For me, the World Race ended six months ago. That’s half a year. That’s more than half the time I spent traveling the world loving on locals in twelve different countries.
Every day since I stepped foot on American soil on May 20th, I’ve wished it back. And now, sixth months later, I wish it back more than ever. I want the nights of sleeping on the floor, the days of sitting in church listening to a language I couldn’t understand, the hours of praying for people who couldn’t understand English, the sticky and smelly bus rides from country to country, the days with more purpose than I could wrap my mind around, and the people I lived it out with.
You see, the World Race changed my life.
When I left for the World Race on July 1, 2015, I felt full of shame from the way I had once lived, shut off to the idea of others having a faith different than my own, alone in a room full of people I called friends and misunderstood by the society I was living in. But the day I left, I knew Jesus was going to strip me apart and rebuild me in the ways He saw me then and still sees me today. I knew He wanted to use me to speak healing over the sick, feed the poor and share His love with those, who like me, felt unworthy to be loved.
Throughout my first month, I felt more shame from my past than I had in years. I used to live a life I hated thinking about. A life of abuse — I was abused by others and abused myself. As I started living a life honoring to God, I buried my past in hopes I would forget the sins I’d committed. The night before we left South Africa, I made the second best decision of my life — to be baptized by my teammates at sunrise on our last morning in Jeffreys Bay. When I was raised up from the frigid water, I felt redeemed for the first time in my adult life. I finally knew I was dead to the sin of my past and could live a pure life of redemption. I left my past, full of shame and regret, behind.
During my second month, the Lord introduced me to the battle field of spiritual warfare and led me into an entire night of prayer alongside my squad. For increments of an hour, my squadmates piled into the candlelit kitchen a few at a time to pray and intercede for the country of Swaziland, El Shaddai (the orphanage we were living at) and everyone we’d met since we’d arrived. I spent twelve hours experiencing the prayers, the outcries, the dreams, the visions, the poems, the songs and the tears of my squad. The Holy Spirit filled the room as the sun set and rose again and I was full of the Spirit of Victory when breakfast began.
A week after arriving to Mozambique, I met a blind man named Orlando. Two of his sons lived at Kedesh Santuario, the boys home my team and I lived at for our third month. Orlando’s home was unlivable for even someone who had perfect vision, though it was a threat to him because he could neither see or get around without his wheelchair. As I sat and listened to Orlando read his favorite passage from the book of John, I observed his hands as his fingers slid across the pages of brail. Tears filled my eyes and I knew the Lord had sent me there for more than it had seemed. Within eight days, my team and I raised $1,300 to have the roof of Orlando’s home replaced. With a new roof, there would no longer be a risk of Orlando drowning when the rain poured down. Instead, he would only hear the storm, rather than feeling it flood his home.
As I was laying on my sleeping pad watching the documentary “Holy Spirit” in India during month four, the Lord asked me a question. “Why did you go on the World Race?” To make your name known, I replied, as I had spoken so many times before. “Are you?” He asked me bluntly. I was forced to face the reality of what I’d been doing. Though I had all the right intentions, I had only been serving alongside other Christians. I hadn’t spent much time seeking out those who hadn’t heard the name of Jesus. I hadn’t made His name known.
He gave me a vision of a marketplace in a nearby town my team and I had visited earlier in the month. “Go,” He said. “And worship.” Lukhipur is the home of mostly Hindu’s who worship more than three million gods. The locals were in the midst of a four-day festival in which they worshipped gods they spent weeks building, all lining the streets. After much prayer, my team felt God had also laid it on their hearts and we decided to step out in faith, trust the Lord and let Holy Spirit lead us.
Deciding to go into the middle of the market to worship and talk to Hindu’s about Jesus came with a lot of risk but we were covered in Christ’s peace. We went. We worshipped. We prayed. We laid hands on Hindu’s and Muslim’s. We led teenagers to accept Christ into their hearts. And this beautiful man here received healing in his legs. He regained strength in his body, stood up and walked as if he was sixteen again. His smile filled his face and he was overwhelmed with joy.
In the two months to follow, I experienced a season of depression. I was called into a leadership position I didn’t think I could possibly have any purpose in; I witnessed children as young as seven years old huffing glue and handfuls of children being beaten by one another due to the caste system in Nepal; I watched men treat women with as much respect as they treated the stray dogs that roamed the streets, and; I felt helpless as I sat outside a coffee shop in Vietnam and listened to an American man tell my teammate and I about the pleasure he got from paying visits to the local massage parlors.
