The World Race… what word best describes this year for us? One word that sums up everything. I don’t know if a single word could fully do that. It would take lots of them: incredible, painful, ordained, hard, adventurous, exhausting, hungry, friendship, slow, fast. I realize that many of these words contradict each other, but they are equally true all the same.
It’s a year of long days, and short months. There are days that you feel closer to God then ever before, and there are days that you feel really alone. There are days that you are in pain (emotionally, spiritually, mentally, or physically), and there are days when you feel great! There are the adventures days, and occasionally the mundane. A full year of ups and downs, just like our many years in America.
With that being said, I do think that one word stands out: community. Now to be clear, this is no normal community of people. We are 35 young people who have been called by God to step out. We are called together, and when Paul describes the church as a body, I think this is what he was talking about.
Then we get to the teams. This is where it gets really strange. Seven people truly doing LIFE together. Allow me to paint you a picture.
You are living with six people (you do NOT get to pick your six people). You sleep in the same room usually within 2-3 feet of each other. You then wake up and get ready for the day (all sharing one or two rooms, and one bathroom). You then proceed to work for between 6-14 hours a day (good average is around 9 hours), taking your breaks together. You then eat dinner together, and just incase the past 15 hours wasn’t enough time together you then spend 1-2 hours talking about the day as a group. Then you might hang out and play some games or something before all returning to the bedroom to go to sleep and repeat this the next day.
Now that is not what every day looks like on the race, some months are lighter ministry and some are heavier. That is just to give you an idea.
So to summarize, aside from quite time in the morning if you wake up early enough, you are with your team ALL day, EVERY day. At first this is hard. It is not a normal lifestyle, and we are living very close to each other. However, once you buy in and really commit to your team, and choose to be apart of the community, it is like nothing else. It is community at its most absolute, and pure. When you see something in someone you can say it, good or bad.
I am sitting here on my bed typing this at the beginning of my month 10. I cant believe it. It has gone by so fast and it has truly been the hardest, and best 10 months of my life! However, now I am looking at what is coming up in 6 weeks. The race will be over, and my stellar community will disburse. Sure, we might talk to one another, but we will not be living and doing life really TOGETHER. That is huge. These people know everything about me, even some things that I don’t know about myself. When a story comes up we are all on the same page, we lived that story together.
Community at home looks very different. I look at my community from home and I see people that I would see a few times a week. Other than coworkers and immediate family, I spent probably around 10 hours a week with any single person. Do that with 7 or 8 people and that is 70 hours: your busy, but everything is surface. It is so easy to not buy in when you are with someone 5 or 6 hours a week. It becomes very difficult to remain surface level when you are with someone for 168 hours a week for 11 months.
My last team, Relevant Love, spent a combine 3,480 hours (give or take) in community with each other. Time investing in the group together. Time pouring into each other, and time being poured into.
Now the idea of spending all your time with one group at home is extremely impractical, and wouldn’t happen. I am just telling you that when it does happen it creates a community that is stronger and deeper than anything else.
People have asked me several times what the hardest part of the race is, and I don’t think I’ve had a really good answer till now. I think that the hardest part of the race is going to come on November 20th, in LAX when the 35 of us say goodbye to the race and leap into the next chapter of our lives. That will be the most difficult part of the race. Not sleeping on the dirt, eating some of the food, dealing with boarder patrol agents, or packing up and retreating from our first home of the race as it flooded with sewage. No, the hardest part I think will be when we are unable to continue living in this community like we have been for the past 11 months.
At the beginning of the race I wrote a journal entry (that alone is pretty impressive for me). In this entry I compared my community at home with my race community. I said it was like trading in a Ferrari (home community), for a Pinto (race community). At the beginning it was really hard, but after you buy in it is the best thing ever. My community at home is great, but nothing can compete with this. It is next level. All because we all chose to buy in.
Side tangent: do you know why I love the term “buy in” when it comes to community!? Because until you buy in you have nothing to lose. If you have nothing at risk in your community, if they don’t know you well enough to possibly hurt you, then you probably are not bought in.
Now, most of the things I just said only really make sense if you have been on the race, or something like it (like YWAM). However, I will be returning to my community at home in 50 days, and when I do I will enter into it with a new picture of what community could look like. The community Paul talks about in the Bible. All because every person choses to buy in, and really commit to the community with everything they have.
Now I challenge anyone who is readying this blog. Buy in. Find your community. Dive in head first and get away from surface level. Great way to start is to make sure you have a safe community of 2 or 3, and share your stories. I don’t mean the, I was born here… NO! I mean tell your REAL stories! What are the areas of your life that you have stubbled, how has God redeemed those areas, what are your biggest victories for the kingdom, what BREAKS your heart? Until we really know people, and what makes them tick; how are we supposed to even pretend to really love them? Until we know where we are all broken, and where we have stumbled how can we help each other stay strong?
That is what community is for: to build each other up! Why would anyone not want to be built up to look more like Christ!? It is not easy or simple, but you just need to do one thing: find your real community and…
BUY IN!
