I am an unlikely missionary. If someone had told me a year ago that I was going to be devoting 11 months of my life to serving God around the world, I would have thought they were crazy. I love God with all of my heart, but I never would have thought that I was the kind of person that God would call to serve him and spread the word. It is largely through my experience being called that I am choosing and trusting in this path, because in the end, it looks like it wasn’t really a choice anyways, God always knew what he wanted for me.
I help to teach Special Education Sunday School at the Rock Church in San Diego. I have been doing this since sometime last fall and I love it more than I can express. The kids are so full of the Holy Spirit that every Sunday I walk out feeling closer to God. I started volunteering in order to help them reach God, but in the end, they are the ones doing that for me. One Sunday last November or so, while I was teaching, four different people walked up to me and asked me about “Impact”. These people were familiar with me and, I thought, knew that I was just a college student, but instead they kept asking me if I was involved with it. I had no idea what it was so I just brushed it off as simple confusion, without giving it much thought. That night in his sermon, Pastor Miles again used the word impact multiple times. I am a big believer in signs from God so I felt compelled to go home that night google it.
Impact 195, I found out, is a discipleship school that is run by the Rock Church. After exploring the website for a little while, I realized that it wasn’t for me, but I was drawn to the missions trips section. This spawned a few hours worth of surfing the web, feeling a push to continue researching. That is, until I found the World Race. As soon as I stumbled upon the website, simultaneous extreme excitement and also peace flooded my body. It was a strange feeling. I almost couldn’t keep still from the excitement, but I also knew with certainty that for some reason, this is what I was supposed to find and that certainty brought about overwhelming peace. I spent most of the night reading blogs and exploring the website, becoming more anxious with every word that I read. I decided to begin my application that night, trusting that this was the plan God had for the next year of my life and then I went to bed, dreaming of helping others abroad.
I woke up the next morning and quickly talked myself out of the Race. I told myself that I had just gotten carried away, that I was no missionary and I pushed my plans from the night before out of my head. A few weeks passed, with the race regularly popping up in my head, but I continued to talk myself out of it. Representatives from the World Race left messages on my phone. I tried calling them back to tell them that I was no longer interested, but my calls never seemed to go through.
One Sunday, just like any other Sunday, I was in Church, and Pastor Miles stated that the measure of you are as a Christian is the amount of time that passes between the moment God calls you to do something and your response to Him. I knew what God wanted, but I had let my own fear of failure get in the way of His plan. Who am I to know the future? One of the most important parts of being a Christian is to trust God and his plan. I went home that night and finished my application.
I reviewed my application and just as I was about to press submit, I realized that I didn’t know whether I wanted to go on Route 3 or 4. Type A personality to my core, I started making lists of every possible Pro and Con. I reviewed the crime rates in each country, read blogs and generally flooded my brain with so much information that by the end of the night, I was back at square one. I decided to go to bed and forget about the whole thing once again.
That night, I had one of the most vivid dreams I have ever experienced. I was walking through my hometown grocery store and I came upon an isle of Greeting cards. When I looked closely at each one, I realized that each card represented a different country on Route 4. The card in the center specifically said “The Knights of Malta are now travelling to Kenya” in a classic 1950s traveler font and design. (The Knights of Malta had been a religious organization that I previously travelled to Lourdes, France with.) As soon as I saw them all, I knew what I had to do. As soon as I woke up, I submitted my application and within the week, I had been accepted into the World Race!
