(photo credits to Sarah Gill and Casey in order)
365 days, 1 hour and 4 minutes ago, F squad got on a plane.
I remember landing in La Paz, Bolivia, thinking, “We’re in a whole new country. This is our life. We’re gonna do this eleven more times.”
And I wondered if I’d ever lose that excitement over going to a new place, if I’d ever not care when I got a new stamp in my passport, if I’d ever wish I had just stayed home.
There were travel days when I was too tired to care that there was a beautiful new country out my window, and there were times when I was so sick of pulling out my passport that the new stamp didn’t matter to me at that moment, but I never woke up thinking, “God, please don’t make me see any more of the world.” I’ll never get sick of exploring.
And I was homesick almost every day, but I would never really truly wish I hadn’t done it.
There couldn’t possibly have been a better way for me to spend those eleven months of my life.
Some people wondered why I didn’t just get a real job. Some people said goodbye and told me to “have fun.”
Those are the people who just didn’t get it. Because both kinds seemed to be thinking that I was either doing this for myself, or should be doing something for myself.
It was a year that was absolutely not about me. Which taught me that life is absolutely not about me.
In the last week of our last ministry, me and my team were watching the movie Wild, and we were all crying at the end because the story perfectly paralleled the end of our Race. They had it on our last plane from Qatar to DC, and right before we landed I watched just the last eight and a half minutes solely for that monologue.
“It was my life. Like all lives. Mysterious, irrevocable, and sacred, so very close, so very present, so very belonging to me…”
I thought about how even though we’d been to all the same places and done a lot of the same things, each of us had a different Race.
My Race was mine and it was a gift. And I’ll probably spend the rest of my life unpacking it, because God made it much too rich to get all the goodness out in just eleven months. I think he does that on purpose.
“I’m desperate for it to be over, and I’m terrified too. When I’m done, I’ll have two dimes to my name, but I’ll have to start living.”
There are days when it seems unreal to me, that I feel like a “normal” person, that I wonder if it was nothing but the longest and best dream I’ve ever had.
Most days though, I forget that there’s a lot more life waiting to be lived. That this wasn’t the sole reason I was born. That God’s plan is bigger than just one year.
At Searchlight they reminded us over and over again that the World Race was only the best year of our lives so far. That God has more, and better.
He does. He did all that in a year…imagine what he can do with sixty more.
“What if all those things I did were the things that got me here? What if I was never redeemed? What if I already was?”
The World Race made me thankful for my story. I’d spent my years in college accepting that it was something I’d have to carry, and then I spent eleven months realizing it was actually something to be celebrated. Something to share.
That night in South Africa, it hit me that it wasn’t in Thailand that those ugly parts were redeemed; God had already done that before they even happened to me. He’d always known what beautiful things he was going to make out of them.
I don’t know what’s next. I know lots of things that are later, but not what’s directly next.
That used to be the worst thing ever to me. Now, I’m okay sitting on the shore with God for a bit until he tells me how to get to the other side.
No more leaping across on my own time. No more begging God to hurry up and do something.
Instead…lots of patience. Lots of rest. Lots and lots of thinking and writing and processing and celebrating what just was, before stepping into whatever’s next.
“…how wild it was, to let it be.”
