America, and my time on Zapatera helped reveal that.
Zapatera is an island we went to for a week during my time in Nicaragua. We were sent there to do construction work to help build a church. They definitely met the definition of “simple living.” They washed their clothes and bathed in a beautiful lake and had a cement toilet placed over a hole in the ground. Their water came from a well and most meals consisted of rice and beans.
You would think that this would be an obvious experience of abandoning my comfort of home, but it doesn’t work like that when I bring my comforts of America with me. I made sure I had plenty of peanut butter and other snacks to sustain me..why? Because rice and beans wasn’t good enough for me. One bowl of rice and beans for a meal never left me hungry, but my need for my own satisfaction and comfort was more important.
Upon returning to the island I received a huge reality check. Our squad leader presented us with the idea of LACK vs WANT. There is a difference between what we are actually lacking and what we just want. The entitlement attitude that I have, has revealed how much I have been falling into the “want” category.
I was reminded of the abandonment that I wanted to practice when first starting the race. Another phrase I quoted in a blog was:
“Abandonment creates the space for God to do something”
I so desired to give God the space to move in my life. I left my phone at home and tried to bring minimal items to allow for abandonment. While on the race though, I completely lost site of that. I wasn’t giving God nearly enough space to work through me. I wanted to keep control.
My desire to practice abandonment was revived and my hope for more intimacy in my relationship with the Lord was deepened. So I started to talk to God about abandonment. I asked him to show me where in the bible abandonment was practiced and he took me to Matthew when Jesus was sending out the 12 apostles:
“Aquire no gold or silver or copper for your belts, no bag for your journey, or two tunics or sandals or a staff”
The whole idea of this story is to release comfort and control and put trust in the Lord to provide all of the needs we have. I so desired to fully rely and depend on the Lord and give him the space to do something with my life and pull me into closer intimacy with him.
After lots of prayer, I came to the conclusion that one area I have been turning to instead of God, is wifi. I definitely wasn’t using wifi daily or that often honestly, but it became a distraction when I would use it. Whether it was conversations with people back home or social media, my time on wifi was filling the time I should have been using to invest in the Lord and start to dig into some harder growth and healing.
That being said, I am abandoning wifi this month. My hope is to create the space and the time for God to do something. Instead of filling my time with distractions, I want to fill it with the Lord. I desire for him to be my first thought in every situation. This is also an effort to let go of the control I have over home and let God step in.
Please pray for me as I go into this month of abandonment! It has already been incredibly hard. But I know that the Lord is greater than wifi, I just need to give him the chance to show it.
