5 Myths You Probably Believe About the World Race
*CREDIT TO NATHAN HAUSER*
*WRITTEN FROM NATHAN HAUSERS PERSPECTIVE*
*PERMISSION WAS GAINED TO USE THIS POST*
1. Everyday is an Adventure
This is a big one. Everyday is not an adventure. Yes you see a million posts or cool instagram photos of mountains, sunrises, lions, and snapshots of pure epicness – but that’s not what the WorldRace looks like. The WorldRace is full of awesome opportunities and is for the most part what you make it.
You could get placed in a ministry month you hate. There will be many, many days where you are stuck on a bus, or a toilet, or shoveling pig poop for the 3rd week in a row. You will eat rice until you never want to eat rice again. You will sleep in the dirt, on bus station floor, or in a starlight field. You will get sick, you will get bored, you will miss home, you will lose focus of your “ministry” – but if you buy in, and challenge yourself daily, you will see God has a lot more for you this year than instagram adventures.
2. You Automatically Grow Closer to God
Somehow missionaries have become elevated in the eyes of Christian society as if we are doing something incredible in service to God. And it’s hard not to when each new location, each new ministry we visit, we are brought before the church or the community and applauded for our efforts. No matter how hard you try, this gets in your head. You think: “maybe I am special. Yeah, I am sacrificing a year of making money to serve God. I am a missionary. I am in God’s popular crowd.” But we’re not.
This attitude festers and spreads in your heart. I’ll skip the Word today, I just did a VBS. I don’t need to pray, I just prayed in church. Before you realize it, your heart is numb because your service to God became a performance. Your job: missionary. Your duties: perform.
One day you wake up and realize you lost the fire, you don’t care like you did, and God seems strangely distant. He didn’t go anywhere, you just stopped looking for Him. The WorldRace only amplified our attitudes in real life.
3. Your Problems at Home Disappear
I know when I left for the WorldRace in January I was really looking forward to escaping home. The idea of starting fresh and venturing into the wild made me salivate. But that doesn’t happen. You can’t run away from your problems. If you have buried something deep in your heart, it will come out on the field.
You’ll get emails with news that jars you. You’ll miss weddings and parties. A year is a long time. New problems will arise at home and you’ll be powerless to do anything. You’ll want to run home and fix everything, but you can’t and you shouldn’t. God knows where you are, and He knows where the problem is. The good news is, He’s sovereign and big enough to take care of both.
4. Your Struggles Go Away
This one goes back to the running away from your problems thing again. I have found time and again, that no matter how far and fast you run, your problems, if not dealt with will find you again. You can mask your struggles with a change in culture or location. You can bury them beneath a mountain of work or responsibility. But they will undoubtedly always resurface.
On the race, constant change becomes your norm. You never really have a home. You are always moving, always adjusting, always changing. The one thing that remains the same is your character. If you struggled with pride, life on the field will bring it out ten-fold.
Anger, lust, laziness, judgementality, fear: all these things are amplified on the race. It’s strange how removing the comforts of home allow the real you to surface. Don’t worry though, if you are brave enough to face who you really are, you won’t have to hide anything for too long. The great thing is, when we are obedient, God chips away at our old selves one bit at a time, until all that remains is the creation He designed us to be. We just have to be willing to let him chip, and prepare our hearts for the pain of change.
5. Your Are Not Good Enough
This is my favorite lie. If I had listened to this one there’s no way I would have packed my bags and travelled around the world for a year. It’s crazy. We often defeat ourselves in our minds before we even get up to fight. But this time you’re right…
You are not good enough. You’re not strong enough. You’re not physically fit enough. Your knowledge of scripture is too weak. Your prayer life needs to grow. Chances are you’ll fail a 1000 times over. The good news is, it’s not about you in the first place. When we are at our weakest, Christ is strongest. Every time God does something crazy awesome in the Bible, he uses people who aren’t ready: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Paul. Humans can’t. God can.
When we allow God to work through us, the mistakes somehow disappear, the weaknesses diminish, and we find ourselves at the end of the day strangely accomplished. Why, because we made it about God, and not about ourselves. So you will fall, you will fail, and chances are it will be ugly. Yet Christ will be there to pickup the pieces, and if we allow God to break us, our new mold will be far more beautiful than before.
The World Race is about far more than travelling. It’s about being obedient to God’s call, spreading the Gospel and stepping outside comfort zones. It will be hard & it will be beautiful.
I can’t wait!
