So, I’ve been home from the World Race for about 3 months now – which is crazy and SO surreal!This blog post is EXTREMELY long. More of an essay than a blog post. Sorry. But not really, ’cause what can you expect for an overview from 11 PACKED months abroad? This entry is basically a compilation of bits and pieces from my favourite blog posts while I was on the Race, some of my favourite memories, and most importantly what I took away from the journey in the most comprehensive and concise(ish) way I could do it. It’s basically the speech I had the opportunity to give at Knox Church (my home church) as a recap during their “fall mission conference”. So for those of you who couldn’t make it to the event (Ted I’m talking to you), grab a cup of tea or coffee or hot chocolate, a cozy spot to sit, and buckle down for story-time with Martha…
So just to review, I graduated from Queen’s in Spring 2014 with a BA in Global Development – studying the social sciences, world and environmental issues, and critically analysing different NGO projects abroad. And the World Race seemed like the perfect opportunity to integrate my faith into what I had learned academically. So September of last year, I set out with 40 other young people to start a journey to four different continents – Asia, Africa, Europe, and Central America (in that order).
I could tell you a million stories. Or what my take-away from each month was. But even that would take over an hour. So in stead, I’m going to give you four words that really represented my journey in a nutshell. Transition, joy, rest, realization.
We began our journey in Cambodia working with different churches, teaching hygiene to children, running VBS programs, building relationships with people in the communities we stayed with, followed by a month in Thailand working at a Christian cafe with women who had escaped pasts affected by human trafficking and abuse, then finished Asia with a month in Vietnam, teaching at an English club connected to the church we worked with. These were very transitional periods for myself and my team of six. We were adjusting to life overseas. Life in constant community, life in constant SWEAT, and a life that forced us to create a home for a month, then be ready to leave it and start again. It was exhausting but also exciting like a lot of transitions are.
I pictured Moses, the scene of the burning bush, while I was on the first plane .Thinking about how Moses had become comfortable with his life in the desert with his family, and the way things were, and didn’t think he’d have the skills necessary to carry out what God was asking of Him. But God, in all His authority said, “I AM WHO I AM.” Moses was terrified…but God said that He would be going before Moses. And so I was reminded that God was going before me.
What I quickly learned in the first while on this trip was that it wasn’t going to be about the “ministry structure” written out for us on the set up sheet we’d receive from our contact month to month, but about doing life with people in different parts of the world, sharing God’s love, and connecting with people who love and want to be loved. Language barriers were one of the first things to show us this. I realized that cutting down your words to what is most important gets rid of all the unnecessary fluff that we say. That if you let God speak for you, there’s nothing that will get in the way of another person understanding what you’re trying to get across. I saw God speak for this little Cambodian boy named Pona that you may have seen in the pictures. We were on a walk, trying not to die of heat, when all of the sudden a little breeze reached my neck. I looked down and 7-year-old Pona had a giant leaf and was fanning me with it. I tried to fan him back but he shook his head with a big smile on his face and continued to fan me…
He couldn’t say anything that I would understand, but his actions left nothing up for interpretation.
It made me think of a quote in “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” by Donald Miller that I was reading at the time;
“We think stories are about getting money and security, but the truth is, it all comes down to relationships…Once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don’t have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it’s not natural to want to die.”
Being thrown into different ministries around the world definitely spurred me on to want to live a better story, but it also made me afraid in the beginning. In Asia, I put myself out there to serve. I let my team know who I was. But I hadn’t realized how much I was really holding back out of fear of failure, and fear of rejection. And often in transitional times, these fears become more real because we don’t have the predictable comforts we’re used to. I lost my grandfather near the end of our time in Thailand, and that with the added spiritual heaviness of the area we were staying in in Thailand really hit me. But I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to let anyone in. And that spiralled through our team in each of their own thoughts and actions, so that by the end of our time in Vietnam we knew we had to refocus. We had built great relationships, had awesome opportunities in teaching English to students, I had even had the chance to teach a weekly dance class and share my testimony to my class afterwards, but there was still something missing.
So moving into Africa, everything changed. I chose the word joy for this continent because it was three of maybe the most life-giving months OF my life. Besides being more creative and intentional in my devotionals, being more honest with my team mates and leaning on them too which all contributed to a more energized attitude, it was the people of Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia that taught me what real joy is like. We started off in Uganda, doing door-to-door evangelism (which is verrrry different there than here in North America), and each of my team mates and I had to preach.
The pastor of our church had told us that many of the people we’d met have said that they were encouraged by us – which was completely God. I preached for the first time ever at a women’s service. And I was SCARED to get up infront of the church to talk about how God uses all kinds of people to do His work. But then it dawned on me. God uses all kinds of people to do His work. Now I was beginning to – with the Lord’s help – conquer these fears of mine, leaving so much more room for joy. Plus it was the Christmas season, which was an awesome celebration too.
