Well, the story of how I came to be on this trip seems like a good first blog entry to me, so here it is.
A friend of mine was accepted to go on the world race around the end of November/early December (she’s currently listed as being on the September team, but she’s actually on the June team now), and sent out an email to let everyone know what she was doing, how to pray for her, all of those kinds of things. In the email, she included a link to the world race website, so I went there to get some more background info. The first thing I notice (not sure how it was the first thing, as it’s actually down at the bottom of the page, but such is the way of these things) is the banner for the media team, asking for people with videography, video editing, and photography skills (among others), all of which I’m experienced with and passionate about doing. My first reaction, I think, was ‘Huh…..’ in a puzzlingly interested kinda way. Getting involved was SO not what I’d gone there for. But, my curiosity was peaked, so I clicked on the link and started reading through what this was all about.
Now, I’ve done missions before, twice on two week trips to Mexico, and some volunteering in South Africa while I was there visiting relatives, but also an eight month missions trip to Spain where I was working in a studio creating Christian programming in Arabic for North African broadcast. After returning from Spain I had decided that I would either just do short term missions (like, under a month) from then on, or commit fully to a missions field and do that for the rest of my life. I wasn’t intending on doing anything in between, such as 11 months going around the world. Spain was an amazing experience, as all missions tend to be, but I felt that if I chose to do another one like it it would be because I wanted another taste of full time missionary life without committing to it. I needed my motives for missions trips to be pure, and the idea of spending a year on one missions field, 6 months on another is very tempting for my wanderlusting nature. So my first reaction to being interested in the world race was ‘No, not happening.’
The next two days were spent searching myself for a definitive opinion on the subject, and I came up with a long list of reasons I shouldn’t even be thinking about it – another year of putting my career on hold, a year away from watching my nephew grow up, the fund raising (always my least favorite thing on a missions trip), and of course questioning my motives for even considering it. Even the idea of travelling that much seemed like less than fun, as backwards as that is from my normal outlook. At the end of those two days I was still at my original answer of no, with lots of reasons to back it up. So, now that I knew my feelings on the subject, I brought it before God (yeah, that’s backwards, I know, God first. I learn slow sometimes). Before I’d even finished voicing my question, God put an image in my head of me on this trip, doing His work, and the sense of belonging that I’ve not known anywhere else in my life but on the missions field washed over me completely. Nothing else made sense but being on this trip. All my reasons for not going deflated next to that image, and I had one choice – do what God was telling me He wanted, or go on with life here as it was.
I went to the website and filled out my application.
