We all have moments in our everyday lives that feel just a bit uncomfortable. Taking exams, job interviews, awkward conversations, business meetings etc. I myself felt uncomfortable about a lot of things in my past life. When I had to give a presentation, I spent days worrying about it. I got anxiety over the anticipation of being observed in any area of my life that I wasn’t fully confident in. I’d even spent hours and hours typing blog posts that I would eventually delete because I didn’t believe I could be a successful blogger. I shied away from anything that I feared would end in a failure because naturally I could only be successful if I indeed succeeded at everything I attempted. I never wanted to reach too far out of what made me feel safe but that wasn’t what God had in store for me.
I have been on the World Race for less than 3 weeks and God has completely dissolved any zone of comfort I could have possibly created for myself and rather than allowing me to avoid the pain, God forced me to feel every uncomfortable second of it.
For some of my teammates, their clothing choices have changed and the way they eat has drastically shifted from a vegetable diet to an all carb diet of A LOT of bread and mac and cheese. Though it has been tough to wear the same three or four shirts every single day and eating chilean bread at every meal, I think we could all agree that the hard parts are in the changes of heart.
Here are a few examples:
Throughout my Chrisitian walk, I have struggled to pray out loud for fear of saying the wrong things, not having enough to say or not having the right words and man has God forced me out of this bubble of fear. I have prayed over countless people in the community, over my church, over my teammates and the community here in Chile.
We’ve spent hours everyday knocking on EVERY door in the neighborhood near our church asking to pray for people and sharing the good news of Jesus Christ and every single door we knocked on I wanted to hide. I didn’t want to interrupt people, I didn’t want to be turned down, I didn’t want the door shut in my face and I desired to hold onto my ego and my ‘reputation.’ I made excuses for why we shouldn’t knock on specific doors and I moved to the back of the group so I wouldn’t be called out for prayer. On the other hand, I have found that the more I step out in faith and boldness, the more the Lord blesses me with new relationships and opportunities to love on the people here. The Lord has been calling me to interrupt the ordinary in order to experience the extraordinary.
Evangelism aside, we’ve been teaching English and I spent years avoiding classrooms for fear of rejection based on past experiences. However, this week, the Lord called us into all the schools in town. I entered a classroom with one of my teammates and she said “Rachel, I didn’t expect you to be so timid” and man was it a challenging wall to climb over as the Lord asked me to to break through my expectations of failure. Reality is, I did fail and I will continue to fail but God will continue to pick me up and show me the value in my trials.
This life is hard. Living in full time community is hard. Nine hours of ministry everyday is exhausting. Not being able to communicate effectively is frustrating. My clothes are never clean and they aren’t always weather appropriate, I forget that I can’t drink the tap water, my sleeping pad already has a hole in it and some days I wake up and all I want is to go home. However, the Lord is so good despite my everyday challenges.
The Lord called me to leave behind a life that made me feel safe and comfortable to lead a life that stretches every boundary I ever set for myself. The Lord is slowly and painfully turning me into a more bold and joyful daughter of the one true God.
“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” ~Anatole France
