As I write this, I’m sitting in a church in Cuenca, Ecuador wondering how a month has already gone by. There are so many ways to describe this past month… full of excitement and adventure, exhausting and life-giving at the same time, inspiring as I watch fifty-two people chasing after the Lord and humbling that I get to be part of their journey, more stretching and challenging than I imagined possible but buckets of goodness in it all, and gratitude beyond words for the people God has placed by my side and the life He has given me to live.
In the last two years, I learned to live a life on mission. My heart began to beat for different things, my perspective shifted, my purpose became more clear, and the way I approach the world and the people in it changed. It’s been beautiful! But because I’ve learned to live a life on mission, it felt like nothing was different when this Race began. On one hand, that’s a really neat thing because it shows that mission and the way I live aren’t defined by my circumstances or confined within borders; that wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I can hold onto the lifestyle I’ve come to love. But on the other hand, the feeling of normalcy disappointed me. There’s something big about this calling, an uncommon blessing in getting to travel the world and stand in so many beautiful places, and something indescribable about getting to experience these cultures and love the people in them… but for a while, I didn’t feel any of this. I walked through poverty and barely noticed it; I watched the sun set behind the mountains, and my breath wasn’t taken away; and I went to bed wondering why the feelings these situations once brought were no longer there. I realized I had been saying, “It’s just life, lived in another place” and I think this was the problem: the just. This word shrinks life to something that doesn’t deserve to be celebrated—when in reality, it deserves dancing and fireworks and the quiet moments when I can’t do anything but smile from my soul and thank God for the gift of it all. No matter where I’m living, my life deserves much more than a “just,” and I don’t ever want to shrink it to that word again. I believe that our reality doesn’t have to change at all for us to change the way we see it. This is not just life, lived in a different place… this is LIFE, and right now I get to live it somewhere different. Capital Life, one that deserves so much celebration no matter what it looks like. It’s not only new things that bring us beauty and joy but rather our choice to find the beauty and joy in those things—new or not.
Sarah McLachlan said it well in one of her songs: “It’s not that unusual when everything is beautiful, it’s just another ordinary miracle today.” Beauty is all around us, all the time… and the fact that it is so common makes it no less of a miracle. A miracle—something so extraordinary that it could have only been done by God. And who are we to overlook that? In the normal, there is still beauty. In the ordinary, there is still wonder. We simply need to look until we see it. This year is an opportunity to push the limits of the greatness I’ve known before and embrace life so fully that I create a new normal to take back home. God is inviting me to rediscover the wonder in His world, to be captured over and over by childlike awe, to see Him everywhere in each moment I’m blessed to live. Moments like this one where I swung over the edge of a cliff and took in the vastness of the mountains. When I walk streets that are new but feel so familiar, like I’ve walked them before. When I sit surrounded by a group of street kids and consider how normal it all feels, as if they’ve always been and were meant to be part of my life. And in each opportunity like these, I’m going to breathe it all in, celebrate that this is life, and thank God that I get to call it mine.
It’s easy to get caught up in the normalcy of life and miss the wonder that God has placed before us. What would happen if we began seeing the ordinary miracles instead of simply the ordinary? I’ll let you find out for yourself, but I bet it will be nothing shy of wonderful!
Photo credit: Kaiden Springsteen
