So last night I went into our room after dinner and realized that my backpack was missing. My backpack that held… a bag of all my past journals starting in Guatemala, all the letters from my family and friends, my plane tickets and wrappers of stuff from every country, all of my chargers/hard drive, my scrunchies and headbands, my jewelry, and my passport 🙂 I went into an immediate panic as my squad leaders ran around our base trying to find our security guards. At first I was angry and confused, asking God why this man would take all my favorite and most special things from my race and not like my money or something. My laptop, phone and wallet were sitting on the bed right next to my bag, but he only grabbed the things I couldn’t replace. After getting over my anger I just felt sadness that I would not be able to show my family all the things I had been saving or get to read back through the past 8 months to see and remember the growth I had experienced.
I prayed a lot that the Lord would bring the bag back to me somehow, but eventually I decided that the bag was not coming back, it was too dark and the guy could’ve been anywhere by then so I started praying for peace and perspective.
The next morning I got up and was already crying as soon as my eyes opened when I looked down and realized it really did happen, that all those things really were gone, but I got up and started about my day anyways. As I was making sandwiches for our bus driver one of my squamates ran in the kitchen screaming “they found it, they found it!!! they found your backpack!!!” I really didn’t believe her, but I went outside anyways and there it was in the hands of the security guard on the other side of the fence, accompanied by the boy who had stolen my bag. He looked about 16 and he refused to look at me. I felt heart broken as he stood there while we looked through my bag to see if everything was there. Apparently he had taken it and thrown it over the fence and was going to go back later to look through it, so some things were still out in the field missing, but nothing too important.
After they left I started trying to process all that had happened and see what the Lord was wanting to teach me or explain to me through all of that and I realized many things.
First that the Lord made me get to the point of saying “okay God it’s just stuff and this trip is not about the stuff, it’s about you, so I’m letting it go.” He didn’t tell me I couldn’t be sad, but I do think he wanted me to surrender over the “stuff aspect” of the world race and regain focus on the true goal of the trip.
Second that he can work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies, but that doesn’t mean he orchestrates the tragedies (quoted from The Shack). I saw this through the way my squadmates surrounded me. While I was standing out in the field crying my squad was all praying for me in the building. They were pitching in money to help pay for my new passport. They were coming up with ways to replace all the little things I had kept and one of my teammates wrote me a letter of memories from each month of the race because I was scared I was going to forget everything I had written down. He poured so much love on me and really brought our whole squad together through a silly little backpack.
Lastly I learned that he always has a plan. He brought my bag back without my faith in him that he would, and was able to teach me so much in the span of like 12 hours just through something small. He wanted me to rely on him and place him above everything else, which is exactly what I want to do, but just needed that push to remember to do it.
