Let’s hop in the DeLorean together, and push the chrome pedal to the floor and hit 88 miles per hour. The Flux capacitor just exploded with its 80s retro sound, and we left tracks of fire. Month one of my World Race was just wrapped up with a pretty little bow.
Our Jaguar bus’s tires kissed the dusty rocky road, and the Ugandan countryside around us changed drastically, moment to moment, with swamps one minute and mountains the next. It was like a scene in a romantic comedy, where the pretty girl is trying on different dresses in montage.
This was a long trip from Kampala to Rwanda. Then it was a long wait at the border of Rwanda, stuck on the Uganda side for at least three hours, waiting for our passports to be processed. Ugandans have absolutely no sense of time management. That’s not a bad thing or even an irresponsible thing in Africa. In Africa time is a different thing. Time feels older there. Time feels slower there. Its like the World wants to you to breathe. The west has this disruptive ability to push us and rush us into busy lives.
It was dark all around me when I set my feet down on the pavement for the first time in Rwanda. I got a bunch of bags, some mine, some not, inside the place we would be staying for the next few days. It was an old lakeside chateau, with just a couple rooms and a massive lawn in the back. We set up tents on the lawn and some of leadership stayed in the rooms. After I stu-stu-stumbled around in the low and slight moonlight for about half an hour setting up my tent and helping others set up, I fell asleep. Thank God for self-inflating air mattresses from REI.
I unzipped my tent early the next chilly morning to realize that this was an incredibly beautiful place. One of the most beautiful I had ever seen. I walked through the hostel and said hey to some of my squad mates, only to look out and see this grand and magnificent lake down the path on the other side of the street. “This is Africa” I said to myself, in the proud but not prideful way that my friend Charles in Uganda would have said it.
I strolled on down the dock, strained to see the other side of this lake, and barely making out a lighthouse through the fog, I started praying for clarity in the internal sense.
The hostel prepared all the meals for my Z-Squad during this debrief. The kitchen staff were all finely dressed in the whole get up a fancy chef would wear, topped off with the big hats. They brought all of our meal items out in sterling silver containers to the front lawn, in a seating area under a covered tent. This was all incredibly classy in a Grand Budapest Hotel sort of way. I loved it all, and it was totally my style.
We had devotionals led by racers in the morning, and sessions led by leadership In the evening. We talked about letting things go, or surrendering something in our lives over to God. I was thinking I could release things like pride, or control, or insecurity about body image. That’s all valid stuff that I struggle with, honest to God.
I had only started to realize that most of my struggle was happening within me and had nothing to do with how I looked, well at least not how I looked on the outside. I was just starting to fight an internal battle against fear and shame that disguised itself with other things to hide, and I usually hid the things it used to hide. I was fighting a losing battle with approval addiction and internal insecurities.
My life back before the race ebbed and flowed based on my performance. If I did well I was approved of, and if I didn’t do well I received criticism. At work I would be judged on performance, and in social settings I judged my own performance (a constant inbred feedback loop roller coaster). I would constantly find myself on someone else’s cutting board or on my own. This feedback that I received before the race was all surface level issue feedback. It wasn’t feedback that had to do with the heart or the root of the surface level problem.
I needed approval, Something I was hooked on like Blue Magic from American Gangster. I had been trained and conditioned to receive surface level feedback my whole life. So, when I didn’t receive the standard of feedback that I had been conditioned for, good or bad, I thought I was faulty. Like a broken old socialite satellite that wasn’t receiving transmittable relatable signals anymore. This seriously affected me and the enemy played my heart strings like Eddie Van Halen. But God, who already approved of me since the beginning of time, had a plan to use what the enemy meant for evil, and work it for my good.
He put me on The World Race with my team, this incredible group of people, who pieced together where I was at, and decided they were going to love me, and step in the ring to fight for the real John that was buried under all the mess of falsehood and fake selves. They fought and I fought.
Then I overcame so many things by God’s grace in Rwanda, Ethiopia and India. My team told me they saw me fighting for freedom, but I was so busy fighting for freedom at that point, and getting it for that matter, that I wasn’t even paying attention to what other people thought. God can change you a lot if you let him. But you have to be real.
All these issues were buried inside me at debrief and I didn’t really want to talk about it. I wanted to press a magic reset button and fix all the mistakes I made month one. But Like Uncle Vernon said to Harry, “There’s no such thing as magic.”
Debrief is meant for us to have fun and relax, because ministry and the amount of travel we go through is incredibly draining. We road motorcycles to natural hot springs, ate wood fired pizza, passed guitars around and sang songs, and laughed the whole time. We had many eventful days filled with things like this. I even got to lead my squad in worship. Praising God is my most favorite thing to do on earth. One evening we had an incredible teaching about releasing things to God given to us by Rich Fires, one of our coaches.
While he was speaking, He talked about how The Holy Spirit could just hit you out of nowhere. He said “Bam!!” with his Philly accent, pretty much exactly like Emeril Lagasse, another great chef like the ones we had at the hostel, says it, to describe the surprising Character of the Holy Spirit. When He said “Bam” All the lights went out in the whole place! All of us freaked out in a really good way and started laughing hysterically, completely amazed by the moment.
He continued to teach once we had simmered down a bit, and somehow, once again, He talked about how God would turn the lights on in our hearts and heads with revelation, and as he was saying that, the lights came back on in the Hostel. This really happened, im not kidding. It was absolutely crazy.
He taught us in this lesson that to find freedom we have to speak out what makes us ashamed so it cant hold us with such a tight grip anymore. This is one of my favorite concepts from the Book Daring Greatly that everyone should read. I realized I was afraid, deeply afraid to talk about the things that made me feel ashamed.
I felt like exactly like a wizard, not being able to say the name of Voldemort, because it would terrify me. I would say “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” or “You-Know-Who” before I would ever say his name. This is a lot like true shame, it would hide itself under other things, and I would call what made me feel ashamed by other names, never really dealing with or speaking out the real issue, hoping it would never rear its ugly head again. After Harry met Voldemort, He was never afraid to speak his name again. Once we confront what terrifies us, it begins to lose its power over us.
A storm picked up one night during a session. Rich told us to gather rocks and walk with him through the storm, to the lake. It was pouring and raging all around us. These rocks we gathered symbolized the things we needed to let go of. With lightning strikes and roars of thunder all around us, we threw these rocks in the lake, releasing things and moving forward. I let go of control, because ill honestly never really have control over anything. This letting go of control was the start of my journey into freedom. Letting go and surrendering to God. Looking back, if I had held tightly to that rock, none of what happened to me later, like confronting the deeper issues face to face, wouldn’t have happened. Thank God from the bottom of my heart that they did.
I’ve battled a lot of those things now, and found the burdens in my life to be a great deal lighter. Some burdens simply don’t hold a candle to the beauty of Christ. Ive almost completely forgotten about certain things that used to overwhelm me because I know Jesus.
Jesus rescued me and taught me so much throughout this journey of The World Race. I would have only existed as a dead and buried man had I not confronted these issues. But Like Harry Potter, I confronted Voldemort time and time again. Like Harry Potter, Love stood between me and death. Like Harry Potter, I’m the boy who lived. I’m a man living an abundant life. I’m no longer a slave to death and fear. I’m a child of God.
