Recently, I’ve really been going through a time of trying to figure out who I am. I came home from my world race trip 10 months ago, and here I am in Colorado, in the middle of a global pandemic, in one of the most controversial moments in American history, and I find myself asking myself “are you happy with who you are? Do you actually like the Shawn you’re becoming?”
Lets backtrack real quick to when I came off the race, and dive into what I went through. I thought that coming off the race was going to be the easiest thing in the world for me. I was like “I got this, I got my community and I got Jesus. This will be easy.” That couldn’t be the furthest thing from the truth. I’m going to be straight up with all of you, it FREAKING SUCKED. I had forgotten that While my life was on pause for a year, everyone else’s lives continued, they didn’t stop and wait for me. So i came home Expecting to find community, and what I found was that my community was now going to be my family. I found that what I had on the race was never going to be replicated in my community back home. And the reason being is I had these expectations that things would be the same. I put these Unattainable expectations without even communicating them, and so when I got home and found out that people had moved, people had stopped meeting, it crushed me because I immediately let that define my community. So I dove into a deep depression. It felt like none of my friends ever asked “hey how are you?” It was mainly “what was your favorite country?”, and im going to be honest, there was times where I wanted to look them dead in the eye and ask if they even cared how I was. Because inside I was screaming. I was hoping someone would be able to understand what was going on in my head. But how could they? How could I dare to even expect people who had no idea what I went through the past 11 months, how could I get them to expect how I was feeling?
I couldn’t, and so I put these unfair expectations on my friends that I never voiced which led me to an even darker place. So I tried to smile through it all and pretend like everything was ok. But let’s be real. I wasn’t being me. I was being what i thought everyone wanted, the shawn that had gone and preached the gospel to the world. The shawn that was still the same.
But I wasn’t. I’m not. I’m different. The world race changed so many of my viewpoints on culture, on religion, on people, on how to act, on what living out a kingdom mindset looks like. But what had happened was I had come home from 11 months, doing ministry 5 times a week, being in a community where we prayed together, worshipped together, had team time and gave feedback to each other, to doing ministry one day a week for maybe three hours, no worship, non prayer, no team time, no feedback, and living with my family. So, ya, it was hard as hell. I had expected to come off the race and be able to share what I had learned with so many people, but what I have come to find, is that at the end of the day, people didn’t care so much about how it changed me, but more so about my favorite part, or favorite country. They don’t ask the hard questions. And ive come to terms with that. That’s ok, I can’t expect them to. But I can’t sit here and pretend like I’m the same Shawn I was before I left.
Back to my opening paragraph. “Do you actually like the Shawn you’re becoming?” If I were to answer this question 10 months ago, I would have said I despised everything about who I was becoming, how I was behaving, how I was treating others. however, I look at myself now, and I realized that its ok to be me. To be the real me. The version of Shawn who tells corny jokes, the version who is socially awkward, the version who is still very much awkward when it comes to talking to females, the version that cries when he sees people he cares about crying. But most importantly, the version that Loves Jesus, and Loves others. At the end of the day, that’s who I want to be known as. Because if I learned anything from this amazing trip that changed my life, it’s that loving Jesus and loving others changes everything.
