It’s not hard in the ways you think it will be, and the ways it kills you, you won’t be prepared for.
I knew the race was going to be hard. I had read the blogs. I had heard about the moments when it all became too much and people broke down. I was warned about the lack of real showers, the cockroaches climbing across you at night, the literally endless sweating, the entirely new and strange foods, the lice colonies that would make home in your head, the untimely power outages and water shortages, you name it.
I think I have had an admittedly easy race in the physical sense, and yet all those things have happened to me. I admit there have been times when it became overwhelming, when I ran out of patience, when thought I was going to lose it.
One day in Cambodia (month 2), after a few weeks of humid 100 degree weather, nothing ever being clean, the food being incredibly strange, cockroaches and crickets filling the room we slept in, feeling utterly inadequate to do ministry, etc… I had a moment.
I was washing dishes in a boldly unclean kitchen environment, when a cockroach the size of my thumb began crawling up my arm from one of the clean plates I was moving – I dropped the plate, brushed off the cockroach, and, partly because of pride and partly because I didn’t know anyone very well yet, walked outside the kitchen, hid behind the school building, and cried for a few minutes. I knew my reaction had very little to do with that particular moment, but I wanted out. I remember thinking “I CANNOT do this anymore! I need to be clean!” It may sound dramatic, and it definitely was, but when almost everything you know is different and you sweat even as you pour cold bug infested water over you in the shower, your patience can wear thin.
Anyway, in that moment, I heard God tell me that Heaven was clean. It was one of the first times I had even heard the Lord speak to me, and it made me laugh out loud. I laughed at my dramatic response, pulled myself together, went in to finish the dishes, and appreciated that I had come to be better adjusted to the world. I knew I had left some of my entitlement by the way side and was happy that it hadn’t taken that long.
For a little while I thought that was it. I thought that was what everyone had been talking about. That was my breaking point. Hallelujah, that wasn’t so bad.
But those moments are not the hard ones – not even close. When people tell you the race was the best and hardest year of their life, they are not reflecting on the physically hard times. And if they are, they got off scot-free.
The real brokenness is much, much deeper.
It comes when you realize that your capacity to love is wretchedly less than you desire it to be. It comes when those you are capable of loving get hurt and you are helpless to do anything but hold them. It comes when you realize that your shoes cost more than any family in the community you are living in makes in a whole month, and the injustice, anger, and guilt of the matter overwhelm you. It comes when you are stripped of your pride and the things you found your worth in. It comes when you realize that the only thing consistent is your identity as a child of God but you have placed it is in other things, and those things fall apart.
You break when you realize that you haven’t lost your way because you never had a way in the first place.
You break when you realize that the pain of this world is agonizingly greater than all the self-sufficiency, coping mechanisms, strength, and perseverance you can muster.
You break when you realize that you NEED Jesus.
And this is far different from wanting Him, far different from having Him as a part of your life.
This is when you reach a point that you are unwaveringly convinced you cannot exist without Jesus.
And that breaking point – that is hard.
It is ugly and painful and humbling – but it is also the most beautiful of moments.
For it is at that moment that you start walking the path you cannot turn from, the path for which you were made.
