Six down, five to go.
Wait, WHAT!?!
Yes, there are more days behind me than there are ahead of me. It’s hard to believe how quickly the Race is going by. Some days, I look back on my past experiences in awe, realizing that in the span of six months, I’ve sledded down a volcano in Nicaragua, went island hopping in Thailand, lived in the jungle in Belize, lived in a beautiful mountain hillside city in Honduras, saw a volcano erupt in Guatemala, and yet all of this has happened in THE SAME TRIP.
It’s also crazy to take perspective on where I was before the Race and where I am now. In many ways, I feel like the same person I was when I left. However, I realize too that my experiences have stretched me in greater ways than I even realize in the moment. In guess, in a way, I expected my growth from this year to come from big dramatic life-changing moments. But in reality, God is changing me day to day, and month to month.
Thailand was a very special month for me. In this month, God taught me something I should’ve already known, but He did it in a way that I’ve never experienced before. And not only did He teach me this theme through His nature, but He taught me how to live it out truly for myself.
In Thailand, God taught me about love.
I’ve been wrestling with this word for a long time. What is love? Is it really only a feeling? How do you know the difference between romantic love and a deep friendship love? Do I really LOVE the Lord, even when I don’t feel it? Do my actions effectively communicate the depth of my love for God, or does that not matter?
For a long time, I knew God loved me, but I sensed that He was more disappointed in me for my inability to meet a standard for our relationship. I knew what things I needed to work on, and I knew where I was consistently sinning, but I continually fell into the same patterns and in turn, continually felt like I was a disappointment to God. I would spend time reading the Bible and praying, but I felt like every time I did that, I needed to confess something or make a radical shift in my life just to please Him. I felt like He was willing to smile on me and listen to me while I talked, but He wasn’t necessarily super thrilled by me. And reading verses like in Zechariah where it says that God sings over me, I wondered why it was that I believed in a God was a God of such radical love, and was going around the world to share that good news, when I really didn’t think He loved me like that. Well, correction: I’ve always known God loves me… I just didn’t think He always “liked” me.
Well, God did something really amazing at the beginning of this month in Thailand. Last month in Malaysia, I was really struggling with connecting with the Lord, feeling a distance between Him and I and not feeling totally passionate about Him. I was crying out to Him for a miracle or breakthrough or some sort of supernatural encounter. Well, I got no angelic visitations at our Leadership Development Weekend in Malaysia, but I did feel God shift my heart towards Him in an amazing way.
A friend gave a message about the joy of Jesus. And even though I was tired while listening to this message on our last morning in Malaysia, something about it shifted my heart. For the first time in a long time, I realized that Jesus wasn’t all “fire and brimstone” when He was on earth. I realized that Jesus wasn’t just condemning everyone for not being up to His standard. I realized that Jesus was actually THE most loving person to ever walk this earth.
But how could Jesus be so loving and yet so harsh? Isn’t love supposed to be gentle and kind? I hardly would consider Jesus flipping tables in the temple or calling the Pharisees children of the devil a “loving” gesture. But the truth is, Jesus was loving. In fact, Jesus was love incarnate.
And so, as I entered into Month 6, I felt Jesus come alive to me in a whole new way. I felt His presence in a different way than I had before. For the first time in a long time, I actually believed that Jesus was a loving person.
I used to roll my eyes at those girls who would say “Oh, I’m reading the Bible as a love letter”, skeptical that they weren’t just using that definition as a way to blanket their desperation for a relationship under the guise of “dating Jesus”. I can’t imagine anyone who reads the Old Testament about when that guy in Judges plunged his sword into that fat king’s stomach, and thinks “Oh, Jesus just loves me so much!!”. But this month, God brought me to the Gospel of John, and I was astounded by how this new perspective showed me a side of Jesus that I had never really understood before.
I’ve read the Gospels many many times before. But this time, I saw Jesus in a whole new light. I loved this Jesus. This Jesus was graceful and generous. This Jesus was tactful, and knew what He did and why He did it. This Jesus was moved with compassion for people, so much so that people would experience healing miracles simply because Jesus loved them in their pain. But one thing stood out this time too.
In love, Jesus was obedient.
