As I discussed in a previous blog post, I don't really have a lot of experiences in my life that give me the tools to know the sorts of things to expect on the World Race. Upon being accepted, I had a conversation with a friend of mine, Matt, who had done quite a bit of international travel. He had been to Australia and China and Alaska and all these exotic places, and he had the stories to prove it.
He told me about how he went to Australia with almost no money, photographed a wedding, and got for payment the use of the bride and groom's apartment and car for three weeks while they went on their honeymoon. He met a Christian family who prayed for him and supported him despite not knowing him from Adam. He told me the story of moving to Alaska to get into the fishing business with no money and no prospects, and within a week he had a job and a place to live.
"It's crazy how God provides, man," he told me, leaning back in an office chair parked at our Mac-covered dinner table. "I went to these places and he never abandoned me, he always gave me a way to live."
I tried to describe to him the feeling I had gotten while attempting to picture what it would be like to be living in Romania, or India, or Malaysia. And I just couldn't. I had no context. All I had were these absurd, caricatured images of cartoon lepers and scenes from "Sahara" and Bond films. It all seemed so cheap, so fake, these images that my brain drily coughed out, my pitiful excuse for an imagination wheezing uncomfortably in response to my demand for something, anything, that could help me describe what I thought it would be like.
Do you remember when you were a kid, and you had to share your box of sixteen crayons with the kid in the class that was a total crayon hog? You called him a crayon hog because he was way more artistic than you and in his zeal to splash color on his canvas, clutched seven or eight in his hands at a time, poking out of the spaces between his fingers like Wolverine's claws. And because of his constant switching of colors, dabbing a bit of this and a bit of that like a spastic cook with a brand new spice rack, you were left with, like, three colors, and they were always the ones that no one liked. You'd maybe have Periwinkle and some kind of brown-ish guy, and the white crayon.
The white crayon was lame. If you tried to draw with it on white computer paper, nothing happened until you jammed it vigorously almost through the paper and left a clumpy streak of pale shavings.
That's how I felt trying to describe an experience I had never had, and had under no circumstances even come close to having. There's no comparison that will be in the same league, let alone the same ballpark; if the World Race is the majors, my puny dreams are lobbing 80mph fastballs over the plate at Single A.
But despite my inability to imagine what it's going to be like to play with children who speak a different language than me, or build a church building, or cry with mother who has lost a child, or carry water five miles to a village, I know a couple things.
Firstly, just like he did for Matt, God is going to provide for me. He is going to give me the words to say (or not say – often important with an well-intentioned yet garrulous individual like myself) in the time of need. He is going to make a way through the difficult times, the sicknesses, the weariness, the frustration. He has promised that to us.
And secondly, I won't make it through eleven months of international travel with waking up every morning with the full intention of giving every second of that day to Jesus. Because the second I start trying to make it on my own, I'll fail. I can't do it on my own, and we should be doing things we know that we can't do. The power of the Living God works in us to make those things possible, and no amount of our own concoction of elbow grease and sweat will ever do anything that is only possible with the Lord.
So my prayer is that as I give every moment of every day, one day at a time, to Jesus, I would remember the blessings he has so lavishly heaped upon us already and will continue to pile onto us, spoiling us like grandchildren.
