I started freaking out the moment I got off the phone after hearing that I had been accepted into the World Race. I started simultaneously laughing, screaming, running around the house, and maybe even giggling just a tiny bit. I was ecstatic; it was one of the happiest moments of my life. I couldn’t believe that it was actually happening. The longer I yelled, screamed, and danced the more I realized what being accepted actually meant. I started day dreaming about the adventures that were now before me. I felt like I could picture every beautiful moment that was headed my way in the next year and a half. I imagined packing my backpack with just the bare essentials and walking with a beaming face onto a crowded plane. I imagined the strange places and even stranger new foods looking back at me. I imaged meeting friends I will have for the rest of my life at training camp. I could picture my team’s two man tents pitched all around mine and I could hear my teammates’ voices singing around a fire. I could picture traveling with them all over the world. (I could even imagine how bad they will inevitably smell.) I could picture getting off the plane after all of it was over, after I was finally getting back to the States. I daydreamed about running to my family and girlfriend and how excited we would all be that I was back. All of my daydreams of adventure became more and more vivid the closer I felt I was getting to the trip. I couldn’t go an hour without thinking about leaving in September. I started to imagine the great miracles God would do around me and the incredible people I would meet on the road. I could see it all, how God was going to bring glory to His name and how He was going to change me and prepare me for the rest of my life. I was picturing an epic adventure, of almost story book proportions. I was going to go out and find my purpose across the sea. I started to believe that I would leave a little boy and come back a man, that I would feel older, wiser, and more capable than I had ever felt before. I could not wait for the trip.
Then God showed me some seemingly simple truths that have convicted me and changed my heart toward my trip.
What He showed me came about in a very simple, yet powerful way. I finally had a warm day in the middle of an otherwise cold Colorado winter and I was going to take advantage of it in the best way I knew how. I was going for a motorcycle ride. I got my motorcycle license last summer but hadn’t been able to ride in a while because of the cold. I had been feeling stir-crazy, so I wasn’t going to waste this chance. As I was getting ready for the ride, I started getting excited that I was finally able to go. I remember thinking that I was about to go for a perfect, warm, enjoyable ride. Once I got out on the road though, I realized that the ride was going to be very different than I thought it would be. The wind was killing my hands even though I had remembered gloves. It was so bad even my thighs went numb. My “perfect” ride was turning out to be way harder to enjoy than I thought it would be. I was fighting to stay upright at times and it was feeling more and more like I just wanted to go home. It was in that moment that I realized that my expectations did not meet reality. Reality was much more, well, real than I thought it was going to be. It was at that moment that God spoke to me about my expectations. He showed me how ignorant my expectations really were. The trip will be hard, and I will have to struggle in many ways. I will have to stay in fellowship and minister even when I am tired and don’t want to. I will have to try even harder to find time to read my Bible and to reconnect with my Savior. It won’t be the perfect adventure that I imagined at first, instead it will be difficult, long, and exhausting. The trip will be difficult, but worth it in the end.
I was joyful at the end of the ride because I had hear God speak. I knew I had been taught a lesson and that I had been humbled. What I learned from my ride with God is that the trip won’t turn out how I plan for it to go now, but that it’s way better that way. It will, however, go according to his will, not mine. My new expectations for the Race is that it will be very tiring and long, but I know that He will provide everything I need. He will bring glory to His Name because of the hard times and how He saves me from them. I can have joy because of His plans for me. I am humbled, but still super excited to go! I can’t wait to go on this trip!
