things you should know - Explore Archived World Race Alumni Blogs

I’m the girl whose name is in the URL of this page and whose picture you’ll see to the left. My middle name is Grace. My favorite color is green. My favorite food is always and permanently pizza. I’ll pick tea over coffee any day. I live in my Chacos. I like to run, whether it’s to clear my head or soak in a nice day or see a new street. I like to talk and talk and talk. The San Antonio Spurs will forever be my team (As I write this my boys are on a 19 game winning streak). I’m the oldest of 4 girls and, if you know me, that just explains so much.

I’ve spent the last 4 years of my life in Lubbock, TX making friends and memories at Texas Tech University. We can go ahead and claim that whole “best 4 years of my life” bit for my college experience; it has been so #blessed and I will spend the rest of my days thanking the Lord for the love and life he’s shown me through the beautiful people and flat places my good ole LBK holds.

More than anything, I want this about me section to be so much more than anything I could bring to the table. I grew up in church, with awesome youth group leaders and chasers-of-Jesus and world changers, but I have spent just about my whole life thinking what I had to offer was all due to my own ability, never thinking it was God’s doing all along. Does that translate? Talents, leadership abilities, extroverted-ness, etc. I have been gifted with things the world finds successful and attractive. I learned to outwardly thank God for what he had gifted me with and then inwardly grip my selfish motives and self-sufficient agenda. I liked control. (*I still like control.)

And then God did what he does and demolished it all. Enough was enough. My pride had had its stroking, my ego had been fluffed like a show dog.

Sweet Jesus, he destroyed my walls and my perfectly crafted facades. And in the aftermath I expected a mess of all the things that were. I expected a broom and dustpan glued to my hand for decades.

Instead, I was given a chair, a throne if you will, right next to my Father. It wasn’t that he wanted me to just sit back and watch life pass me by. No, no, no. He had me at his right hand, clueing me in on why things happened, where he was in every situation, how to sift through his vast stores of knowledge, how to receive love, how to act with mercy abundant. I am his daughter and he wants to give me the world. He wants to show me every secret Mickey Mouse he’s hidden in creation. He wants to pursue me and love me. He wants to discipline me so that I grow stronger, stronger for his cause, for his kingdom. And maybe sometimes that means I need to be weakened. And maybe sometimes that means I need a good breakdown. Maybe sometimes that means I win and maybe sometimes that means I lose.

The funny thing is, I still don’t get it. It makes me laugh how much I just don’t get it. I don’t mean to go all 1990’s country on y’all, but John Michael Montgomery said it pretty well when he sang, “life’s a dance you learn as you go”, only maybe we could change the next line to “God’ll always lead and we’ll always follow”. I’ll see what John thinks about it.

The point is, I’m learning and I love it. It’s all the painful stretching and pulling and molding (that fancy sanctification word) that changes and wins the world for the Lord day after day. It’s in the everyday nitty gritty wrestling match that work gets done. It’s in the silence of an empty evening that the Holy Spirit moves. So I won’t ever get it. But you better believe I am just stupid happy to be sitting beside the Father and Jesus, with the Holy Spirit in me, for the rest of my life, serving them in whatever capacity they see fit. And right now, the four of us are staring at the World Race. At 11 countries in 11 months. At Asia. At a year of adventure and heartbreak and growth and community. At a new phase of life.

“…for to you I have committed my cause.”

Jeremiah 20:12

the faces of those I love are (but not limited to) as follows:

This is mom, Debbie, Debster. (And the Alamo because HI, TEXAS). Incredible, wonderful, Super, and all the other good adjectives would accurately describe her.