This was the dream. It was my escape from the path I was going down.
month one of the race I battled with the thought of going home. The race was hard and I didn’t want this “dream” anymore. One night I called a friend to help me process my thoughts and frustrations. He told me to ask God why I was so unsatisfied. There I was sitting in the damp grass outside of our base in Guatemala, begging God to talk to me. Seconds passed and I started to feel my frustration building up. I closed my eyes and took in a big breath of the cold air. I saw a comic book on an old tire and it was raining. The comic book represented how I saw the race as this fantasy, and the rain was the disappointment. To be honest, the race rescued me from the disaster that my life had become. After I was accepted into the gap year program, my parents told me they were separating, I had my first heartbreak, I started doing drugs, I moved out (for my sake), was sexually harassed, I worked 60 hours a week, and managed to paint a smile on everyday. The amount of things that went wrong before I could even get my first foot in the car for launch was ridiculous. I hadn’t even touched down in Guatemala before I had built this fantasy inside my head of what the race should look like.
Then, I got to Guatemala and time itself stopped and left me with plenty of time to process the fake smile on my face. God was going to break me, and then build me back up. My biggest fear was to face the problems that had pieced me together from the last ten years. I would work so much because it would keep me busy. I had never stopped going, and then suddenly I hit a wall- a big one.
When we moved into our little home in Thailand, the quiet would leave a ring inside my ears. It left me deaf to the Lord. I was frustrated with him, myself, AIM, and my family. Honestly, I stoped listening, and then I was mad because “God wouldn’t talk to me?” So, there I was, in the middle of some rice fields, with six girls, and my thoughts. Forced to face the demons that continued to haunt my happiness.
Christmas Day, I was watching the sun set on the mountains that surrounded our village. I was trying to make myself cry so I could get a moment of relief. Instead, God walked me through all of the hurt he spared me from by bringing me halfway across the world. My heart was so full of lies that I had convinced myself they were true, and I was living in false serendipity. If I would’ve gone home in Guatemala, the hurt would’ve swallowed me and encased me in bitterness. The whole point of this program is to go out and instill hope and faith in broken communities globally. Truth is, I was broken and the people I was serving shook the foundation I stood on. The only time I would let God completely intervene in my life would be when I mentally separated myself from the uncertainty that surrounded me. Like a packed chicken bus, or the silence of a rice field, possibly melting in the heat on bus 35, and maybe an isolated house in Africa. It took ten years for me to recognize my brokenness and learn how to handle it. I was pining over my lost childhood and sitting in pity. My character had dissipated into a person I didn’t even recognize anymore. I swindled everyone around me to befriend this stranger I saw in the silver glass staring back at me. I became what everyone else needed. I was unhealthy, and wasted a lot of time sinking into an unidentified depression. My biggest struggle, silence, became my life preserver. It kept me humble because I wasn’t in control anymore. Time and time again, God found me, sitting in the silence, vulnerable. He breathed life over me, and made me whole again. For the first time, ever, I now know the foundation I stand on, it’s concrete, and I’ll always remember the strength and the strain it took to get here. I “was” all those things, but now, “I am” better because of them. It was a choice to be more than my circumstances. I can’t change what happened to me, but I do have the capacity to acknowledge my pain and bring it into the light. There are a surplus of regrets in my life, but my scars aren’t one of them. I fought to be here, and rediscovered my joy. If all it took was an act of insanity, and ten seconds of chasing failure to find myself, it was worth the dream.
love always,
macayla
