I’d like to start of with an apology. It’s been a near eternity since I’ve posted a blog so I’m sure all of you feel completely out of the loop and I’ll do my best to catch you up. I have so much I want to tell you all.
I want to tell you fundraising has been an incredibly fruitful and rewarding experience.
I want to tell you excitement and anticipation for what lies ahead of me on The Race has made the past few months a pure joy.
I want to tell you I’ve never felt so in touch and loved by God.
I want to tell you the last three months have been great.
But saying any of that would be a lie.
I’m not a big fan of beating around the bush and sugarcoating things so I’m just going to level with you, the reader. The past months since I signed up for The Race have been hard; I mean really. hard. In my first (and only) blog post I talked about I had no idea what I was doing and how I was pretty scared about how the next year and a half would shake out. But the fear I was writing about in January wasn’t real fear; it was the cutesy “I’m going on a cool adventure that’s gonna be really really really awesome, but kind of scary I guess.”
That is not the fear I’ve felt since that blog went up.
The fear I’ve felt since then is the kind of fear that breaks a person, the kind of fear that turns your world sideways and paralyzes every fiber of your being. There have been more days than I’d like to count that I spent curled up in my bed like a driveling child because I could not physically or mentally cope with the idea of The World Race. The phrase running through my head changed from “What am I doing?” to “You cannot do this.” I’m an introverted homebody who isn’t good at public speaking or prayer or music or any of that stuff that “good Christians” should be. How was I supposed to pull this off? And when you’re bombarded with that message on a constant loop long enough, your brain accepts it as fact.
Then when I was circling the drain, really considering backing out of The Race, a good friend reminded me of a story from Exodus. Moses had just encountered the burning bush AND been told by God that he would lead the children of Israel out of slavery AND been shown two miracles that Moses himself could do to show that Israelites that he was full of the power of God. So after being spoken to by God from a burning bush and directly being shown the miracles He has the power to do, naturally Moses’ response is “But I can’t talk well.” (Really, Moses?)
Of course God responds perfectly with “Who do you think created your mouth?”
God goes on to tell Moses that He (God) will be Moses’ mouth and will teach him what to say.
Man did I need to hear that. It showed me that it doesn’t matter how laughably unequipped I am for a mission such as this (I can’t really emphasis how in over my head I am). It doesn’t matter because everything that’s going to be put in front of me overseas, God is going to teach me how to do them. It may be my hands doing the work, but God is the one that’s going to be moving them.
