Have you ever noticed how some things are just right and you know it?
You hit a moment in time where you catch yourself in a smile as you’re slipping into perfect tune with the world around you and you just know in that moment you are in just the right place, at just the right time, with the right people beside you. It’s in that moment that it doesn’t really matter what the heck is going on around you or where you are on the globe at the moment because the peace that you find in that beautiful instant is bigger than all of that.
I enjoyed a million of those moment when I was on the race….
-Sitting in a ministry briefing in Nepal, tears pouring down my face.
-Riding back from Siem Reap in the heat, guided only by the constant whirl of the wheels
and our tiny electric bicycle lights.
-Waiting in a torrential downpour for a bus to pick us up in Australia.
-Looking out at a blanket of stars so vast it seems endless on the edge of a cliff in
South Africa.
-Screaming declarations at the top of my lungs with my team at a little park in Malaysia.
-Praying for just a brief rain shower while riding home in an auto in the May Indian heat
and then reaching out my hands to embrace the cool drops when it actually happened.
Beautiful moments when I realized without a doubt that no matter what I was struggling with I was exactly where I needed to be. And then the race was over and I came home…and home was different and so was I. It felt like I would never again be able to reconcile the two.
All I could think about were the places I used to be and the people I went there with…
——->Moving Forward.
For as long as I can remember I have had a dream. I knew what I wanted to do, how I was going to get there and what my life was going to look like. There was a point in my life when I gave up on that dream and tried to kill it dead because things weren’t going as I expected. Truth is I was doing everything in my own power and hadn’t seriously stopped to even think about asking God where he might be leading me. Coming home from the race, changed but with few plans and no clear direction, I have found myself face to face with a choice.
Go it on my own or wait patiently, pray for wisdom, trust God and rely on His timing.
I have spent about a month composing this blog. It’s something that has been heavy on my heart for a while now and I just didn’t know how to put it into words. I thought I got used to discomfort when I was on the race now I find that I face a new kind of discomfort. The kind that confronts you at random when you find yourself having conversations in the grocery store about organic produce or the ethical debate about eating meat when you know how rare and precious food is in many parts of the world. If killing a chicken feeds a starving family, I have to say it, cut that birds head off and get him on their plates. But I feel this tug to fit in to my new environment.
I can’t count the number of times that I heard this phrase during my time on the race:
