I knew what baptism was when I was immersed in a tub in front of my church
I knew a few things about girls from my own romantic interests
I’ve talked about wanting to be ‘sold out’ and trust God completely for His provision
I heard from Africans in America about the ‘spiritual darkness’ on their continent
I told my mom before the Race that we are placing ourselves in God’s keeping
It has been said that the most difficult journey in a man’s life is from his head to his heart. So it has often been with me.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been eager to learn. During my childhood, I came to be known within the family as a ‘walking encyclopedia’, and this thirst for knowledge would manifest itself in different ways as I grew: around my middle school years, it became a fascination with nature and animals, an obsession with cars throughout high school, and at some point around the time I entered college, I developed a deep interest in psychology – learning the way people think. Even in preparing for the World Race, I wanted to soak up as many details as possible about the countries we would be traveling to – my seriously incomplete ‘eleven countries in eleven months’ series.
Despite this personal characteristic, on the World Race I have frequently found myself feeling ill-equipped to address the challenges around me. There are often situations and problems for which I simply do not have an answer, and the many hours I’ve spent pouring over Motor Trend during the past ten years certainly haven’t been any help. But really, I can’t blame Motor Trend or any other interests for my predicament. The source of the problem, as I began to realize during training camp for the World Race, is that I’ve allowed the way I pursue knowledge to set the tone for my spiritual life. I took everything I knew about God, wrote it down in a book, and carried that book around with me wherever I went – to school, to work, to the movies, even to church. And every once in a while, God would grab my attention, and I would make a new note in my book. And that’s the place from which I thought I was supposed to share my faith.
It’s quite popular these days to say “don’t put God in a box�. What I’ve learned recently is this: we put God in a box because of the way we view of ourselves. When we remove the constraints from our own lives, when we begin to understand true freedom, that’s when we’ll see God show up in new ways. I’m not enslaved to anything I’ve done in the past, any word that’s been used to describe me, I’m not even enslaved by my own knowledge or understanding of myself. The Spirit of God lives in me, and that Spirit knows no limits.
So what am I saying about my life? Am I going to stop reading Motor Trend? No. Will I cease to do research on a country before I enter it for the first time? Of course not! Am I going to continue asking for and seeking experiences that God can use to touch my heart? I must. Because when I overdose on head knowledge, and I don’t allow myself to be exposed to anything that might change me, I forget that Christianity is alive and well, all over the world.
I hear and I forget.
I see and I remember.
I do and I understand.
