“I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land” Ezekiel 36:24. Such a sweet promise to receive from the Lord. He has indeed brought me back from the nations and back into my own land!
I have been home from the Race for about two weeks now and have several post-Race reflections (you’ll have to get coffee with me to get them all) but for blog’s sake, I’ve narrowed it down to the big 3:
1. The reality and goodness of spiritual gifts. The summer before I launched for the World Race, I was in the Scriptures every day, hard core studying the teachings of Jesus trying to grasp any knowledge I could on spiritual gifts. I wanted to solidify my own personal theology of spiritual gifts before I embarked on this crazy charismatic trip. However, over the course of the year, God brought my heart through a slow softening process to how the gifts are properly and beautifully used to edify the church today. Rather than have my nose in 1 Corinthians 14 every day, I saw with my own two eyes the gifts of the Spirit come alive and sanctify the church of K squad. I received words and visions from people I knew and from others I didn’t. As I continued to take step after step of faith out into the unknown waters of the Spirit in my own life, God rewarded me by showing me the tangible benefits and growth produced from following His voice and diving in deeper with the Spirit.
2. Reject the Savior Complex. This is a hard one for me. I am a doer, a fixer, a go-getter. The World Race was the perfect environment for me. Every day there was a new opportunity to dive into ministry: throw kids up in the air, preach my heart out to an underground church, relentlessly share the gospel with anyone who will listen, you name it. On top of that, all year I was digging deeper into the unique gifts God has given me and the unique calling He has placed upon my life. After a while, unbeknownst to me, the sneaky Savior Complex started to creep in on my mentality. I started thinking primarily about the ways that I could be used by God and how the gifts He’s entrusted to me could best be leveraged to advance the gospel in the world. By doing so, I took my eyes off Jesus and was more focused on me and myself and my own personal growth when in reality He was the one doing the real work in and around and through me. Even now, my natural tendency is to jump back into life head-first in America, getting as connected and plugged in as humanly possible. But God is reminding me that actually He is the one doing all the work and if He allows me to, I can play a small role in the great adventure of sharing Christ’s love throughout the earth, whether it’s in Macedonia or Minnesota.
3. Embrace disillusionment. This was a big lesson for me throughout the Race and even now that I’m off the Race. In a lot of ways, I felt deceived by what the World Race claimed to be on Instagram and through blogs when what I was going through on the field didn’t seem to reflect any of that glittery goodness that I was originally sold. Therefore I became very disappointed once I was finally “illuminated” with what I had actually gotten myself into. Oswald Chambers has a great quote about disillusionment in his devotional book, My Utmost for His Highest, where he writes, “Many of the things in life that inflict the greatest injury, grief, or pain, stem from the fact that we suffer from illusions. We are not true to one another as fact, seeing each other as we really are; we are only true to our misconceived ideas of one another.” When we treat people (or experiences) like the idea that we’ve misconstrued of them in our heads, they will inevitably be disappointing. So, I hate to break it to you, but the World Race was nothing like my Instagram account. Yes, those great days happened and there were a lot of awesome stories posted on my blog. But more often than not, the World Race was really really hard. Relationships were hard, leaving people you loved every 4 weeks was hard, community 24/7 was hard. But laying expectations aside and embracing the World Race for what it really was (not my imagination of it) was the best way to push through this year.
Those are my main 3 take aways from the Race, but you better believe there are many, many more! Thank you for following my journey this year and I look forward to continuing to further God’s kingdom in month 12 (and 13, and 14, and 15…) in my most exciting country yet: the United States of America.
Forever His,
Grace
PS: added bonus – a 3 minute & 41 second video recap of my year!
