I’ll admit that the last few weeks have been rough for me. For a while I couldn’t put my finger on it, something just felt off. And then I realized it was that something felt off in my relationship with the Lord. I felt like I was struggling to feel the Holy Spirit move and work in me on a regular basis like I’ve grown used to. I felt it on a large scale, but I felt somehow alone in my daily life. Like God had called me to the World Race, but He was taking a back seat on the actual logistics of getting me there. I told myself maybe it was my job to get from point A to point B, knowing that’s impossible, knowing I am incapable, and therefore just expecting my inevitable failure.
For me, I’m not someone who thinks big picture. For so much of my life I’ve struggled just to get through each day as it comes. I don’t think in terms of five, ten, fifteen years from now. I think of later today and sometimes a week from now. But I’ve noticed God is redirecting my heart and mind to think big picture. To think about a year from now, two years from now, where I’ll be when I’m twenty-five, what my life will look like at thirty. I think He’s doing this because it’s easy to draw up a vision of your heart’s desires. It’s easy to pinpoint and tell Him what you want in life. What’s difficult is discerning what He wants for you from those selfish desires.
I first felt the Lord speak the World Race into my heart in late August. For so many weeks, I just ignored it. Until one Sunday during church, my pastor asked a question along the lines of “what’s holding you back?” I immediately knew and couldn’t ignore that this was God asking me “Mallory, what’s holding you back from the World Race?” At the time, my answer was money. He answered “not good enough”. I agreed.
Just the other day God changed the question. He looked at my heart and this time asked me “what are you holding back?” We so often look at our lives and say that it’s school, work, money, your friends, family, any situation out of your control, anybody but you, holding you back from being the person God’s called you to be. It’s easy to throw blame on any excuse under the sun. But those are just that: excuses.
God asked me, “what are you holding back?” and I felt like I’d woken up for the first time in weeks. I felt a sense of responsibility for my own neglect in my relationship with Him. I thought I had committed to the Race. I thought I had surrendered every piece of me to Him to travel the world and be a message of light and love to His people in eleven different nations so vastly different from my upbringing and comfort zones. But, ever since I felt Him making this calling a reality, I’ve felt like I’ve been staring down the barrel of a gun just waiting for someone to pull the trigger and obliterate my pipe dream to pieces. I realized I’ve drafted my own clause in a contract with God detailing my plan B if this crazy thing He’s asked me to do doesn’t pan out. But here’s the catch: there is no plan B. That’s not how faith works. There is no “well if this doesn’t work out…”. I realized that I am literally holding my faith back. Yes, it’s my job to do the work, but it’s not my job to make the World Race happen for me. It’s my job to believe that it will happen.
Along with my fellow female interns and a few other staff members, I had an amazing opportunity one Saturday during my internship in Jamaica this past summer to attend a women’s prayer breakfast at one of the churches we partner with. One of the speakers at this breakfast had the gift of prophecy and got up on stage to pray, only to almost immediately begin speaking in tongues and prophesying over several women all around me. I couldn’t understand most of what she said as she alternated between tongues and Patwa, but there was a moment, almost like a switch had been flipped, where she asked a simple question in English and I knew it was God speaking to me. Looking at no one in particular, she asked “why do you consider yourself the least of these?” I didn’t understand it at first. It didn’t seem right that God was asking me such a question. I came to Jamaica to serve the unloved, the outcast, the least of these by society’s standards, just as Jesus commands. How could I consider myself the least of these? But then I started to think about it in terms of my confidence and the way I view myself. The words “the least of these” are still written on my heart more days than I care to admit. Acknowledging a toxic belief or pattern of thinking is only the first step in changing it, so for me, this isn’t something that I’ve realized about myself and can write about in past tense. However, I do find great comfort in the fact that His love for me covers every single discrepancy and inadequacy in my own.
This is me stepping out. This is me refusing to acknowledge any instinct to the contrary, that a quiet twenty year old from a quiet town in Kentucky can and will raise $18,000. This is me abandoning the belief that my own lack of faith in myself is enough to hold me back. This is me going all in.