Just a story of how the Lord provides, we started up a Pay Pal account and contacted some friends/family back home to fundraise for some Christmas gifts for 17 of our Ugandan family and friends. We went out into the market and bought Ugandan soccer jerseys, jeweled sandals, earrings, a replacement cell phone, dress shirts, and purses among other things, then wrapped them up, labeled them and couldn’t wait for them to be opened. Let me tell you that we spent about $80 (USD) out of pocket, not knowing how much would be in our Pay Pal account (if anything)…and at the end of the day when my team mate Asia checked, there was almost exactly $80 in that account. God had put it there before we even spent a shilling…
Rwanda was incredible, from the household we got to stay with and the family we became a part of, to the incredible redemption between people groups and progress the country has made since the atrocity of the genocide in the early Ninety’s. God was so present there you could feel His movement. At the beginning of my time in Ethiopia when we worked with a Christian NGO called Hopethiopia, I asked God to let me love so hard that it would break my heart. And He let me. And reaching that broken heart reminded me of how capable I am of loving. The children we taught kindergarten to and the lady cooks in the kitchen and the local workers that we painted with and moved bricks alongside, had all come to have a special place in my heart. I had learned to love because of how well I had been loved, and God had SO humbled me through that.
Some of you may have heard this story, but I got sick and basically unintentionally fasted for 5 days because I couldn’t keep anything down. I returned my cup to the kitchen, and my lovely Ethiopian cook-friends were sitting at a table. They asked how I was, I pointed to my stomach, and the lack of smile on my face said it all. “Martha, come. We pray,” said Mama Alfaneje. She opened her arms, and I sat down on her lap, arms around her neck, crying on her shoulder. The three kitchen ladies prayed boldy in Amaric over me, holding me, believing so faithfully that God would heal me. I opened my eyes at the end, and one of the cook-ladies was also in tears. Feeling my pain, loving me like a daughter. I experienced something so powerful. I can’t explain it and do it justice. But if I had had to get sick just to share that moment with those ladies of faith…well it was worth it…
Another story…I wore flip flops to paint in, so I wouldn’t get my shoes full of paint. I stepped in mud on my way to the work site, and one of our friends from the month – Baba (who’se in the midst of creating a proposal to open a Biblical seminary in Ethiopia) saw that I had muddy feet. I asked him where the hose was to clean them up. He said, “I’ll show you.” I saw the hose, and said thank you, but before I knew it he was scrubbing my feet. I stood there, over him, in disbelief, so awkward. Why was this man washing my feet? They were filthy. I tried to tell him to stop, that I could do it. Like, I was INSISTING. And he said, “I serve a God who serves – who calls people to serve. He has served me and so I delight in serving others.” This was the first time someone ever washed my feet, and how undeserving I felt then.
I had left my heart in Africa, and thought that I would have nothing left for the rest of the Race – even though we still had 5 months to go. But God always knows what we need and Eastern Europe had the theme of rest. We stayed with an American missionary family on a beautiful mountainside. Our schedule was much more relaxed, setting up times and locations to show the Jesus Film or organizing a church service, and our host wanted to pour into us during our time there through Bible studies. Though it was difficult to adjust to the different pace (as some of you may know, us Kennedy’s aren’t used to any pace less than 100 miles a minute) I began to recognize how much I needed to rest. To rest in God. To sit for a second and enjoy continuing to get to know my team mates. To stop and just look around for a way to serve our host family instead of finding somewhere to go or something else to do.
So when it came to Albania, I was well-rested and ready for what was next. We worked with Hope for the World Albania which houses and educates teens that have outgrown the orphanage system. It was like hanging out with the senior section of Knox Camp for a whole month! What rocked MY world is not the unbelievable hardships that these kids had endured. It was that they’d made it to the other side, and that it was Jesus that brought them there. What ALSO rocked my world was the amazing hope that there is in the orphanages we visited. These weren’t “orphan-Annie” type worlds. These were brand new facilities with constructed family units in bright apartments with loving adults that are passionate about the kids they’re caring for, and determined to instil hope into these kids who could easily believe there’s no such thing. Albania is probably in my top three favourite places from the Race. I wrote in a blog post;
“I miss them. I love them. It’s getting easier to love, and harder to leave. My heart feels like it’s in a snow globe that someone keeps obnoxiously shaking REALLY hard. And even though it’s beautiful to look at, it hurts on the inside.
But if you ask me, it’s worth it for the beautiful, lasting effect.”
And of course it’s when we think God can’t surprise us any more that He surprises us AGAIN in even crazier ways. We headed to Central America for our final three months. And my theme for those three months was “realization.” So many simple concepts of Christianity, and of God, that we can easily complicate, just hit me so hard and so simply. For example, how much God wants to give gifts to His children. In Honduras we were stationed with an awesome host family of American missionaries from Alabama, and worked with an incredible bilingual school with beautiful hilarious kids on the island of Roatan – clear turquoise waters, white sands, windy evenings and starry nights. At first I didn’t know how to react. I didn’t deserve any of this. This wasn’t the mud and bugs that I expected from a mission trip. But I realized that accepting it and thanking God for it was like thanking a father after opening a present.
