So far, all you may have seen of the World Race are beautiful pictures of adventure days, beautiful smiling children during children’s ministry, worship, and other such things. On the surface, it seems like everything is perfect and beautiful. While that is true for a lot of our ministry (#welivinthatholyspiritlife), there is another side to this World Race lifestyle: sacrifice.
Last month was amazing, but also very challenging, so this month, we are learning about how we can be in closer communion with God when we sacrifice worldly desires. We have done this in a lot of ways since our plane took off from Atlanta last month. Here is a list of the ways we as a squad have made sacrifices, and also personal sacrifices:
SLEEP:
From the start of our very first travel day, we learned that a good night’s sleep was going to be a luxury we could not afford on this race. We left our hotel in Atlanta, Georgia at 2am to take a 6am flight to Florida, to then sit in an airport for 16 hours before taking a flight to Bogota and then our final flight to Medellin. We arrived to our ministry sleep deprived and hungry, but we learned that the Holy Spirit was what was sustaining us to that point, so we learned a very valuable lesson that day!
SPACE:
Our living arrangements at Ciudad de Refugio forced us to sacrifice a lot of personal space. We were living in a homeless shelter, and our beds were the same (but slightly newer) beds that the homeless men would sleep on at night. It was a black pad about the length and width of a person, and not a whole lot more. We were also sleeping shoulder to shoulder with the other girls of our squad. Feet, hands, and sometimes heads were stepped on, but it was a lesson in living in close community, and how we can honor and serve each other in living situations that are more intimate.
ORDER:
Our God is a God of order, but sometimes that “order” doesn’t seem very orderly to us. Because there were so many of us in Colombia, our schedules changed frequently, and sometimes at the last minute. This month, since we have to jump between many college campuses, we are encountering the same thing here as well. We came from the luxury of always knowing what we are doing, when, and knowing that schedule far in advance in order to prepare. However, by sacrificing our order and our schedule for God’s schedule, we were able to be obedient to the Holy Spirit, and in the moments when we felt called certain places to do certain things, we had the flexibility to be obedient to those calls.
FOOD:
Everyone has their preferences of food, including me. There are certain foods I won’t eat just because I don’t like the taste. From the very beginning of the race until now, due to culture, budgets, and hosts, we have had to sacrifice a lot of those preferences in order to honor the place we are staying. By doing this, we see and respect what our host spent lots of time and energy preparing to give us sustenance.
Fasting also falls in this category. This month, our ministry partners at Cru fast every Wednesday and pray intentionally for a certain aspect of their ministry. While doing this, I have discovered why this is such a popular religious practice. Whenever your flesh cries out for food, simply by praying, God can subside the hunger pains. Humans realistically can go for a while without food, and while 3 meals a day is good to give us enough energy to make it through, it is something else when we can rely on God for that energy instead of food. It shows the depth of His love for us and just how much He desires to fill us with His love and His spirit.
MONEY:
Since we have fundraised our way here, we are very convicted to be good stewards of our money. This means that, unlike that vacation to Paris, we don’t spend money on every little souvenir or adventure we see. We usually have a day or two per week called an “adventure day” that is dedicated to doing more cultural activities, but we have to sacrifice going on the BIG adventures that cost a lot of money for smaller excursions. Through this, though, we have learned that you can have fun doing anything, and it doesn’t have to cost a million dollars to still be a fun experience. This also puts us more in the shoes of the people we are serving. In many places, it is assumed that if you are from the US that you have a lot of money, but when we get to explain that we don’t really have that much and are relying on God to provide for us, that gives us an amazing opportunity to share the depth of our faith.
LAUNDRY:
After 2 months on the field, I am learning that it is a lot harder to have clean clothes than I expected. The options range from paying to do laundry at ministry host, going to a laundromat, or just hand washing. Regardless, doing laundry on a regular basis is not as easy or cheap as I thought it would be. We have all learned strategies for stretching the wear of our clothes for as long as possible to help avoid some of the expenses of having clean clothes. Some people on my team, to help save money, are only hand washing, but that still is a challenge. It required a lot of time and a lot of space to dry. In the midst of this, we are all learning that it is okay to be an outfit repeater, and we are also understanding just how much of a luxury clean clothes can be, and we can begin to understand the lives of a lot of the people we are serving.
INTERNET
This is a sacrifice that I did not realize would be as hard as it is. I’ve spent months at camp having little to no access to the outside world, but being here and not having wifi is a whole different ballpark. When things happen, I need to contact home. We need wifi in order to blog and post updates. We need wifi to get emails about important squad updates. It is a lot harder to sacrifice wifi than it seems. This month, I told myself I was going to give it up all month except to blog and do ministry. I think I made it barely a week until I went to the nearest plantain shop to contact home. In other parts of the world, however, it will get even harder to reach the outside world, so I am still praying through how to balance using wifi for the things I truly need and stopping myself from letting it keep me from ministry. Once you get on the internet to do one thing, it’s hard to ignore the notifications from all of the social media sites and focus on the task at hand, especially when you can only use wifi once a week.This is a sacrifice I am still praying through so that I can be present in the moment, but still can contact home to give updates.
