One year ago today, I stepped off the plane from Kenya onto US soil. Weary with jetlag, feet covered in dirt, and carrying a backpack full of worn out clothes and beat up camping equipment, I walked through that terminal filled with so many emotions, stories, thoughts and questions. I looked forward to what was ahead – for well-deserved rest, for hours of laughing and storytelling over coffee with friends, for air conditioning and hot showers and familiar foods and all of the beautiful luxuries of America finally being at my fingertips. The journey of a lifetime was over, and I was grateful it was so. But what was next proved to be a greater challenge than expected.
Looking back from a year ago, I can say that it’s been quite the journey getting to where I am now. Not to say it’s been a journey in the sense that my year on the Race was (I don’t think I’ll ever know a year as wild and memorable as that one was), but it is remarkable in how much has happened to say the least. Throughout this past year, I’ve told many stories about my trip, and have answered many questions about my experiences – “What was your favorite country?” “What was the hardest month?” “Do you have any poop stories?” (this is a real question… with unfortunately a real answer). But the biggest question that has plagued me since the day I came home has been the one I’ve struggled to answer. “How did the World Race change your life?”
This question is hard to answer, because it was the question I sought to answer going into the Race. I wanted life change. I wanted to be challenged in my faith and in my personhood. I wanted to see life in ways I never had before. I wanted to cease to be complacent about pain in the world. I wanted to have a real understanding of my identity in Christ. I wanted to know Jesus, to walk with Him, to know His voice, and to never doubt again. And so, I set out on the Race, ready to come home with answers. I was ready to come home as a perfect Christian, shining with the light of Christ, and perhaps able to heal the lepers by the shadow of my oversized travel backpack. And yet I sit here at my computer, looking back on the year that should have answered this question, and I wonder what much has changed since sitting in this same place two years ago.
What did I learn from the World Race?
My first month at home was a whirlwind. I spent most of my time sleeping in and spending time with my family. A lot of my time went into finishing up personal projects – video montages and final blogs and posting photos while they were still hot off the Race. These proved to be exhausting, as after a while I started to grow sick of talking about this trip. I was ready to move on. The trip had a lot of fun memories, but it also carried a lot of unsettling feelings. I wanted to say that at the end everything was perfectly wrapped up neatly with a bow, but while the final debrief had a lot of beautiful and satisfying goodbyes, I was still plagued by that question that I didn’t know how to answer. I knew I would have to answer it eventually. “Maybe it’s too soon,” I thought. “Maybe I just need more time to settle in before I see its fruit.”
One of the greatest challenges I faced in coming home was feeling this need and desire to be comfortable at all costs. My energy levels dictated how much I would put up with activities or people. I couldn’t imagine doing anything hard in the near future, like finding a full time job or moving to a new city. I just wanted to not think and just be for a while. I deserved this, right? So when my mom and I were invited to go on a 10 day missions trip through Greece a month later, where we would be gaining a hands-on experience learning about the refugee crisis, I was surprisingly less than excited. I remember sitting in the airport, tired and cranky, asking God why I had to go to Europe and help the Refugees. I didn’t know why I thought it was so exhausting to go to Europe, where I would be staying in nice hotels and be communicating with English speakers and have a whole schedule laid out for me. Maybe it was that I couldn’t handle the change. Maybe I didn’t want to go back into dirty refugee camps and meet people in need that I didn’t know how to help. Maybe I was too exhausted to care about what the Lord wanted to do.
I tried writing my “What I Learned on the World Race” blog over this trip, and kept writing in circles, because I still didn’t know what to say. Here I was, back on the missions field a month later, and I just didn’t want to be there. How could I say I learned something from a year of serving the Lord on mission, when by the end of it I was too burned out to care? I felt like a liar, saying how much God had changed my life on the trip, when in reality I felt like in certain ways I cared less about missions than I had before. I didn’t have my answer to this question, and it felt disingenuous to try and fudge one, so I opted to just move on and let the blog go unpublished.
The trip went on, the team had a great time, and I learned a lot of amazing things about the work being done to care for the refugees in these countries. I came back to the States, directed my friend’s one-act play for a festival in NYC, worked as an extra in a bunch of TV shows and movies in Atlanta, visited with friends and family all over the country, and spent a few months saving money at home before making the big move back to NYC in April. Life had gone back to normal. Almost like the Race had never happened.
I wondered, and still wonder, what I expected the Race to do to me. Did I think that I would come home, immediately decide that America was evil and move to Africa to start an orphanage? Did I think I was suddenly going to come off the plane healing the sick and saving everyone within a five-mile radius? Did I think that Jesus in the flesh would be walking alongside me everywhere I went? Had I just set my expectations too high for this trip, or were those expectations not my own?
Over the last year, I’ve wrestled with the cultural expectations of missions, specifically in our American Christian short-term missions culture. For so much of my life, I saw people come home from short two-week missions trips filled with fire for Jesus and gushing about all of the crazy things they got to see God do while overseas. I had it deep in my mind that even though life was hard on the missions field, overseas missionaries were the real Christians. They were the ones who experienced God on a real level, and all of us sitting in cushy air-conditioned mega churches were basically dumb, blind, and useless. Therefore, coming home from the Race, especially from a trip that promised to be life-changing, I expected to be that super-Christian missionary person that others would think I should be. But no matter how many times I prayed over a stranger, or made a connection with a local, or overcame fear and challenges, the end result felt like nothing but a façade and a question: Did I really do anything of value?
