So I’m now on month 8 of the race and I honestly never thought I would be where I am right now. I don’t mean physically, I knew I was going to be in Cambodia in the dead of their summer experiencing heat like I never have before and I also knew that it would be month 8 of the race where things start to change and you start to talk about entering back into the states. But spiritually, I never thought I would be where I am now, nor did I ever know it was possible.
The truth is, before the race I thought I knew God. I would have said I was in a healthy relationship with him and that he was a good God. The race changed all of that. The real truth is that I had God in a box. A box smaller than a ring box. As soon as I stepped onto the plane headed to Panama I knew that my life would change. I knew that most likely it would change for the good. I had no clue, however, just how much it was going to change my life. It has completely changed the way I view God and what it actually means to have a relationship with Him.
The past 4 months of this race we have been in Asia and it has been very hard for me. I can’t even deny there are parts of me that can’t wait to board that plane to Africa and get the heck up out of here. While I was in Thailand I was faced with spiritual warfare that I had never experienced before. There, I could physically feel the hand of the enemy. I would wake up from naps and have to catch my breath because the weight of his presence was so strong. I was broken into so many pieces that month. I had insecurities from my past hitting me full force. I had lies of “being a burden, not being wanted, and feeling so alone” hitting me so hard I could barely breathe. I have never experienced anything like it before. After several hours of prayer and endless cry sessions to my teammates and squad leaders I finally felt relief from those attacks, but the lies were still present.
I knew I had to deal with them but honestly I was scared. Those “lies” are truths that I believed for the majority of my childhood. I can’t remember life apart from believing them, but I also knew that I wanted to know. In Laos, I started to let God into those areas and see why those lies were present in my life. As I started this process, I discovered something crucial. In those lies that I believed, I lost who I was. My whole life I have always tried to be someone that people wouldn’t consider a burden, and I have always fought to a have a purpose or “role” in every relationship I had. In doing that, I never had to let anyone close enough to see the mess of my emotional life and that is honestly exactly how I wanted it.
The race changes things though. I am around people 24 hours a day. I go to sleep beside someone, I wake up beside someone, I eat every meal beside someone, I do ministry beside someone, and I walk everywhere beside someone. I am never alone. I don’t have that time by myself to just be and get my emotions straight so that I can be who everyone wants me to be the rest of the time. Even in the first 4 months of the race, I was able to hide in the “roles” that made my identity what is was. But Asia broke me. Month 5 sleeping in an 8×8 room with 6 teammates, 2 dressers, and a fan broke me. Working in the sun all day with my team, playing with kids in the evening, then coming home to have team time and go to bed to do it all over again the next day, broke me. I no longer had the space to recharge the person I was into the person I thought people wanted and needed.
I realized in Laos that my identity wasn’t in Christ at all, it was in all of these roles. But for once in my life these roles no longer fit. In fact, I was left in this place of not evening knowing who I am. I looked at myself in the mirror and I honestly didn’t recognize the person looking back at me.
Now I’m in Cambodia and I’m feeling the weight of it all. The weight of a lost identity, the weight of my past, and the weight of my relationship with God. I’m in this place of limbo where I don’t find my identity in myself anymore but I also have no clue what it means to have an identity in Christ either.
I read in a book this past week, about the verse Galatians 2:20 where it says “it is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.”…It then goes to paint this picture of what that actually means. Imagine if you had a child, but that child was no longer able to live and you had to choose whether or not to let their organs be donated. You choose to, and their heart is given to a little girl who needs it. Your only requirement is that you are able to hear your child’s heart beat in the little girl who received it and when you do, you hear your child inside of them and it brings you peace. That is how God sees us. When he listens to our heart he hears his Son’s. (By the way that book is called Grace by Max Lucado and you should read it! I’m only on chapter 3 and my views on grace have already changed so much.)
And that’s where I’m at. The entire race I’ve been letting that box I had him in get bigger and bigger but I am tired of just letting the box get bigger. I want to open the box! I want to give myself fully to Christ and to let him have free range of my entire life, not just pieces of it. I want to know what it means to have my identity in Him. To look in that mirror and not see myself staring back at me but to see Christ. To see God’s perfect son that he gave up for me so that he could replace my own selfish heart with His son’s and through that be able to give me eternal life. That is my heart’s desire.
I’m honestly not there yet and there are still a lot of areas of my life that I have to let God into to bring healing and restoration. There are still things I need to process, grieve, and move past, but the beauty of it is that I don’t have to do it alone. God is with me in a way that I can’t even fully explain, he is opening my eyes and my heart to what he has for me. I’m going through a tunnel with him right now… there is a lot of darkness from my past that I have to work through and open my heart to the healing God has for me there, but there is a light at the end of this tunnel. A light that brings freedom and joy like I’ve never experienced before. I am so grateful for this opportunity to truly trust what God says, to experience him in new ways, and to find what He has for me.
Thank you for taking this time to read this. Love yall!
