When I first made it to Kenya, debrief was exactly just what I needed, and one of my then squad mates now teammate, Samara, shared with us something that the Lord put on her heart for us. She talked about how we don’t realize how much God loves us. This is or was old annoying news to me at the time. There was something nice about it, but something irritating because I felt like I could never really believe that. For those of you that don’t know, the race has made me realize how much I have struggled with unbelief and struggled with knowing with my whole being that God truly loves me individually.
Over the course of Africa, I wrestled with God on a lot of things, and on the way to the India in the plane, I heard the Lord out of the struggle. He promised me to reveal love to me… I had no clue what that looked like, so I just journaled it and decided to see what would happen. In India, after a particularly rough hour or so of crying about nothing, I felt something I never had before. In my heart and in my mind and in my whole self, I felt an embrace like no one could give. Since then, God has changed my mind about a lot of things.
I see myself so differently, my life differently, circumstance differently… I feel it, I believe it… I really do. I can’t say enough about this, but this last debrief, God spoke something else about what His love is. I was laying on the floor in the dark at worship one night with my squad, overcome with His love, and I just kept saying over and over again, “I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve it, I don’t deserve it.”
I am finding out that when the Lord speaks to me, He is very direct. He gives me one-liners all the time… no fluff. I guess He knows what I respond to, or need to hear. On the floor in that moment, God gave me one of those lines, the kind that make me shut up. He said, “My love has nothing to do with you deserving it.” And that was it… all I needed in that moment.
