If you’ve been following my journey since the beginning, you know why I initially chose the World Race. For most of my life, I’ve felt God calling me to foreign missions. The Race was a good way to get my toes wet: experience in many different areas of ministry, exposure to missions in eleven countries on four continents, the opportunity to live in community and be discipled, and the people along the way whose lives and stories would be forever intertwined with mine.
Although I am grateful for this period of my life and look forward to everything God still has for me on the Race, I’m going to be honest with you—sometimes I wish I could be home. Growth is beautiful and necessary, but it’s also painful and uncomfortable. At the beginning of the Race, being thrown into new and uncomfortable situations was fun and adventurous. After seven months, I’m starting to crave routine and normalcy and independence and the comforts of home.
Living situations stretch me. I live out of a backpack and have found that I overpacked in some aspects and underpacked in others. It’s been an adjustment, learning to live without things that I am used to having. At times on the Race I have been freezing cold or unbearably hot. I’ve had months where there was no toilet, only a squatty potty. Each month my diet changes, and my body is often unhappy with that. I’ve gone to bed hungry. I can’t remember the last time I had hot water, and for months now I’ve only had a bucket as a shower. Washing clothes by hand is the norm. Everywhere I go, people stop in their tracks to stare. I cram onto public transportation or walk for over an hour to get where I need to go. Sometimes I am being eaten by mosquitos in a village hours away from civilization, and sometimes I am struggling to breath polluted air in a crowded city.
Ministry stretches me. Often I don’t know what I will be doing until I arrive at church, or someone’s home, or wherever else our host takes us. The culture may be difficult to navigate and even frustrating at times. I have been asked many times to do ministry that I don’t have experience with. It can be exhausting to pour everything I have into a ministry, only to leave in a few short weeks. One of the most difficult parts of ministry has been language barriers.
Community and relationships stretch me. I have little to no privacy or time alone. I have been held accountable and called higher through feedback. After getting to know people while doing life with them, I’ve had to switch teams and do it all over again. I have had many hard conversations, some with a positive outcome and some without. Although I have had many amazing ministry hosts, I have also had hosts who made me feel unwelcome and unwanted. I’ve fallen in love with the people in a country, only to leave them not knowing if we’ll ever meet again.
These things aren’t necessarily bad, but they are difficult. So who in their right mind would consciously choose them? And keep choosing them for eleven months?
I have to choose the Race every day. Choose a positive attitude, choose to die to myself, choose to press in to community and ministry, choose to fight for joy and peace and seek God’s face. Most especially I have to choose to love even when it hurts. I know why I chose the Race in the beginning, but why do I keep choosing the Race? I got to the point where I had to reevaluate why I am here and renew my heart and mind, reminding myself why the Race is worth running.
Even though it’s harder now, I still choose the Race for the same reasons I did in the beginning.
-Give God the opportunity to use it to teach me and grow me, uproot unhealthy things and plant better things
-Experience missions around the world, make connections and open the door for future missions opportunities
-Encourage and support long-term missionaries and the local church
-Learn about other cultures and discover how culture influences faith
-Participate in beautiful, life-giving community that spurs one another on
-Deepen my relationship with the Lord by obeying him and putting myself in an environment where his voice is the loudest
These things are worth all the discomfort, illnesses, and homesickness that I’ve experienced this year. Although the Race is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and there are times I want to go home, I would choose it all over again for the things I’ve experienced and the ways that I’ve grown.
I want to encourage you to choose something uncomfortable today, with the promise that growing pains are temporary indicators of future maturity.
