I am just like an Israelite. I saw incredibly powerful and miraculous signs from the Lord. And now I complain and have a hard time trusting that He will come through.
I know I have had a lot of time to think about this topic, but the idea of faith is still something I am grasping at. I do not mean whether or not I believe in God. I mean dangerous faith that requires stepping into a vague cloud, each step veiled and difficult.
It has been over a year since I have returned home from the World Race. A lot has changed in this year. God has given me an amazing woman whom I will be marrying in a few weeks! I have moved from Scottsdale, AZ to Flagstaff, AZ to Colorado Springs, CO to Sarasota, FL. And I have still wrestled with the meaning of the faith I tasted on the World Race. I saw incredible miracles. I saw God providing in unbelievable ways. God routinely showed up at the last second and wowed me, over and over. I discovered that there was more to this God thing than I had ever experienced before. I was stirred up, woken up, broken down, and lifted up many times over.
I am not sure exactly what I expected from my return to the United States. Honestly I think I believed that my return would somehow mark a drastic change in the lives of those around me. That maybe wherever I went there would be a dramatic revival in people’s hearts. And for whatever reason, the climactic and dramatic never really occurred. People were interested in hearing my stories for a while. But soon that novelty wore out and people were back to their busy lives.
Since then I have kind of been standing around scratching my head. I knew there was something different inside of me. I had been changed. And I have found it difficult to assimilate back into the everyday lifestyle that surrounds me. I have jumped around to new locations, spreckling in a few odd jobs. I worked for AIM, worked for a coffee shop, did some landscaping, have spent months writing and recording all my stories from the World Race. Sometimes earning money and a lot of times not earning money.
I know that I have had really high expectations for what my own faith would look like living in the United States. And for whatever reasons, I have had to deal with feelings of disappointment. Although I have not gone through feelings of doubt about what I experienced, I have seen that a lot of the pizzazz that marked my spiritual life kind of go flat, like a soda left out too long.
My biggest spiritual question, ever since I returned home, became, “So what does this life I want to live LOOK LIKE?” Intangible concepts like “a heart on fire for God” met head on realities like rent money and bills. I could not figure out the difference between living a radical life of faith and running away from responsibilities. The World Race bubble burst rather quickly. Suddenly praying and reading for hours in a day, seeing what God brings to you, asking the Lord, and living by faith went from kosher to irresponsible.
My soon to be wife has been incredible. God has used her in many ways to challenge me and grow me. God has used her to continue pulling down old walls that I never even knew were there. She has helped me grow in spiritual freedom and has given me nudges when I need them. I love her and I see her as a picture of God’s blessing to me every day.
But now I am not just responsible for one. I am getting married. That means that a whole lot more is on the line. That makes it that much more difficult to trust God. If He doesn’t come through, my wife will have to pay. So I sit here and squirm and wriggle.
And then God speaks to me. “I am doing this for you. Just because your situation has changed, does not mean I have changed. This is all part of you learning to trust me in all things.” And for now I see that it was easier for me to trust that God would come through while going into a remote village in Africa than trusting God in finding a job in America. It is like once I came home from the “mission field”, I had to trade in my missionary pants for something much more rigid and conforming. The unspoken rules of American life that I so clearly experienced freedom from have been hammered back in around me.
It has been difficult to see that I am living the exact same life. The only difference is that my location is not some distant foreign land that changes every few weeks. So instead of being invigorated by interactions with monks in Cambodia, I need to see the beauty in the seemingly mundane. My faith still needs to be radical. Because it is still not me who is God and I do not want to wrestle those responsibilities out of His hands. If God doesn’t come through, I’m sunk. It is the same as if I were eating goat in Mozambique or on the beach in sunny Florida.
I know my thoughts might have meandered a bit. I am still trying to grasp this. The point I am trying to make is this: Trusting in God did not stop once I left the world race. To me is has become more real because it is no longer in the context of a “program.” I am learning to trust God every day in life.
