This text to my friend Kylie, sent on August 10th, 2014, is what I now very affectionately call “the beginning of the end”.
If you’re here on my page right now, you’re probably wondering what this whole World Race business is. Isn’t it that TV show where you and one other completely incompatible person team up and run around backstreets in South America looking for clues to help you put together a giant puzzle and win you a spaghetti dinner for your village? (I’ve never actually watched the Amazing Race, but in my head this is what it looks like.)
Or maybe you think it’s like shorter version of the Peace Corps, only heavier on the Jesus approach and the people crazy enough to embark on it eat rice three times a day and shower out of a bucket.
I guess it has a little bit of each – but it is so much more.
The World Race is an 11 month missions trip to 11 different countries, in order to serve and meet the needs of communities by teaching, feeding, serving, and working alongside the local church.
Remember that time I went to Ireland last summer, and spent a month ministering to high school students in the tiny village of Buncrana? That trip was put on by the same organization that platforms the Race – Adventures in Missions. They are extremely near to my heart – not only out of sentimental reasons (did I mention I met Kylie there?!), but because I have been to Adventures headquarters and seen the way that they live and breathe the Great Commission. They don’t just send students and adults out on missions trips; they evangelize to, equip, pray with, believe with, and serve their contacts and missionaries unlike any organization I have ever known.
Adventures loves their people so well, and that love cannot help but be extended from trip participants to the doorsteps of the thousands of communities that they mobilize people to each year. With that said, I couldn’t be more thrilled to tell you that I’ve responded to the call that God laid heavy on my heart to do the World Race.
I’m terrified. I’m ecstatic. I’m prone to ranting. And my hands get super clammy in this spot, just this one spot, any time someone asks me about it – I still can’t believe my own words when I say that I’m going.
This trip is not free, nor do any of us get paid to do it. In order to leave next September, I need to raise some money – $16,256.70, to be exact.
A month ago, just saying that would have put a pit in my stomach, but God currently has me resting under a huge blanket of peace. When He called me to go on the Race, my biggest, and pretty much only protest, was the price tag.
He very simply, very quietly spoke to my heart, and asked, “Do you believe that I can do it?”
There is a verse about counting the cost of a project before you begin it, lest you are unable to finish it, and be made to look like a fool. I told God all about that verse. I don’t want to be humiliated. I have never relied on asking people for money. What if I can’t do it? He listened patiently to my anxiety, but in the end His words were always the same. Do you believe that I can do it?
I believe that He can do it, because I believe – more than I’ve ever thrown my heart into anything else – that this is His will for me. I believe that we will see the sick healed, souls redeemed by the love of Jesus, the hungry fed, hope restored, and the veil of depression and loneliness lifted all over the world.
Will you believe with me?
