Hey y’all! Wow. Where do I even begin? The World Race gave so much to me the first time around in 2014. Being immersed in so many different cultures and traveling with my squad for eleven months paved the way for me to find myself, stripped me of my comfort zones and forced me to face so many things that held me back from a full life, a life that allows me to be free to to look in the mirror and be proud of the woman I see staring back at me. As I pulled up my World Race page this week and saw all of my old blog posts from my first trip, it feels crazy to be back here again. In so many ways, I barely recognize the girl that wrote those posts years ago. I’ve grown so much in the past 4 years and have been on so many great adventures since coming back to the states in June of 2015. I ventured to Spain for 6 months and then landed in Indianapolis, Indiana where I’ve worked at Starbucks as a Shift Supervisor for the past 3 years. Each season has brought so much growth and so many amazing people into my life. And now here I am leaving again. It’s been a decision in the works for a little over a year now… wrestling back and forth in whether I wanted to continue to grow with Starbucks or if I wanted to move on to something different. There’s so much more to say but for the moment I just want to take time to share what I’ll be doing this time around. I’ll share more about my time post race and what working at Starbucks meant to me in future blogs.
So squad leading! What is it?! A squad is the group of people you travel with from country to country. I am leading the June squad. My squad will have around 40 people and will be traveling for eleven months in Central America, Africa, and Asia. There will be four squad leaders including myself and we will leading our squad for the first five months of their race. The heart behind being a squad leader is to go and help your squad get adjusted to missional living. This includes giving them insight on what it looks like to build healthy teams, how to serve our hosts in each country well, help when problems arise, and support in personal growth. I personally want to challenge them to think for themselves and figure out what they believe for them. I want to love them unconditionally through the messy moments where things don’t make sense. I want to listen to them as they struggle through things and help them realize the answer is within them. I want to celebrate with them when they are blown away in God’s goodness and wrestle with them when they feel He falls short. I want to dance through the pain with them and laugh when things couldn’t go worse at ministry that day. I want to be able to impart to them the lessons I learned on my journey and continue to learn each day. I want to learn from them! I know they are going to teach me every day and challenge me to step more into a leader and help me to discover myself more! And so much more that I probably don’t even realize yet. That is the beauty in the unknown and the uncomfortable places… there is always growth!
So there you have it folks! I leave in 10 days! I’ll be in Georgia for a couple weeks for training and then we head to our first country, Nicaragua.
If you have any questions feel free to comment them below or send me an email: [email protected]
Also here is a link to my facebook page, if you want to see pictures along the way too!
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=715375789
