I look at this blank page, thinking about my last summer as a college student and all that it encompassed and I am a little overwhelmed. The task of sharing my vision for packing my belongings into a backpack, getting on a plane and beginning the eleven month, eleven country journey that is the World Race seems daunting to say the least, but as Maria Von Trapp states in The Sound Of Music, “Let’s start at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start…”
As a little girl, I fell in love with countries. For a while, it was China. I was going to live in some remote area of that country and share the love of Jesus with anyone and everyone whose paths I crossed. Next came India. I saw a picture of a toddler sitting on a street corner, bugs crawling all over her and hundreds of people walking past without stopping. My plan as a very passionate ten year old was to show everyone the picture, ask them to support me after they broke down and then go find every single baby like the little girl in the picture I had seen, telling them how much I loved them. The trend continued and over a span of several years, this love for the peoples of the world grew and developed into a deep hope that has led me to the World Race.
Why now? At the beginning of this summer, I realized that I had the next few years of my life planned out. I would graduate early, work for a semester and then spend a year at my church’s discipleship school. From there I would get whatever job the Lord opened up for me until I was able to get on board with a church planting team. All of this would be done with the amazing community that I have been part of for these past three years. In this community I am secure, known and deeply loved. I am safe. But God never promised me safety in this world. He certainly didn’t promise comfort or control, but He did promise that if I abided in Him, if a dwelt in a place of relationship with Him that I would bear much fruit (John 15:5) I looked at my life plan and realized that it had been made apart from Jesus. Out of fear and a desire to have control, I had jumped ahead and planned as far as possible, when all that Jesus had called me to was to abiding in Him, trusting in Him moment by moment. So one day, I sat down wiped the slate clean and as I began asking the Lord “what now?”, a friend spoke to me about applying for the World Race and two months later, here I am.
I am filled with joy and overwhelmed by the grace of God. After three years of belligerently demanding to go to just one country, the Lord revealed the vastness of his mercy and has given me the gift of going to eleven! I am definitely sad to be leaving this community full of people who deeply love the Lord and a little nervous about the unknown, but Jesus is more than enough and I can’t wait to carry that overwhelming, freeing, beautiful news to the nations!
