and introducing, my wonderful, courageous step-dad, Rick Noble, with the dynamite blog that should be an inspiration for all past, present, and future racer parents:
And Why Would I Want A World Race T-shirt?
A few days before my wife and I flew out to Atlanta to attend the Parent Launch early in October, my wife excitedly said, “When we attend the launch, I want to buy you a World Race T-shirt. They have one design in particular that I think you’ll really like!” With very little hesitation, I quickly said, “No thanks. Not interested. I’ve got plenty of T-shirts.” I did not voice it to her, but in my mind I was thinking, “Why would I want to buy some cheap T-shirt, advertising this thing called the World Race, which I truly know very little about. And on-top-of-that, you know I primarily wear name brand outdoor apparel; so, NO THANKS!” OK, so before you completely judge me and think, “What a jerk”, allow me to provide a very brief backdrop, which in and of itself will sound paradoxical in light of what I just revealed about myself: I am a fully-devoted follower of Jesus Christ. I love GOD with all my heart, mind and soul (or least try to). I spend time almost daily in his Word, faithfully serve at my church and fully believe in the Great Commission. BUT…although our World Racer, Maggie Harrell, had invited my wife and I (her step-dad) to this thing called “Parent Launch”, I primarily agreed to attend in order to support my wife in telling her daughter good-bye. I was not excited to spend the money on the flight, the hotel, the food and certainly not on a cheap World Race T-shirt, no matter how Patagonia-esque the graphic might be. Telling Maggie good-bye was certainly a valid reason to go with my wife, but it was not my primary motivation.
After connecting with Maggie at the airport and taking a shuttle to the Hilton, when we arrived at the hotel, I began to see and meet these “kids” (everybody else was calling “racers”) toting around their monstrous back-packs and wearing their Chacos as they gathered in the hallways, filling it with squeals (the girls of course, the girls were squealing, NOT the guys) of enthusiasm and excitement for this weekend that had finally arrived. I took it all in, but was mentally dis-en-gaged, committed to endure the weekend’s activities of parent meetings in support of my wife until that moment when we could exchange good-byes with Maggie, get back on the plane and get back to our ever-so important life back in Northwest Arkansas.
Maggie’s perceptive. She could tell from my silence and aloof demeanor that something was going on with me, but being the sweet and loving girl that she is, she continued to include me in her thoughts about the weekend and in conversation with her mother. Maggie accompanied my wife and I to our hotel room along with her 200lb back-pack. After a few cursory comments, she asked if we would like to see everything she had packed for the race. I grunted something like, “sure”, while my wife clapped in excitement to see the stuff her daughter had packed to survive on for the next eleven months. As Maggie began to pull item after item from her back-pack, I actually felt a degree of interest rising inside of me. I was truly impressed with the use of space she had managed in packing so much stuff into such a relatively small space. “Hhhmmm, impressive”, I thought to myself, being a person who prides himself on being highly organized and an efficient user of available suitcase space.
We went to an early afternoon lunch and I found myself actually warming up to the conversation and finding some interest as Maggie explained various details of her weekend’s meetings, aspects of things she had learned during her Training Camp and information about the other “kids” she would be calling Team-mates. Yeah, it just seems kinda silly calling them “racers”? I admire their passion, commitment and maturity, but “racers”, c’mon, they’re kids!
On Saturday morning, my wife outlined what our day’s schedule would hold and advised that it concluded with a corporate Worship Service after having dinner with the other parents of Team Grit, Maggie’s team. Our parent meetings started around 1:00P, incorporating great informational sessions, parent socialization time and helpful Q&A sessions. During those meetings, I not only heard relevant and detailed information, but began to see that this group (Adventures In Missions) seems very well-organized and has this parent’s indoctrination process running like a finely-oiled machine. I was impressed and actually found myself with a growing interest still. However, it was not until the Worship Service that GOD completely ambushed me and grabbed my attention along with my calloused heart. GOD began to launch me in the right direction for the first time in this entire journey that Maggie had started months-and-months before with her mother’s full support and encouragement.
As we took our seat in the meeting room in preparation for the service, even before the worship band played their first chord, the speaker who opened the evening, David Reeves, delivered a message (not a sermon, but a story of his own World Race journey) that connected with me in more ways than I can even recount. By the time he finished speaking, I realized how cloaked my own thoughts had become and how far out of alignment my perspective reference the movement of GOD through this organization and these RACERS that He was sending out to the world. (Yeah, I said RACERS!) The worship music took my experience that evening to a whole other level and then by the time Deon completed his anointed and pointed challenge based in scripture, I was wishing that I was a World Racer. I was envious and jealous of these racers whom I knew were going to see and experience GOD in the places and faces of this world that I would never see, nor experience. By the end of that night, I asked my wife, “Hey! You know that T-shirt you told me about. I WANT ONE!” My wife was eager and pleased to help me pick one out that was almost exactly like the one she had already purchased. Yeah, we practically had matching T-shirts. Not a practice I typically embrace, but for this, I was proud to do the matchy-matchy thing.
On Sunday, I proudly wore my T-shirt to the morning sessions and concluding lunch, knowing in my heart that I was eager to join Maggie in her world race through prayer and in response to her blogs, hopeful that she would invite ME and my wife to join her in the Parent Vision Trip in May 2019. That Parent Launch weekend was a renewal and revival to my soul and one that I was not looking for, not expecting, nor aware that I truly needed. GOD has a way of capturing our attention and getting us back on course, even when we do not even realize our attention needs to be captured or that we’ve slowly strayed from His ordained course for our own lives. That is exactly what He did to me in his gentle and patient way when my wife and I attended the Parent Launch…and it all started with a conversation about a cheap, cotton T-shirt.
Psalm 103:13-14
“As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.”
