Hello Friends!
In a few short weeks I will be leaving the States for the next step in my journey with the World Race. Before I start blogging again in real time, I thought it would be appropriate to let you all into a piece of what my reflections looked like during my own month 11. Thank you all for your continued support! I am still accepting donations for my Alumni Squad Leading role this fall. Any and all donations are genuinely appreciated and can be made on the main page of this blog! I can’t wait to update you all about these last few weeks home so soon!
-Nico
June 2019:
I have memories from all over the world now, one not any more vivid and beautiful than the next. All full of language I had yet to hear in my life, food I had yet to eat, ground I had yet to walk, and hands I had yet to hold.
In the second week of Sunday school in Chile I cried in a bathroom because I felt Full of shame that I knew not a single children’s song we were singing.
And by the eighth week I was in the middle of the Amazon, giving my testimony and a few God guided words.. completely in Spanish.
I’ve grown and matured in ways that would take me hours, honestly even days to comprehend on my own in order to fully explain to those around me. I haven’t done it all alone, either. I went from being the girl that had to be told to come downstairs to play cards because I was so comfortable in solidarity to the woman that sometimes can’t decide what she wants to do because she wants to be around everyone all of the time.
I’ve traveled by plane, train, bus, tuk tuk, moto, foot, taxi, Uber, Grab, and boat.
I turned 26. And prayed the most dangerous prayer I’ve ever prayed… that I would be rebuilt from the ground up, that I’d have roots that don’t sway when I step back on American soil. That any faulty lie I had been taught by culture would be revealed and ripped out, even if it meant me kicking and screaming about it.
I’ve celebrated birthdays, mourned deaths, and learned what it genuinely means to “be present”.
I still listen to rap, and prefer my grey sweatpants over a dress. I drink coffee just as much as I did back home, and sometimes still struggle to lift my pack up. So much has changed in who I am, but so much is all the same.
I learned some hard truths about what it means to follow Jesus, and not just to follow him, but to live a life that mirrors what he lived. I’m starting to understand and comprehend where it gets twisted and why so many of the people that I’ve lived life with for 26 years would rather change the subject when it comes to conversations about Jesus Christ.
I knew by month 2 this couldn’t be the end. There was absolutely no way that I had been called out of the life I was living, just to experience “missions” for 11 months. And I know now that’s because I started this whole thing with a twisted view of what it means to live a missional lifestyle.
M!ssions to me meant building houses, preaching, and playing with babies.
Now living a missional lifestyle means understanding what a disciple is. Living this lifestyle means the switch never gets turned off. It’s not just an 11 month trip, or a Sunday service, or a bible study where I encounter Gods face… it’s being willing to have a conversation with a stranger, it’s being willing to build a relationship with that stranger, treating them like the human with their own stories that they are, and being willing to speak when the Holy Spirit tells you to share about your own stories of addiction, or emotional abuse, or the time God moved you out of the toxicity you were once living in.
This year wasn’t just a trip that I went on to feel like I had done my part in the world, although that may be how I first felt on the 30 something hour bus ride through Chile.
This year was the laying of a foundation.
A foundation that once was built upon a facade of perfection. A foundation that couldn’t keep itself together because it wasn’t built on truth that’s rooted in the history of the entire universe. A foundation that during the month of my 26th birthday was completely wiped clean, and within a few months barren.. ready to be rebuilt.
This is not the end of my story.
Because it’s not the end of His story.
And now I get to walk alongside others, as they walk out the lifestyle of this upside down journey that we are called to partake in.
Love yall! -Nico
