Sometimes I forget that I’m on the World Race.
I forget that I’m in a different country, and that this will continue for another 8 months.
Especially this month, when the World Race doesn’t include living in a village and taking bucket showers.
This month, the World Race looks like living in more than sufficient accommodations with hot water showers, air-conditioning, and western food everywhere you turn.
It also means traveling around the entire country, instead of being in one spot investing in the same people and building relationships with them.
It’s funny: I truly did build expectations for what my race should look like.
I pored over blogs and spent hours watching videos of the adventures that people were having all over the world on their journey of 11 countries in 11 months.
There were stories about teams hiking with all of their things across rivers, through mountains, and through jungles in order to get to their ministry site in some tiny village far away from the rest of the world.
There were stories of teams laying hands on sick people and seeing physical healing right before their eyes.
I read so many stories of crazy, life-changing things that can’t even be explained because there’s only one word for them: God.
I got this idea in my head that if I went on the Race, I would experience all of these things and so much more.
But I haven’t.
And I have to admit that when I came to that realization, I was a little bit disappointed.
My Race so far has been amazing, but when I first began to analyze it, it seemed to me to be strangely similar to the way that I experience God everyday in my life back home.
Nothing noticeably supernatural has happened.
I have seen no burning bushes with God’s voice booming out of it telling me what to do.
There haven’t been any possessed people needing the extraordinary power of prayer and healing.
I haven’t even witnessed anyone making the decision to lay everything down and give their lives to the Lord.
And while all of these things are perfectly possible, that’s not always how God works.
Something I love about Jesus – and something that I’m seeing more and more in Him as I journey through my life – is how He speaks so intensely in the simplest moments.
Last night, Lauren, Libby and I walked down the street from our hostel in search of some ice cream.
We did find some ice cream, and we also found a whole bunch of street kids trying to sell us stuff.
It’s in those moments that God chooses to work His miracles.
Those kids would walk up to us, trying to peddle their wares, and we would immediately engage them in conversation.
It was so easy to do – it was impossible for me not to see them the way God sees them.
Behind the desperate plea for us to buy their things so that they can provide for their families – a burden that is so beyond what a young child should be carrying – there’s such a desire to be seen.
The Lord revealed that desire to us.
We saw it written all over their faces and God only had to give us a slight nudge towards doing what we could to make them feel like children.
Amidst the burden of responsibility far beyond their capacity to even understand, there were the hearts of children crying out to be treated like children.
So we spent time with them.
We played rock paper scissors and hide and seek with them.
We giggled and made faces and bought them ice cream.
This was the moment that God used to show me that this is my Race.
This is how He’s choosing to use me right now – in little miracles.
God is completely and totally capable of working huge, out-of-this-world, extraordinary, supernatural, beyond-our-wildest-dreams miracles.
But sometimes He shows His power even more through the breath of fresh air, the soft beam of sunlight, the stunning rainbow, and the tinkling laughter from a child.
What are the seemingly small, irrelevant ways that you see the Lord working His miracles?
