Let me start with apologies–it’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog, I’m sorry! I’m alive and well in Peru now! I didn’t blog at all in Bolivia, but I did learn a lot about myself, my team, and ministry, so here goes:
When I started the Race, I made a commitment to myself to do things that scare me. I thought at the time those things would be physical, adventurous things like snorkeling and jumping off of cliffs and climbing tall trees or something. I have done several things like that so far that have really pushed my fear limits, but in Bolivia I had to bump up a different kind of courage.
I learned courage as I was challenged to do things far outside of my comfort zone. I had to evangelize in the street, sing in front of a church full of people, preach, speak lots of Spanish (butcher lots of Spanish), teach English classes to kids and adults, and talk in front of a class of high school students. I was not good at any of these things when I started, nor did I consider most of them to be very effective “ministry” at first. As the month went on though, I got notably better at most of these tasks (still can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but the rest definitely improved!). I also saw that the Lord uses our willingness to make eternal differences in people’s lives, even in the tasks that we don’t consider to be very significant.
Bolivia was the first month that my team, Hijas del Rey, was alone together. Our first month we were partnered in Puerto Rico with Crisco Unico, then our second month the whole squad was together, so being just the six of us women in the desert was a little shock to the system. Suddenly there was no one else to turn to when things got hard except my teammates. (It was also the first month that things got hard for me.)
I learned that it takes a special kind of courage to trust others with raw parts of yourself. To trust others to love you when you are totally honest, to care for you when you are sick, to see you at your worst and give you grace there–I never considered that to be an act of courage until now. And while is takes courage to trust others, I learned it also takes courage to speak hard truths to others. To say the things that need to be said in TRUTH and LOVE is hard. My month in Bolivia held more than one hard conversation with a teammate, times where we had to lay it on the line and hope that we would each have grace for the other at the end. After one hard conversation one night with a teammate, we came to the conclusion that we often think that when others really know us, they won’t love us; but the reality is that when people really know us, they have a greater capacity to love us.
That’s what Bolivia was for me: learning myself and my teammates more deeply, and loving them more for it. We didn’t get to pick our teams, and I’m glad for that. I would have picked a very different team at training camp last October, but now I’m thankful that the Lord knows what I need better than I do, and I could not imagine a better team of women to be living and growing with these past three and a half months.
Our coach, Mama C, told us at debrief in Dominican Republic that all it takes is 20 seconds of insane courage to start anything. (I think she said she heard this in “We Bought a Zoo,” but I haven’t seen that so I can’t be sure.) That became a mantra for our team over the past few months, that we could do anything uncomfortable, scary, or hard, if we just had 20 seconds of insane courage to jump in and start.
We could all use more courage, to trust others, to grow our relationships, and to do hard things. How are you growing your courage?
