Almost six months ago I was in Georgia getting ready for launch. It’s hard to believe that we have gone to Cote d’Ivoire and to the edge of Ghana. We flew across the world to Nepal and India. We’ve traveled through East Asia and eaten what seems like all the white rice in the countries of Laos and Cambodia. It’s crazy to look back on all we have seen and done, but as I look back, I can see with increasing clarity what my world has looked like.
Contrary to the pictures you see on Instagram, this is not a glamorous life. It is full of smelly clothes, dirty feet, and squatty potties. Sometimes it is a lice infestation and sometimes it’s ants. It is communicating through smiles because you don’t speak Telugu or Khmer or Ewe. It is missing your family like crazy while also making family out of the people you are around.
This life is also full of beauty. It is seeing the glory of the Lord in the simplicity of a riverside restaurant but also in the magnitude of Angkor Wat. It is taking ALL the selfies with strangers you meet. It is receiving chickens and goats as gifts. It’s celebrating the little things like good off-brand peanut butter, washing machines, and dryers.
It is crying over the brokenness of the people around you. Shoot, it’s crying over your own brokenness. It is loving people with your whole heart, knowing that in a couple of weeks you have to say goodbye to them.
Sometimes it’s that Christmas morning feeling you get when you find a shop with good coffee AND good wifi.
Sometimes the race is diarrhea.
It is asking the Lord what the next step is and taking that step even when you can’t see the ground beneath you. It’s feeling inadequate and unprepared at least four times a day. It’s also not knowing what’s going on 99% of the time.
It is a life full of good days and bad days, days you want to quit and days you want to live over and over again.
The race is constant change. It is 24-hour bus rides, 10-hour train rides, and 14-hour flights. It’s messy and chaotic and full of adventure.
All of these things could fall under the hashtag of #racelife, but for me it is just life. All over the world people fall in love, they eat, they sleep, they go to work. Everyone has family and friends that depend on them and count on them. The only thing that really changes from place to place, village to village, and country to country are the asterisks.
The World Race is life*
It’s my life, just with different asterisks.