Another realization – how God really does have our plans set out for us. Hearing the testimony of our missionaries and how they ended up in Honduras, made me reflect on my life and all of the steps that God laid out ahead of me. I was reading Bob Goff’s “Love Does” at the time and it reminds me of a quote, nearing the end of the book, when he talks about a time he randomly went to Uganda with a friend and they decided once they got there to start up a school that quickly grew exponentially in size and educational success. He says, “We weren’t thinking at the time about where the chain reaction would stop, and we’re still not thinking about it. I’d like to think it’s because we didn’t have a plan. We had a big idea instead.”
I wrote in a blog that month;
“God’s given me the capacity for big ideas. I mean, He’s given that to each of us. We just limit ourselves by the feeble plans we create in our own heads that we think will see those ideas into fruition – which, many times, stops us from running after the potential that idea can have. Being on the water this month, I’ve really felt the Lord through the strong winds. What an example of being surrounded by Him, and His Holy Spirit rushing through and around us.”
By the time I got to Nicaragua, the second last month in the trip questions of what would come after the Race when I returned home started to linger in my head and distract me. We worked with a church, the pastor and his family that month helping out in different ways in the community, serving at VBS, and being the rainey season at the time, there were many moments when we would be stuck indoors, with a bit too much time to think, at least I thought. So by the time we got to our last country, Costa Rica, I had a pretty empty tank. It was the most homesick I’d been, because I could see the end in site, and I was exhausted…and of course, a lot of times, it’s in our weakest state that we see God’s strength. This had been a long journey of uncovering things about myself and things about God, so I’ll quote a bit of my last blog post here that talks about my final realization of the Race:
“What has really hit me is how hard I try to appear strong. To create this image that seems unbreakable. Especially anticipating the next chapter of my life… The last few months I’ve had so many question marks flying around my head, that I wanted to deny what I felt – the feeling that I don’t have it together. I wanted to fake strength and ease with where I was at because that seemed like it would be the most simple. But through acknowledging my weakness, slowly the Lord uncovered a lot of areas in me that He wanted to work on, and before I knew it, opening up to what I was/am feeling has allowed God to show up to me in ways I never expected Him to (classic). And it was coming into Month 11 here, with the end in sight – a little sick of community-living and ministry, lack of independence, having to wait until after the Race to go after the things I want, and just being away from home – that God said;
“Hey. I still have so much to show you. You know how much you desire these things beyond the Race? That’s not even a fraction of how badly I desire to be with you. You know how you’re so excited to see your family –because they’re your biggest cheerleaders? I’m cheering even louder for you near that finish line, and there’s still so much I want you to see this month before reaching the end of this Race. And you can make it, because there’s no way you won’t hear me motivating you from the sidelines. You know how you just ‘want to know what’s next’ in your life, and you’re waiting for me to put it in your lap? I’ve lead you this far and equipped you. Now chase hard after what you’re passionate about and I’m going to be running alongside you. If you trip, I’ve got you. If you puke, I’ll hand you water and say ‘you can do this.’ If you see people passing you, and you get discouraged, don’t lose your stride…”
“There’s this song by Bethel that has a line that says, “And You crash over me, I’m where you want me to be. I’m going under, I’m in over my head. Whether I sink, whether I swim, it makes no difference when I’m beautifully in over my head”. Does someone who is “in over their head” ever truly look like they “have it all together”? Nope. Why “have it all together” on the boat that’s going to sink anyways, when I could walk out on those rocky waves toward Jesus? When I could go after that ‘big idea’ I talked about a few blog posts ago, and let God show His strength through my weakness, His perfection through my imperfections, His majesty through my mistakes? When I could fall, but it would be something beautiful, because I was going after something life-changing? What’s the point in convincing people – including myself – that I’m strong, when breaking down, or admitting I can’t do things on my own, or letting the tears fall could be exactly what someone else needs to see in order to see Jesus?”
And then I was saying goodbye to my squadmates and team mates and back in Canada. So much peace, but a ton of surrealness too it all. Near the end of my time in Costa Rica I had heard about a program through a friend there – Incarnate 2016, a discipleship arts programme and mission, held at the Isola Evangelical Centre near Rome, whose aim is preparing artists to apply their artistic skills and gifts in a missional and cross-cultural context. The program is run through the organization Operation Mobilisation (OM); an international, interdenominational evangelical mission which specializes in cross-cultural evangelistic teams in Europe, the Muslim world, and South Asia. And after a week of being home, I got that same feeling that I had before clicking the “apply” button for the World Race. Before I knew it, I was agreeing to 3 months of training in Italy come January, and a month of outreach in Blegium to follow. My major in the program will be dance, and seeking to use dance as a tool for outreach, in building relationships and sharing the gospel. So that last blog post in Costa Rica about chasing after what I’m passionate about and letting God create the plan totally came to fruition. I still have lots of funds I need to raise, and the thought of going out again so soon after returning home is a little tiring, but I know this is what God wants and for that I’m super excited!
To conclude, basically life is a series of adventures. Different types of adventures that pass through different types of seasons. And this next one? I have as much excitement and apprehension as I did before the Race.
Guess it’s gonna be a good one 🙂
