So I woke up in Africa one morning last week, and it hit me: Im 2/3 done with this thing called the world race. This crazy, difficult, beautiful adventure with the Lord filled with friends and growth and lessons to be learned. Ive been to four continents in the past six months, lived in three countries, and visited three others, while learning too many lessons to count.
As I enter into my final leg of the race, the real, raw, hard-to-breathe, about-to-pass-out, final three months, I find myself filled with joy and sadness at the thought of leaving these people I’ve grown to live and love with.
But I’ve realized that the race is a measuring cup. You start small, and as you continue on, your ingredients that once filled a teaspoon in month one end up to be a full cup of goodness in month nine. And it just keeps growing as the Lord keeps adding the ingredients he sees fit with every month that passes. Some months he throws in salt to clean the wounds of brokenness, others he offers a pinch of sugar to sweeten the moments that I’ll be missing in three months. And sometimes he likes to spice it up with trials that test my faith. But most of the time the Lord pours in flour to fill in the gaps between immense joy and desperate despair.
Without the fullness of flour there is no substance to carry the weight of the sweet, salty, and spicy moments from the Lord. Appreciation of the extraordinary comes from the beautiful ordinary that fills our souls with the goodness of life in our lungs and love in our hearts.
The world race is a crazy adventure. But it’s also just my life. I’ve lived in Ecuador, India, and now Zambia for six months with a tribe of people I now call family. We love orphans, speak in churches, dig up rocks, paint murals, teach English, share meals, take public transportation, clean our house, sleep in tents, kill spiders, and sometimes we watch movies together if we have wifi. It’s a good life, it’s an ordinary life that becomes extraordinary with the grace and goodness of the father. As I approach the final season of this life on the race, I find myself more and more thankful for the flour mixed into the salt and sugar, because those are the times and memories I’m going to miss when I’m cleaning my own house back at home, when I’m eating a meal with my family in California, when I’m watching a movie with my dad or sleeping in my own bed alone, and not sharing a room with six other girls.
My measuring cup is slowing filling itself up with the ingredients of life that the Lord knows I need just when I need them, with the hopes of being poured out into my own bowl of life when I return to the states. I’ve learned to no longer search just for the sweet moments that I know I’ll miss, but to seek out the spirit in the simplicity of life, where his voice is often louder and more clear and the spirit moves at a constant pace of love, acceptance, joy, and grace.
