Firstly, I want to apologize for the lack of updates that I’ve given lately. I hope that this blog will be a sufficient explanation for my silence these past couple months.
Secondly, I just want to share my heart with y’all. The past four months on the race have not been easy. There have been countless times when I’ve wonder why I left my safe and comfortable home in the first place. There were a lot of nights where I laid in my bed/tent/bunk/sleeping pad and thought, I’m done, I quit, and I can’t do this anymore. I am quitting the race.
I know that I have said it in blogs before, but community is so hard. If for some reason you skipped that last sentence let me say it again, community is so hard. It has this incredible ability to push you to new heights, sharpen, and refine you, but it can also bring you to your lowest point and sap all of the life out of you. Unfortunately, that is the type of community that my last team encountered. The ugly kind. Unhealthy community can break you like nothing else can.
Thus the reason for my silence. It is really easy to write about all the wonderful, feel good things that happen on the race, but writing this blog makes my stomach churn. It’s far more difficult to let people into the deep places that are full of hurt and that haven’t quite healed. So here is one deep place that still needs some healing.
In Thailand I had a teammate decide to leave the race. I want to protect her story as much as I want to share my own so I am not going to give a whole lot of detail. I will say that in the wake of her leaving I felt unqualified, inadequate, and upset. I felt like a failure. My team had walked through a lot of conflict and hurt and now we had to walk through the loss of a teammate. For me, this was my last straw. I was tired, I felt broken, and with only four months of the race left, home felt close. So close, that I wanted to quit. I wanted to hop on a plane and leave the race, and my brokenness, behind.
Thankfully, the Lord knows that I am stubborn, sometimes to a fault.
I was not going to quit.
Since I was not going to quit, I decided to coast. Eight months into the race and I knew all the right words to say, all the right things to do, while also being completely, 100% checked out. I was done with ministry and my team, and I was going to coast my way home to Texas.
But y’all, my God is infinitely smarter, capable, and far-sighted than I am.
He sent my team and me to a small church on the outskirts of San Salvador that had never hosted a missionary team before. I don’t think that I can express to you what a massive blessing this church was to us. For the first time in four months, people on my team were able to open up and be honest with each other. Again and again people stepped out (sometimes we were pushed out) of places of comfort to see the Lord reward them for their boldness. People on my team preached for the first time. People used gifts and talents that they hadn’t before. We got to see the Lord raise over $1000 to bless a pastor and his incredible family. It was a month of healing for my team that we needed to move into a new season. God took a team that had been built on strife, conflict, and fear, and He miraculously transformed that foundation into joy. We had all walked through some pretty terrible months, but we stuck it out. In my case, for the wrong reasons, but the Lord is always faithful.
My month in El Salvador was an incredible gift. A gift of joy, of healing, and of really tough goodbyes. Those three months before El Salvador were probably some of the hardest days I’ve lived. I have never felt so inadequate in my life, and I’m still asking the Lord why he had my team walk through what we did. When He answers I’ll let you know. What I’ve come to realize is that the answer is not what matters; God’s faithfulness is the only thing that counts, and His power is most perfect when I am at my weakest.
My squad just went through team changes and I get to experience the blessing of these last three months with six incredible women. I ask that you continue to pray for us as we finish this race with perseverance and strength, with a little bit of our weakness mixed in.
