A few years back, my church began using the phrase ‘love where you live’ when they started their push for local outreach and that idea has stuck with me. When people ask me why I’m doing World Race America, I think it comes back to the fact that I really do want to love where I live.
But let’s stop for a second. The idea of loving where you live can be unnecessarily broad. The heart behind that tagline isn’t just that we love what our cities offer us. Sure, ask anyone, I love Jacksonville. I love the beach, the terrible sports teams, and the convenient shopping, but theres more. To love where you live means to invest into where you live. To serve where you live, to give of yourself, to seek the betterment of the community, because you love and care about the people in it.
In the past year and a half, I’ve traveled to 14+ countries and have partnered with and have tried to support the people who are day in and out trying to love where they live. It’s been amazing and the Lord has shown up in more ways than I can express, but none of those places are home. I haven’t lived there all of my life, I’m not apart of the culture, and often times I don’t even speak the language.
I say all of this to illustrate the beauty that has been, and the opportunities that are coming. In the past year and a half God has overcome all of the barriers that could have kept me from serving people and building relationships with them. God let me love and be loved by a lot of people and a lot of places, and now I get to go home. United States is my home, my culture, it’s full of my people and I get to go and love them.
I know that there is a lot of hurt and brokenness in the States, we don’t have to look very hard to find it. In this next year there are a few things that my team and I are going to be focusing on to ‘love where we live’ well: Evangelism and Revival.
For every place we go, and ministry or church that we partner with, our goal as a program is to set aside intentional time for evangelizing in the communities that we are working in. We believe that the Gospel truly is the good news that people need and are crying out for. The Bible says that the harvest is plentiful and we want to go out and engage with the harvest that the Lord has been preparing.
We as a program are also praying and seeking a revival for the American church. Someone once explained to me that you cannot be revived if you were never alive. Revival is something that is going to happen within the church when Christians begin to truly live out their faith. We want to engage with believers and pursue radical life change together.
We want to love every community that we encounter well, both inside of the church and out, because that’s what Jesus did.
I’m believing big things for this next year, thank you for believing with me.
Much Love,
Morgan
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