I’ve always heard people telling stories about what god told them. Recently, I’ve had people come up to me and say, this is what God told me about you. On the race, it’s totally normal for people to have supernatural experiences with God. During training camp, it was something new to me, but nothing I was opposed to. I knew I wanted to hear God speak to me, but that was somewhere down the line. Not for me. Not now. It was to weird.
For the first week of the race, it became very apparent that it was something I wanted. I would find myself jealous of others when they would talk about hearing him. It was still spooky to me, but at the same time, something I yearned for. Except I didn’t know what it looked like. I kind of expected something where I’d fall down flat on my face, start running around the room screaming, or where I’d be transported to another place and suddenly God would be sitting there right in front of me (think Harry in the 7th book). I just expected something major, something huge. But God doesn’t like to fit into our expectations.
Yesterday, it rained, like hard. We were all supposed to be working outside, working towards building the greenhouse. But we couldn’t. So we decided to just hang out inside, hoping to find some cleaning or cooking to do for our hosts. Cody suggested that we have a quick prayer and worship time before we get started. So we headed into the meeting room and Lauren started to play. We sang and prayed for a while, but then something started to happen. It was clear that God showed up. Slowly, each person got in the middle and everyone else prayed for them. People were yelling out things God had told them about a certain person or pictures they had during the prayer. People were laughing, crying and obviously feeling something. And there I stood. It was all I could do to concentrate on my own prayers and not stare at my friends in jealousy.
I started crying. Not crying, sobbing. I wanted to hear God so badly in that moment, and I just couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Here were all these other christians around me, people who believe the same things I believe, yet they had more. I felt inadequate and forgotten by God. After 3 hours of this, I gave up and sat on the floor in the corner. I had to take a step back.
