I read the famous “Kisses from Katie” over the course of a few months while on the Race, and one concept resonated with me as the most important lesson I learned in the last 11 months.
No, it’s not that I need to adopt 13 children.
Rather, it’s complete dependency on the Lord.
There are nights I lay on my sleeping pad, sweating in the heat, scratching the mosquito bites, and reeling back when I see beetles scuttle across the floor by my arm. There are days when my teammates are busy and I’ve somehow ended up alone and no one speaks English and all I want is a friend. There are days when all I want is to be alone but all 5 or 6 of my teammates have questions and adventures and needs and we have to pick a restaurant to eat at but there are 4 options and 7 opinions. Or times when I’m starving, but there are 6 more homes to visit and pray for. Or when I just want to easily get to our next location, but it requires 48 hours of planning, a bus, a train, an overlooked ATM stop, gesturing when no one speaks English, waiting in the cold for transportation that’s 2 hours late, staying up until 4:30am, and not having any more of the right currency to buy food for the mentally loopy, exhausting travel day ahead.
The majority of the days on the Race have been like this. I can handle it for a few weeks, but then eventually I break down and call my parents, begging for just one single decision to be easy. To not have to think of anyone but myself. To speak English easily. To get in my car and drive when I need to be somewhere.
But in all of these moments, I have learned the most precious lesson of all: to depend on the Lord.
At home, my daily decisions are a breeze. And when they’re hard, I go home to chocolate, a comfortable couch, people who completely understand me, and a climate controlled house with electricity and water. Here, I rarely have such luxuries. There aren’t necessarily couches, dryers, familiar snacks, people you’ve known forever, TVs, or beds.
But the lack of comforts leaves more room for one thing, and that’s the Lord.
When I don’t have anything else to turn to in hard moments and hard days, all I have is the Lord. I have to cry out to Him from my tile floor, covered in dirt, for friendship and patience and strength and energy.
While this lifestyle is certainly hard, I would not trade it for anything. And this is a lesson God has to continually remind me of. He brought me here and He gives me the resilience to make it through each day. I will gladly give away comfort all of my days (and easy decisions and fast friends and simple conversations and marriage and a home and anything else He might possibly ask) in order to have more of the Lord.
God is worth giving up everything for. God is our goal, and it’s a lot easier to turn to Him when there aren’t a thousand small distractions standing before me and Him.
I pray that I am able to be like Paul when he says, “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:11-13). God has taught me a lot about learning to be content when facing need and low circumstances. I pray that He shows me how to do the opposite, to be content and dependent on Him in America where things are easy and abundant. I pray that He shows me how to continue to turn to Him even when life seems to function without Him.
I pray that we would all have the courage to give up everything in order to gain the one thing that truly matters, a relationship with and a dependency on Jesus, our friend and Savior.
