Lets be honest here for a moment, on the World Race you give up a lot of comforts. One comfort that can give you a warm fuzzy, is wifi. This little bugger is fickle one month, present the next or completely gone. You can’t trust your relationship with wifi on the race, you never know where it’s going to pop up or if it will even show its face.
During the months wifi decides not to show its face, sometimes you can find little places that provide it for free. When you hear of these places, excitement to talk to your family, and show the world what you’re doing can take over.
Then you get blinded by wifi.
This is my story of how wifi on the race (& life in general) can blind you to what is around you.
In Madagascar, our relationship with wifi was fickle. We had gone weeks before talking to our family or friends. As hard as those moments are, they are some of the best moments on the race.
We took our translators out for lunch the last day of ministry to just simply honor them for all their hard work. We heard of a place that had fast wifi, western food, and a real toilet. I heard about the real toilet on top of the free wifi and I was sold.
TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER
I’ll be honest, the real bathroom got me wayyyyy too excited (hey it had been a while).
The lunch was wonderful! The place reminded me of a restaurant back home. Wifi popped up on my phone, there was a toilet that could flush, and the coffee made me feel like I was back at home.
However, we were blind to where we really were.
On the way back from lunch, we found out what the restaurant turned into after 7pm for foreigners.
A Legal Sex Trafficking establishment hub (with children).
This wrecked a lot of us that had been there in such excitement. This was one of those moments that turn your stomach, that upset your spirit…as it should.
This is common knowledge, its sin that’s out in the open. We came face to face with an establishment that not only supported this, but had rooms upstairs to be used.
I don’t believe you should be blind to these things. I believe your spirit should have discernment to what’s going on around you.
We were blind, we were distracted, we put our spirits at the bottom of the list while wifi was at the top of it.
My mind went back home once I found this out.
America hides its sin.
The mentality back home is…
”Don’t let people know you aren’t perfect.”
“Don’t let people know your struggles or your pain.”
“There is never any crime in my home town to this extreme.”
How many places back home have I gone to that are establishments like this? The reality that you and I have probably been to many of them, make my stomach hurt.
Living in Atlanta, I’m constantly seeing signs to end sex trafficking. We all tend to write that big red X on our hands to show we are against sex trafficking. This is all fine, but it still keeps the truth hidden. The truth is, this IS in our home town, at restaurants, in hotels down the street.
When you know about something, you now have a responsibility. Do we enjoy sticking our heads in the sand back at home? Yeah, probably. I know I have before, but not anymore.
I want to know the pain that’s going on in my home town. We are not much different, we just hide the truth. I want to see where Christ can be brought into. I want to be apart of healing not hiding.
What if God showed us what was really going on behind our own closed doors?
What would it change about our life if we knew?
Would it change where we go?
Would it force us to be more active in bringing God everywhere we went?
Maybe God wants us to lean on our discernment in the spirit more. Maybe God wants us to be active in bringing Him into coffee shops back home simply by faith. Our father always wants us to see, and will walk us through each level of discernment.
Maybe He is asking a few of us to start uncovering the truth and bring a revival back home.
