Sometimes God calls your cell phone. Sometimes, he uses a land line. Occasionally, he tweets. But in this instance, he decided to use email. Hundreds of emails that is. And I’m not even joking. Let me explain:
I graduated college as a graphic design major and landed a job as a web designer. The first day on the job, I was asked to create an HTML email to promote our products. Well, one email became two, two became three, and three became… well a few hundred. After a year of making emails, I began to reconsider how I was spending my time. Don’t get my wrong, I enjoyed my job and loved the people I was working with, but it just struck me one day that I was spending my life making emails. Emails that most people didn’t even open.
It was about that time that I heard about this book on the radio by Max Lucado called “Outlive Your Life”. The concept is to do something in your life that makes a difference in the world long after you’ve left it. I wanted to do this, so I began to pray about it. I was quickly convinced that God had something big in store for me but I didn’t know what it was yet.
So I kept working. The problem was: I had no idea what I wanted to be doing if it wasn’t making emails. I kid you not, I changed my mind on a weekly basis of what I wanted to do. First it was design, then it was business management, then personal training, then disaster relief. I even decided to become a writer at one point.
It was about the time I got to disaster relief that I realized that I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but that I wanted to do something to make a difference. Now my older sister, Shannon, spent 9 months doing missions work after she graduated college, and my little sister, Skylar, was getting ready to spend the summer in Peru doing missions work. So I thought to myself: maybe I would like to do missions work. Once I started thinking about it, it just make sense. Now is the perfect time in my life to do this, and I might not ever have the opportunity to do it again. So I started asking around.
Someone from one of my bible studies mentioned The World Race, and so I looked at their website one day. And the next day. And the next. And the next. And the next. And pretty much every day since then. So I knew it was time. Just commit, Stacy. Take a dive. Go big or go home. Out live your life.
And that, my friends, is how I decided to do this trip.
