Shoutout John Mark Pantana. Anyways, here we are, a week left in this nine month journey, and i’m bringing you the second blog of my world race career. Every time I sat down to write, I hit a mental roadblock after the introduction. I’ve never struggled with writing, so I came to the conclusion that I’m a post-processor. I have all these ideas and pieces of wisdom to impart to those around me, but it seems like i’m somewhat unable to put them down in fully fleshed out thoughts when i’m still in the thick of learning about them myself. However, I found it very easy to express how my experience has been on this journey.
Here’s some dope things the Race did for me:
- It challenged my Americanized view of Christianity, specifically my views formed by growing up in the south. Some examples: I didn’t REALLY know what the holy spirit was until about 2 months ago when i got to Guatemala. I believe many Christians also don’t really know the extent of its power and involvement in our lives. I’ll definitely be writing on all that soon. The race also helped root out traces of legalism and false limits on God’s love for me that I was still holding on to.
- It helped me start to tackle my fear of evangelism. I’ve never been one to tell people about Jesus outside of a ministry setting, and even then it was never an invitation, but rather a statement that I hoped they’d take to heart. This is very reflective of my church upbringing. From my personal experience with the church, I’ve realized how inwardly focused it can be. Sure there’s outreach events where the congregation serves the poor and discipleship is present within the church, but how often is the invitation to join the church and to be discipled extended to outsiders? I’ve seen an unwillingness to go out and bring people in and to make disciples of all nations. We love sending missionaries to far away places, but seem to be unwilling to invite people to our church who look different, or who have different values, or who seem too far gone. Jesus didn’t choose his 12 then just stick with them. He went after people like the Samaritan woman and the adulterous woman, in a culture that already didn’t value women highly, and brought them in. He captured their hearts and changed their lives. If we truly want to be like Jesus, we must go out and lovingly tell people about Christ. I’m by no means a pro at this, I wouldn’t even go as far to say I’m good at it. However, it’s what God calls us to do, and he always has his hand in those encounters, and that’s all the confidence I’ll ever need.
- It helped change my perspective on what intimacy with God looks like. I used to be under the impression that waking up and reading the word for 30 minutes (which i didn’t even end up doing half the time) was enough, and that my life would just somehow radically change after a certain number of days in a row. It was a very linear and shallow perspective of God’s desire to know us and spend time with us. Will be writing about what intimacy with the Lord actually looks like at some point.
These are just a few things that came about from the decision to do the race, and it’s by the grace of God that I was able to learn these things so early on in my faith journey. He’s been teaching me so much more that I’ll be sharing soon, but I’ll be back in the States in a week and would love to grab coffee (even though I don’t even like coffee) and talk about what’s been going on. Love y’all
P
