It feels like just a few weeks ago I was planning to leave the country for a year to travel to 11 different countries, but yet it has been over 6 months since I flew out of the D.C. airport and headed to India. What a wonderful, awesome journey it has been!
Landing in Calcutta, India was immediate culture shock and it really did a lot to set the tone of the race for me. For the first time in my life I was thrust into poverty. I saw it everywhere I looked. I couldn’t escape it. No finding comfort in my nice suburban neighborhood I lived in, in beautiful, affluent Woodstock Georgia. I couldn’t surround myself with things that allowed me to live as if I didn’t know poverty existed. Although I didn’t know it or understand it at the time, I would never be able to go back to the life I lived before I left for the race. Now, 6 months into the race it is all too clear.
The life I have lived for the last 6 months has drastically changed me. My hope in this blog is to give you a few simplified lessons that I have learned and ways that I have changed, but much like its hard to depict every individual brush stroke in a painting, I also find it hard to articulate the individual lessons I learned. Maybe it will be best illustrated through how I live my life when I return to America and begin to live life with all of you again. But in the meantime….
INDIA, as I mentioned earlier, was a month of being surrounded by poverty, but it was also a month of learning to live in community with my teammates and learning patience and trust. At home, when I had a bad attitude or was upset about something I could find somewhere to go by myself. That luxury was now gone as I lived with 6 other people 24/7. By not being able to hide my flaws, I was forced to deal with them and to learn my identity in Christ and not in what others think of me. The Lord has really done a work in making me comfortable with who I am and how He created me.
In NEPAL, my biggest lessons were about orphans and widows. After reading 2 books (A Hole in Our Gospel and Compelled by Love) I asked the Lord to break my heart for what breaks His. He did, and sooner than I expected. The same day I prayed that prayer He sent our team to this sweet widow named Bisnamyu. I sat and cried with her out of the compassion the Lord had given me. Also, that month, He gave me a desire to give my life away for orphans… to love them and take them in and give them a home. Not sure exactly what that looks like yet but I know that is what He has called me to.
THAILAND was a month of dying and preparing for a new season. This month the Lord asked me to give up several things to Him. To give Him my fear, my time and my possessions. This is a lesson I am still learning how to walk out daily. A big part of that lesson is also learning to take risks. I always want to be certain of an outcome before I will take the next step, but the Lord is teaching me that, that is not how He works. Faith is a requirement of this life that I have chosen with Him.
MALAYSIA was one of my hardest months. I loved our ministry but spiritually I was in a dry place. The Lord had asked me to give up several things in Thailand and this was a month of following through with that and learning to walk it out. In the midst of it, it was really hard but through it I learned even more to trust God when it didn’t make sense and rely on Him.
The Lord taught me a lot about not having expectations in CAMBODIA and actually enjoying living with a lot less than I thought I needed. Cambodia is actually once of my favorite months and the Lord gave me joy even in the midst of some really hard circumstances. The people we were able to interact with in Cambodia, made it so worth it!
Last month, in VIETNAM, the Lord gave us the awesome opportunity of a test run for what ministry will be like at home. Since Vietnam is a closed country, official ministry outings were few and far between, but our everyday life was ministry. So, I learned a lot about being proactive, initiating, and making my daily life a ministry opportunity.
At this point, its so hard to believe that its ALREADY been 6 months and at the same time that its ONLY been 6 months. I have already been changed so much, but I have no doubt that the Lord will use these last 5 months to continue to shape me into who He created me to be.
Thanks for all your love and support so that I can be here!