“If you love me, keep my commands,” Jesus says in John 14.15. And time after time, Jesus shows His undying love for His Father through obedience and faithfulness to the commands given to Him. He could have easily given up or asked to return to Heaven. He could’ve easily slipped into sin or grown weary. But because Jesus so loved His Father, He obeyed Him even until the very end of His life. And in that love, which He demonstrated on the cross for us just as much as when He healed blind men or people who leprosy, He obeyed His Father even through the toughest of seasons.
This month was no cakewalk. As you probably read in my last blog, I’ve been battling through the throws of disillusionment, a very natural but difficult season for every World Racer. This past month, while I had an amazing ministry teaching English to adorable Thai children, I struggled with distractions from back home, wishing I could finish the Race and return home to my comforts, because I was starting to grow weary of this life abroad. And it was funny I was feeling this, because even though I was struggling with this desire to give up, I still felt Jesus’ love through this whole month.
Strangely, I thought that this new understanding of Jesus would influence my hunger. In some ways, it did. It made me realize how much more I enjoyed spending time with Him than I was used to. But even despite this realization, I still found myself going days at a time missing that intimacy because of distractions. Even though I felt the feeling of God’s love towards me, it still didn’t entirely change my heart.
But something else impacted me this month. For a couple days during our time in Hatyai, we joined with a campus crusade group at a nearby university to do evangelism. The first day we did this, my team spent almost five hours with the group one afternoon walking around campus to talk to students. This was a struggle for all of us – it was hot, it was long, and the language barrier made it pretty impossible to effectively communicate with the students we were witnessing to. But something spoke to me out of this afternoon.
These young adults in this campus crusade group were in LOVE with Jesus.
And by in love with Jesus, I don’t just mean that they were passionate. Most of them were also students at the university, going to class and doing their studies while also joining with the group during their free time to pray and worship and witness to their friends. All of them were either previously Buddhist or Muslim, and almost all of them were going against their family tradition to follow Jesus (a HUGE deal in Southeast Asia). Despite being shunned or looked down upon by their families, these young adults fearlessly pursued Jesus no matter the cost. They were devoted to Jesus in a way like I’d never seen before.
How is it that I’ve been a Christian my whole life and still I’ve never known this love??
Late in the month, my team had the opportunity to present a skit in the weekly campus marketplace as an outreach activity. We didn’t have one prepared initially, so I immediately suggested the only one I knew that came to mind – the Lifehouse “Everything” skit. For those of you that don’t know this skit, it’s a very popular wordless skit from the early 2000’s that’s been over performed by basically every church drama team in the US. In it, it tells the story of a girl being brought up in relationship with Jesus, who later gets lured away by different worldly evils (lust, money, beauty, alcohol, and depression). When she reaches the end of her rope, she tries to run back to Jesus (who has been calling her back the whole time), but the evils keep pushing her back. Finally, Jesus steps in, and holds back the evils himself, setting the girl free. At the end of the skit, He vanquishes the evils, and gives the girl a brand new white shirt to wear as they return to their life together. It’s a beautiful skit, and in conjunction with the music, it’s so powerful it sometimes gets me choked up. And because I played Jesus (mostly because I now have long “Jesus” hair), I got to experience this story from His perspective, watching as my beloved gets pulled away by lies, when all I wanted is for her to see me and remain in my love.
As we started preparing for the skit, I could feel the Spirit moving. I knew that God would do something through this, and I was confident in this even if we never saw the fruit. But, throughout our process, we hit a couple of road blocks. Our team was mostly inexperienced with performing, and many were extremely uncomfortable with performing in front of a crowd. We set up rehearsal time for us to learn the skit, but we battled fatigue from teaching all that day. We had very few rehearsals, because most of our nights were taken up by various other activities. And even when we went to the market for our performance, it began to rain heavily, causing most of us to wonder if we were even going to perform the skit at all. But soon, the rain let up, and we found a small corner in the market for us to set up for our performance. And sure enough, people approached us to watch. Even though many things tried to get in our way, our team pushed through them in order to share this message of love with the students on this campus. And even though we didn’t see thousands accept Christ in a mass revival in the middle of that marketplace that night, I knew that God did something that night.
And He did. The next day, as my teammate Anna Beth and I were teaching our regular afternoon English class for high school and university students, we got to discuss the meaning of the skit with our students who had seen it the night before. We explained the Gospel message that was communicated, and shared that this love Jesus had for the girl was the same love He had for them as well. And in response, two of my female students said this:
“After seeing this skit, it made me want to believe in God.”