Just when I didn’t think I could take another day of darkness, the Lord brought me into the deepest intimacy I’d ever experienced as I began a 21 day fast during my seventh month. [You can read about why I chose to do it here.] Each morning, I rose with the sun and went to the rooftop of my favorite coffee shop in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I spent the morning worshipping and dancing with Jesus for the first time since I was a young child. I then spent hours reading His word, falling deep in love with who He is. I depended on the Lord for my nutrients, strength, energy, patience, knowledge and well-being. During the three weeks, I only had two very hard days. Two days in which I withheld food rather than fasted to spend time with the Lord. He sustained me through it all and nurtured the relationship I shared only with the Father.
During one of my favorite months of the Race, I experienced the Lord’s love and adoration for me through 40 little girls at Sending Hope International in Thailand. Every morning before leaving for school and each night before going to sleep, my little sisters would raise their arms in praise of what Jesus had done for them. As tears rolled down my cheeks, I wondered how many of them hadn’t seen their parents in the last year or two. You’d never know if they felt any pain or absence in their hearts because they were full of Holy Spirit. They knew their Father and He alone was enough for them to share all the love and joy they had in them. On our last night with the girls, they held a ceremony in which they performed the sweetest of songs for us as each of them, as well as the staff, washed our feet. There wasn’t a dry eye on my face or those of my teammates and nothing in us wanted to part ways with the family we’d grown to love so deeply. Saying goodbye as we walked them to school the next morning was the hardest goodbye I’d experienced in eight months.
Throughout the last leg of the Race, I experienced the worst sunburn and sweatiest days as I travelled through the heat of Central America.
One afternoon in the beginning of month nine, I was approached by a man covered in his own vomit. I quickly shut the door of the house I was living in to avoid having a conversation with him. I immediately felt as if I had denied my Father and spent the next days repenting and asking the Lord to break me for what broke Him. The rest of the month my heart shattered for the alcoholics I saw passed out on the street corners day in and day out in Guatemala. Even though we were weary somedays, my teammate Kelsey and I began talking to them about the Lord’s redemption. Through those experiences, the Father revealed a deep passion I have for loving on the homeless and sharing Christ with those who live in the same ways I used to — abusing drugs and alcohol.
On Easter Sunday, I had the privilege of baptizing a sister and previous teammate of mine in the Pacific Ocean in El Tunco, El Salvador. She chose to proclaim her love for Jesus, die to her old self and rise from the water with a new identity. I was so vividly reminded of what Jesus had done for us so many years before, saving us from having to live unto the world.
I learned a tiny bit of how patient, kind, forgiving and understanding our Father is as He watches His children live each day throughout my month in Honduras. The Lord continued to strip me of my judgement towards others and set me free from fears I had of being honest with myself. Though it was one of my most difficult months on the Race, He showed me just how far He’d brought me since leaving home ten months earlier.
And finally, throughout my last month on the Race, the Lord showed me the importance of community. Both the community I was currently living in and the community the Lord had blessed me to live alongside of for the entirety of the eleven months. We worked the dry Nicaraguan land, participated in feeding programs for the local children, prayed for the community, visited the unfit prisons and pressed into our last few weeks with one another.
And then final debrief came, so much quicker than I ever imagined.
Third Generation U Squad reunited for one last week of reflection. As I prepared to go back home, I reminisced with my closest friends about the healing’s we’d seen and experienced ourselves, the “mountain top” moments we shared, the times we peed our pants, the days we played outside in the rain, the people we met throughout the year, all the Creation we laid our eyes on and the ways the Lord changed our lives through the World Race.
We laughed and we wept. We swam in the ocean, played volleyball on the piping hot sand, bought the last of our souvenirs, ate some really good food, took ridiculous amounts of pictures, dressed up for a banquet, worshipped as one voice and toasted to the best and hardest year of our lives.
We celebrated one another and how much we’d grown since we first met at Training Camp under the scorching Georgia sun a year earlier. Because the truth is, not one of us was close to the same person we were when we said see-ya-later to America.
We had no comprehension of what it was going to be like to leave — to not have another numbered month, foreign country and questionable living situation ahead; to get on a plane without one another; to think about sleeping in a bedroom alone; to not have to wait in line to shower; to not have at least six shoulders to cry on at any given moment and to think about seeing America less than twenty-four hours later. But it was reality. The World Race was over. And although our experiences weren’t the same, our experiences impacted us the same. Our lives were changed forever.