That’s the real question. Lord, did I really serve you? Did I really love people the way you loved them? Did I really listen to your voice and obey? I could think through many instances where I felt like I had over that year, but I could also think of many more moments that felt wasted, useless, or unfruitful. Entire months where we did a couple of projects and nobody got saved, but I got some cool pictures on the beach.
Was this trip actually fruitful for the Kingdom? Was that really what I was after?
The biggest insecurity I had was that after the World Race, whatever I decided to do with my life would have to be bigger, scarier, and even more off-the-path than this year had been. I knew my passions were in theatre, but in comparison to the year I had just had, that seemed far too cushy, self-focused and realistic for me. Going on the World Race was a big step in a different direction for me, and surely God didn’t ever want me to go back. But still I wrestled with this question of “what next” – I didn’t feel particularly passionate about any of the ministries we had worked with, at least enough to return to that country after the Race, but I also didn’t feel like working in theatre was enough for God. After all, I realized that my purpose was to live for Him, and not for me. Anything that served me or served my own personal vision would have to go. Theatre seemed to be in that camp.
But God moved in that doubt. While at a conference in Cambodia, God confirmed three times to me that I was called to NYC, and that He had given me my passion for theatre for a reason. I knew that I was not called to serve overseas, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my work in NYC wouldn’t be enough. Maybe theatre would just be a fun hobby, but I would need to have an actual ministry to do in the city or else I was wasting my time. I remember having this crisis once again when I was on the Greece trip, meeting all of these refugee workers who were desperate for other Christians to have compassion and help these people. How could I look these people in the face and tell them “Sorry, no, God wants me to do theatre.” How dare I think that putting on silly plays and telling stories that have “Christian themes” would be more impactful to the Kingdom than literally feeding and clothing the poor and needy?? How on Earth would Jesus think I was His good servant if I turned this cry for help away because “I’m just not passionate about working with refugees.” How disgusting is this??
Still, God had a plan. After wrestling through this on that trip, and talking it through with family and friends, I came to the realization that God was still in this call to NYC. As much as the refugee workers in Greece needed help, God was simply not calling me there. And that felt weird to say, but then God reminded me of the things He taught me on my trip. How every month, I had to leave my ministry site to go to the next one, even in the face of serious need at that ministry. How even though I knew there were impoverished people who were in great need in the countries I visited, sometimes God put me in a wealthy location to teach middle-class children English. How sometimes, the ministry we did didn’t really feel like ministry, and yet for whatever reason, that was what God was calling us to do. God’s call never really made total sense, and in many ways, I could have told him that we would’ve been better used elsewhere. But that was the beauty of what God did in that year – to just say yes to the thing in front of you, and let God define what’s “valuable”.
At the end of the day, I realize that there are a hundred billion problems in the world. Thousands of girls are sold into sex slavery every week, hurricanes and earthquakes decimate cities, and millions of people go to bed on empty stomachs. It’s devastating, truly, and overwhelming to say the least. But as much as anyone can shame me for not caring, my responsibility is not to say yes to the shame in order to make myself feel better, but to say yes to the one thing God has asked me to care for. After all, He’s watching over all these problems, and I’m convinced that He has people picked out to be on the front lines of every issue going on around the globe. But God asked me to work in theatre – to use my gifts and passions in storytelling to bring His light to a dark world, as rich and glamorous as it may seem.
Sure, this doesn’t mean that I don’t love the refugee that lives in my building, or that I don’t give money to support needs overseas, or that I don’t stop and pray for the homeless man on the street. It’s all about whatever God puts in front of me. And I guess that’s been in the Bible for some time (1 Corinthians 10:31), and I somehow missed it in pursuit of trying to solve all the world’s problems, but maybe that’s the greatest thing I learned from the Race. That after all I learned, and all the people I met, and all the hardships I endured, that the thing God was most after was my willingness to trust that what He calls me to matters to Him. Whether it’s evangelistic or not, whether it’s ministry or not, whether I’m saying Jesus name or just carrying Jesus’s heart, if He called me to it:
IT IS ENOUGH.
Now, one year after returning from the World Race, I am living in my own apartment in New York City with two awesome roommates. I have several awesome jobs that support my living and allow me to connect with people from all different walks of life. I have an amazing church and Christian artist community that is believing for God to do big things. I have future work opportunities that allow me to work within the Broadway community, and to stretch my gifts. I have a musical I’ve written that is playing at a theatre this October (a total miracle). And through the good and bad, I know this is where God wants to use me. He’s not waiting for me to give it all away to move to Africa. He’s not shaming me for not giving my life to rescuing refugees. For now, this life–for whatever reason–is what matters to Him. And if it’s enough for Him, it’s enough for me.
To my friends who want to go on the World Race, I encourage you to listen to God’s heart and trust His guidance. If He calls you to it, get ready for the adventure of a lifetime. If He does not call you to it… get ready for the adventure of a lifetime. Building churches and feeding starving children and preaching in churches and praying over prisoners will shift your perspective on God, but they won’t bring you to God. You don’t need to earn Him, because you already have ALL of Him. Go change the world, whether that’s in a mud hut village in Africa, or in your office in America.
Here’s to our next adventure.
“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” 1 Corinthians 10:31
