You see all the pictures of adorable children with heartfelt captions. The photos of places that my squad mentor perfectly describes by saying, “our backyards are other people’s backgrounds”. You hear all the amazing stories of God doing incredible things. This is what you look at when you prepare to go on the race. You don’t think about the hard days.
Those days when you just have nothing left to give. When tears are barely held back for a whole day and you don’t know what to do, or how to express what you’re feeling because there really aren’t words. What happens on those days?
This is where I found myself in India. I got stuck in a “funk” for the last week or so of ministry and I didn’t know how to explain how I felt because I didn’t truly understand what was happening.
Maybe I’m alone in this, but when I signed up for the race I wasn’t thinking about those kinds of days. In the back of my mind, I’m sure I knew they would happen but I barely gave them a second’s thought. Then I got to India and I struggled.
I’m not saying that every day was hard, but that last week I was hit with an emotional wave the likes of which I hadn’t experienced yet. Yes, I had been homesick, or upset, or sad, but not to this degree or for this long. And to top it off, we were all living in one room together with very little space or opportunity for true alone time. I felt trapped because I didn’t want to burden my team and detract from our ministry. I had heard what my team had been saying the last three months about opening up, but unfortunately the devil used my insecurities to tell me that they didn’t need or want to know what was going on with me. So I held it in against what I knew to be true and what I knew God would have wanted me to do. I had created a false belief that on the race bad days don’t exist or if they do, you quickly push them aside and continue on. I made myself unhealthily convinced that on the race, in order to do ministry well, you have to have it all together. This belief ended up creating a rift between me and my teammates that they could not cross and I in my own strength was unable to bridge.
Thankfully, and by the grace of God, the story doesn’t end there. Through a feedback session, I ended up explaining all that had been going in with me. Far later than I should have but it all got out, and I know I grew from the experience. Shortly after that, our team was split up at debrief. I am sad that team Devoted Love is no more, but I am so incredibly grateful for that group of women. They taught me so much and loved me, even on the hard days, and the greatest lesson I’m taking from them is that bad days are real and that’s ok. That’s part of life, real life, the life where all the facades and faking are stripped away and everyone says, “this is who I am, who God created me to be”. The life that the race is all about. It’s time for me to be okay with having good days, bad days, and any kind of day in between and sharing them with the people around me. Because really that’s what life is and we need to live each day with nothing held back. Life’s too short of anything else.