Anna Beth and I were kind of dumbfounded. Sure, we knew that God did something powerful through us the night before, but we didn’t expect to see the fruit of that immediately after, ESPECIALLY when our ministry that month was teaching English!! So, we told the students that we could pray with them to accept Christ right then, and they said yes. Our third student, a boy, prayed along with the two girls, and all three of them declared that they wanted to believe in Jesus for their salvation!! All three of them came from Buddhist families, and were on the fence about abandoning their family’s wishes to follow Jesus, but decided from our skit that Jesus was worth following.
And from this amazing testimony, I think about all of the things that tried to keep my team from presenting this Gospel message that rainy night in the market. Fatigue, fear, and even the weather came against us, and yet we stayed obedient to the goal ahead of us. All because of love.
At the end of our month, we traveled to Bangkok for our squad Debrief. During this time, our squad coaches Jimmy and Sharon spoke into us, giving us wisdom to know how to push through the hard season of disillusionment that had now swept across the whole squad. And one thing they continually preached stuck out to me.
Passion is temporary. Passion is an emotion. Passion will instigate you, but it will not sustain you.
But purpose is a calling. Purpose has a direction. Purpose is a choice.
In coming on the Race, I was led by passion. I had a deep desire to see the Lord move powerfully in the world, and I felt so passionately about being a part of that. But as the Race progressed, and I started to fall back into desires that I thought I abandoned at Training Camp, I realized that my passion had faded and I didn’t know where to go from there. I knew I at one time was passionate about serving Jesus, but I didn’t know that my passion wouldn’t sustain me in the way purpose would. But, in the midst of the hardships I battled against this month, I found that from this message, God taught me something totally unique about love.
LOVE is a calling. LOVE is not just a feeling, but a direction.
And most importantly, LOVE is a CHOICE.
The young adults in the campus crusade group pursued Jesus amidst persecution, not just because they were passionate about Him, but because they saw incredible purpose in everything God called them to do. When Jesus came to Earth, He didn’t come just because He was passionate about His people, but because He had God’s purposes in mind. God has chosen to love me, not just because He is passionate about me, but because He has a purpose for me.
So what about me? I can say all day long that I love Jesus, but what is my purpose? To get a high from His love, or to feel fulfilled in ministry, or to feel like I’m making a difference? Or is my love for God going to be fully realized when I surrender my will to Him, throw aside all distractions, and CHOOSE to LOVE Him with the purpose of fulfilling His purposes on Earth wherever I go?
When I signed up for the Race, I knew going into this month that Thailand was going to be a special month for me. And it was. Thailand was a turning point on the Race for me. Late one afternoon, at the end of our time in Bangkok, I sat on the roof of our hostel talking to God. And in that time, as I processed everything that I had gone through on the Race thus far, and everything that I still had yet to see happen through this trip, I realized that I had a choice to make. Either I would go on choosing the things that kept me safe and comfortable on the Race, or I would choose the path Jesus had for me – one that would be more likely to have struggle, conflict, and sacrifice, but would have the power to transform me and draw me closer to Him.
So in that moment, as the sun went down on the city skyline, I made a choice to love Jesus.
It’s not that I haven’t loved Jesus before. It’s not that I didn’t love Jesus then. But I realized that my choice to love Jesus required me to continually say yes to Him, even when I didn’t want to. That I needed to see past a passion that may have faded, and look forward to the purpose that He’s calling me into. Regardless of the struggles ahead, I know that Jesus’ love for me is going before me. His love chose me before I even knew Him. His love has fought for me, even in my ugliest of moments.
His love never fades, because it’s purposeful. And in taking my eyes off of my personal struggles, and choosing to see my eternal purpose, I see His love joining with mine.
I’m grateful for Thailand. I’m grateful for the infinite ways God showed me His love through countless adventures, beautiful beaches, incredible animal encounters, awe-inspiring sunrises and sunsets, delicious food, and an overwhelming amount of blessings that I will never forget.
But most of all, I’m thankful for a God who loves me through my worst. There’s probably a lot worse to come, but I’m thankful that regardless, His love will always choose me.
I pray I do the same, Lord. In love, I choose You.
“But you, O Lord, are a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” Psalm 86:15
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Check out photo highlights from our last two weeks in Thailand! And scroll to the bottom of the blog for a full video montage of our month in Thailand!
