5 years ago, I was a student in Abilene, Texas. I learned that a friend of mine, Bethany Anderson, was going to go on The World Race. I had never heard of it. The more I learned, the more I thought she was crazy. Who in their right mind would want to go and travel to third world countries and live out of a backpack for 11 months? That was something I would NEVER do.
So, how did I get here? How did I get from NEVER to NOW?
How did I get to leaving in January 2020 to spend an entire year serving across the world in 11 different countries?
Anyone who knows me knows that I love serving on mission trips. I’ve been on more than a dozen mission trips in my life since 9th grade. Most of them were fairly local, traveling to some small, under served city in Texas. A few were to Mexico. One was to China. They were all short term mission trips lasting at most 3 weeks. The World Race is a different story. It’s something I’ve never experienced. Something I can only begin to prepare for. But I love mission trips and I love challenges. I love to watch the Lord work in strange and mysterious ways. Put those things together and you start to wonder if maybe this is something you want to do.
Not long after my friend Bethany’s trip, I graduated and left Texas. For the first time in my life, I lived in another state and I was 9 hours from home. I hadn’t thought about The World Race in at least a year. Bethany’s trip was old news, easy to forget when you’re busy building a new community in a foreign place. It was easy to find my bearings in Louisiana. Culture-wise, north Louisiana isn’t all that different from west Texas, except that they call their grocery store shopping carts “buggies.” I’ll never get used to that. I was still a student and college culture wasn’t that different either. ULM was a still a fairly small school. I knew what to do to find groups and get plugged in. Church hopping wasn’t too daunting either because Methodist culture is fairly consistent across the board. I came to a lot of familiar things in Louisiana, and I was surprised to find that I was still ok. It wasn’t too bad. Going home only a few times a year wasn’t as awful as I thought it’d be once I got myself busy and got plugged in with the Christian groups on campus and made friends.
I was happily, nervously hopping around town to all the Methodist churches in Monroe, Louisiana looking for the right church home. But nothing seemed quite right. Finally, and rather reluctantly, I gave in to God’s tug to go across the river to West Monroe to try out the churches there. I didn’t want to. They were a little bit further away from my house. I had plenty of excuses. But obedience mattered more. The last church I went to was First United Methodist Church in West Monroe. There, something clicked. I knew this was the church I was supposed to go to. But I still gave God a hard time about it, jokingly. Why on Earth did he want me to go across the river when there were perfectly good churches in Monroe?
Immediately, God thrust me into meeting the needs of my new church. I served in children’s ministry for a time and was pushed far outside my comfort and desire zones. But it was all for the Lord. That was what mattered.
Shortly after I started attending, I learned that a girl in my church, Mary Cox, was going on, you guessed it, The World Race. The church, and to a small degree I, poured support into her trip and funded her race. And then she was gone. In the blink of an eye. I guess that’s what happens when you leave the country. Once in a while her name popped up. But it popped up again A LOT right before it was time for her to come home. She came home and gave a presentation to the church about where she’d gone and what she’d done, with one of her most memorable stories being the impact that cleaning an African long toilet had on her.
That one Sunday morning reignited my intrigue with The World Race. It wasn’t really something I wanted to do, but I wasn’t as against is as NEVER anymore and it was kind of fun to dream about. I obsessively checked the website for a little while to see where they were going on future races. I also learned that another friend of mine had actually been thinking about going on The World Race for a long time. She’d even pinterested some ideas of what to pack and all that fun stuff, but she was engaged and wasn’t really that committed to the idea in the present stage of her life. So after a few months in 2017, I stopped thinking about The World Race.
I don’t know why, a year later, I decided to check the website again to see where they were going, but I did. And something in me was different. The dreams of going became suddenly more enticing, more real. Probably the fact that graduation from school was actually a thought on the horizon played a role. Probably the fact that my commitment wasn’t real played a role, because, let’s face it, in 2018 I was still a year and a half from graduating. Probably the fact that I had no idea what I was going to do with my life after graduation played a role.
But I think the biggest factor was the fact that now, in September of 2018, going on The World Race felt like something I was capable of doing. I’d been away from home for 3 years with only phone calls and a few visits back to Texas. Leaving my family and friends didn’t seem so daunting. Spiritually, I had been challenged to think about evangelization by the groups I was connected with on campus over the last couple years. I still like challenges and I still have a desire to grow as a person and in my faith. How better to do that than true, deep surrender to the Lord by trusting that I can go into a place with only a few things on my back for a long, but temporary, period of time seeking to fulfill the Great Commission that we’re called to as believers to spread the Gospel to those who need to hear the story of Christ.
So why do I want to go on The World Race?
Why NOW?
Now, I KNOW this is something I CAN do. I know this is something that honors the Lord and something that will build me up in the most important relationship of my existence. I want to do Kingdom work for the God who makes all things work for good. I have seen and experienced miracles in my life and I want to see more. I TRUST God to open the right doors for my future and I see him opening doors for The World Race.
I think I’m supposed to DO something about all this.
The longing and desire in my heart to go on The World Race means something.
God has something He wants me to be part of.
I am desperate to follow that call, even if it means pushing myself to places I never thought I could go 5 years ago.
And so I will go. I will be the hands and feet of Jesus Christ. I will take on the task of preparing for a year of my life that I can barely imagine and am so excited and terrified about. I will take on the task of raising $20,000 dollars and trusting that God will provide. I will try and give him control in my weakest areas like planning for what on Earth I’m supposed to take and do to get ready. I have almost no idea what I really need. But God knows. And I’m happy that he’s put a great organization in my path to partner with me. And I’m grateful that he’s put a community of support in my life to help me and to question my decisions in this.
Perhaps you, the person reading this blog, are meant to play a role in my story. Perhaps you’re called to support me with prayer or finances or suggestions or questions or encouragement. I need it all. Will you be my partner in serving the Kingdom?
Sincerely,
Sabrina Wegner
