When you decide to come on the World Race you realize that this will be a year of saying goodbye. You say goodbye to your job, family, friends, church, and all of the comforts of home when you leave for the race; and then every month you spend about 3 weeks pouring your heart and soul into people, ministries, and countries just to say goodbye and walk away. So as you can see, we say a lot of goodbyes on the World Race; but there is one goodbye that you don't really consider having to say for 11 whole months, until you do and it kind of breaks your heart.
The goodbye that you don't want to say is to a friend that you knew nothing about just 7 months prior; in fact, you didn't even know that he existed a year ago. Yesterday I said goodbye to one of my best friends, and it made me cry…quite a bit!
Meet Jake, one of the coolest(weirdest, grossest, and nastiest) guys that I know!
He was my team leader from the beginning, but was eventually raised up as our squad leader. He has been the person on O-Squad that has laughed with me (and at me), watched me cry, listened to me ramble on and on about my feelings, peed in my water bottle, aggravated me just like a brother would, challenged me in ways that other people don't do, gone to movies with me, entertained thoughts of a community house (he's actually going to go build one now in Tennessee), hugged me when I needed a hug, told me jokes when I just needed to laugh, he has been vulnerable with me and allowed me to be vulnerable with him; basically we have been privileged to just do life together for the last 7 1/2 months, and it has been so incredible! Very quickly he became one of my best friends; and then not long after that he became my brother.
This month his health hasn't been doing well, and I knew that he would be going home soon; but that didn't prepare me for the phone call that I got two mornings ago, the phone call that made my heart sink; and everybody on the squad knew that it would. Truthfully I still don't understand why this has to happen. I know that Jake needs to be at home and this is the best decision that he could have made for himself, but why did he even have to make it in the first place? But the truth is that the "why" doesn't really matter, what matters is what we all chose to do with this thing that none of us really like.
So even though I have cried (and I will probably cry some more) I will choose to remain present on my Race, and I will choose to encourage and uplift Jake, because God is totes going to use this to make His name famous! This is just the next step towards total healing for Jacob Fields; and I for one am ready for Jake to be healed!
