Today was the day to do something worthwhile and productive. I knew it because the sun woke me up. It maneuvered its way through the trees, into my window, and on to my eyelids saying "GIRL GET UP."..but I slept away the morning because two days prior, I arrived home after my 22-hour flight from Africa. I had spent the summer in the bush of Zambia with a missionary family, Jako & Amber.
Now I woke up in my comfy queen-size bed in Tampa and the urgency to get up and fetch water pails/shirts from the clothing line had left me. For a moment, life felt void as I wasn’t lugging water pails around and retrieving laundry and flailing my arms at chickens to exit the kitchen. So while considering a turning point question in life like “what to do now?” my suggestion is that you waste less time and go ahead and type it into your Google search engine. That’s what I did. Sort of. Except I searched “mission trips around the world” or something like that…
and that is the story of how I came across the World Race. That was almost two years ago.
Since that time I’ve been daydreaming and praying (but mostly daydreaming) about going on this thing called the World Race. I want to seek out the poor, the widow, the orphans, and hang out with them, love on them. I want to experience what I’ve only observed in a lecture hall about how the majority of the world lives, dumpster diving for a day’s wage of $3.50. I want to pray in new ways. Selflessly. Throughout villages, in street markets, in prisons and hospitals. I want to live simply, and let go of all the stuff I’ve been relying on so that I am forced to rely completely on God. If I’m not forced I probably won’t do it. Now that I know how, I want to pick lice out of a woman’s hair (at an arm's length distance) and laugh when she looks at me, bewildered at what I'm doing. I want to help others on a whim. Jesus did life like that a lot, I think. I want to maybe climb a waterfall and gaze upon another piece of God’s vast array of artwork.
And NOW is finally the time. I graduate in December with my bachelors in Social Work, and July 2013 will be here sooner than one can say "rice-and-beans" (what I have to look forward to in my diet)..
I will spend one month doing ministry in each of these countries:
Ireland
Romania
Ukraine
India
Nepal
Mozambique
Swaziland
South Africa
Thailand
Cambodia
Taiwan
