Tried, Overwhelmed, broken, too much traveling, too much community, no alone time, spiritually tried! These are a few of the emotions that I have to face everyday on the race. Entering Month 7, it is a time where the race has "lost its magic", traveling gets exhausting, you are craving good food from home, desiring to see your family and friends. Through these struggles, these questions have run through my head, "is this really worth it? "is this race worth all the tears, tough conversations, weird food, exhaustion and painful growth?"
I hadn't really doubted my time on the race until this month. My team is doing Unsung Heroes this month, where we travel around a country, looking for new contacts who are striving to further the kingdom to partner with the World Race. But our team is doing Unsung Heroes on steroids because we are traveling around Montenegro and Bosnia & Herzegovina, countries the world race has never been too. We have split our time between these two countries which has been really exciting but challenging. I have loved getting to see so many places, meeting fellow believers and learning about the complicated & intense history of the Balkans. (the nerdy history major in me 😉 ) But at the same time, that also means that we have to travel quite a bit, packing up every couple of days and adjusting to different cultures and different living situations. As we prepared to head to our 5th city in our third country, the doubts and concerns began to roll through my head.
Our fifth city was a little town in Bosnia called Kunjic which is predominately muslim and only has a hand full of Christians. We went to meet an Albanian man, Fisnik, who had moved his family to this city about two years ago. We heard about this contact from our ministry in Kosovo; Fisnik is the brother of one of the missionaries we stayed with. He is the reason we are in Bosnia, the reason we started this crazy adventure and we were all excited to meet him! After arriving in Kunjic, we spent 6 hours with Fisnik's family, hearing their story, telling a little about our story, seeing and praying over the city and playing with his 3 kids. After a fun couple hours, we once again grabbed our bags and headed back to bus station to finish our journey to Sarajevo.
During our walk, Fisnik told Emily, "Thank you so much for coming, it was really encouraging for you guys to visit us!" We had only been with him for a couple hours where he welcomed us into his home, bought us lunch and spent his time with us yet he was encouraged by us? What?
This simple comment blew my mind and after thinking about it, reminded me what this race is all about. We are not doing this for ourselves! We are NOT here to travel to new places or gain ministry experience or have cool stories to tell our friends. We are here to work alongside Christians who have dedicated their lives to serve The Lord and encourage them, reminding them there are other people praying for them and fighting in the same battle that they are. We are here not only to work but to encourage others, give them the strength they need to continue their ministry, continue seeking The Lord and impact the people in their community.
The World Race IS worth it! Even if I have to travel for hours, eat strange food, sleep in bus stations, play charades with people to communicate, live in strange places, probably offend people accidentally and not shower much just to encourage one missionary, I will do it! The reward simply outweighs the price I have to pay. We are sent to help those who need it and we have no idea the impact we make on the people we minister too and the people we minister with. That is why the Race is worth it! We get to encourage and inspire others who then in turn inspire us!
