I leave for The World Race Gap Year in seven months. Overall, things are going great for all the preparation. I am 40% funded!! Thank you all for helping to make that happen. I am so grateful, and I really had no idea how many great people I had connections with. It has been really humbling to have a lot of people that I didn’t expect donate so generously. I guess the best way to get in touch with people is to ask them for money (Disclaimer: That is probably not true). I still have a lot I need to do and a long way to go for preparation and fundraising, but things have gone incredibly well so far. God is so good!
I have been thinking a lot about how much things are going to change in my life over the next 18 months. Between prepping to finish high school, going on The World Race, and attending college, it is safe to say that I have more to think about than any other time in my life. Graduating high school and starting college are always trying times for teenagers, I mean just think of all the movies there are about that. It is easy to get overwhelmed by looking back at how far you’ve come and by looking forward to how much is going to change. Senior year makes everyone start to realize that there is going to be a lot of last times for everything, so they start to act like they have to make the most of their time left. Or people go the other way and start to stress plan everything they have to do after high school. This can easily turn into holding on to the past versus planning the future. I think it is healthy to do a little of both.
I said earlier that there is only seven months until I leave for The World Race. Mostly when I think of that countdown, I think of how much I still have to do, or how much money I still have to raise, or how long I still have to wait, or how little time I have left in the high school stage of my life. This is when I fall into trying to keep the past or plan the future. We really shouldn’t idolize past memories nor future adventures because there is good and bad in both. It is possible to savor the end of something while being prepared for what is yet to come. Yes it can be hard to change things, but a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts (that was a quote from Avengers: Age of Ultron just in case you thought I was getting really deep there).
Psalm 113:3 “From the rising of the sun to its setting The name of the LORD is to be praised.”
