I found out about the World Race from a dingy Internet café in Darjeeling, India. I went to India because I was 22 and wanted to change the world. Instead I found myself homesick and confused. Did God even have a plan for my life?
Desperate for connection with people, grasping for purpose in life, I opened my email and found one from my best friend. “I know what we should do with our lives,” she wrote. “The World Race.”
Tears filled my eyes. This is what I had been looking for. God knew me; he heard my cry. He wanted to use me.
Less than a year later I landed in Dublin, Ireland with a backpack full of hope. 11 months lay before me.
Little did I know what God had in store.
With each passing month, with every border crossed, he broke open the box I had unknowingly kept him in.
Everything I thought I knew about love, everything about grace and faith and healing and sacrifice, shattered. He would not be contained.
I found myself in the Romanian countryside, praying for the villages around me. In Turkey, stumbling over broken language with a family and trying to choke down the liver they fed me. In Tanzania I wept with a widow whose daughter had been sold into marriage. Cambodia brought me to a woman who made pants for a major department store in the U.S. (ever heard of Target?) On the beaches of Thailand I prayed for a dead girl to come back to life. She didn’t, which resulted in a wrestle with God. Why? WHY??
I learned that God’s ways are not my ways. And while I might not always understand his ways (cough cough or hardly ever), he is faithful. He is good.
I came back from the World Race with dirt-stained feet and a forever-changed heart. How could I be the same when I experienced God in places and people all around the world? My life was no longer my own. It was His. It was theirs.
It’s been 6 ½ years since I returned home from the World Race. I no longer move month to month or wander from country to country, but I still live each day with purpose.
Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. In Atlanta as it is in heaven. In Walmart as it is in heaven. ANYWHERE as it is in heaven.
I still want to change the world. It just works a lot better with Jesus as plan A. The World Race showed me that.
And it can show you too.
