First thing’s first, I would like to thank my family, friends, and faith builders in my life that have edified me in my walk with Christ, reaffirmed with with words of reinforcement and encouragement, and haven’t given up or walked away from me, particularly in these uncertain and indecisive past few years of my life. I wish to thank my mentor in my ministry candidacy process, Pastor Dan, whom God used to help give me the push I needed to take this step. I also, most importantly, want to thank Debbie, a very dear sister in Christ, without whom I would have never come to have known about The World Race!
For those of you who are reading this that do not know me, it would do for me to give you a few quick facts about me. I am 22 year old Pennsylvanian born and raised; and a rather tall fellow at that who enjoys old shows, old music, old… everything, haha! I’m rather a history buff if you couldn’t guess it. My hobbies include a game called Heroclix (it’s uh, like chess, only more confusing/fun!). OH- I also work as a one year-old-teacher and do everything from getting painted on to being used as a human tissue (But I am also given and get to give lots of hugs and get to teach and watch these kiddos grow in new and great ways each day, so it’s not all that bad! 🙂 )
Well now that that’s over, onto why I’m here writing this. So here we go. A warning, this is not exactly the typical Race blog. But anyway, here goes nothing! This is hard… and yet… liberating!
I want to tell you all, my dear friends and family, that since high school things have been great, that my faith has been a driving force in my life, and that I’ve had all my stuff together. Well, I haven’t. Not even remotely. The last three and a half years of my life have felt like one endless tempest and I’ve been beaten and torn and tossed about. In that time I had largely left my faith go amok while maintaining the bare minimum image of an upstanding Christian. At the same time, I had so many questions arise within myself about faith, God, etc., and instead of seeking answers I wallowed in dismay and discouragement. What’s more, I was fearful. I knew that God had put a call onto my life, but the thought scared me and I pulled a Jonah and ran away to Tarshish, so to speak.
So I pursued solely my own desires in order to avoid the reality of it all and I shut myself in; I disregarded the problems and cares of friends and acquaintances; of brothers and sisters in Christ. Not only did I nearly completely abandon my faith but I abandoned myself in doing so. I had become withdrawn, introverted. It came to the point that every day was a very real and even desperate struggle. I was depressed and felt there was no way out of drowning in life. I was in a rut, I wasn’t going anywhere. And to top it all off, I was still, through all the torment, largely content to be in that place. I was (and for now still am) living at home- in the comforts of what I knew was certain, unchanging, and largely in my control. Now I am thankful every day for my parents and the support not just physically but also spiritually that they’ve shown me since I left college. But faith not lived outside the walls of your home and your comfort will wither quickly and my motivation towards my faith and my future gradually dissipated over time.
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Fast forward to late 2015 through 2016. Without going to great depth, suffice to say that the last year or so has challenged the boundaries to that comfort zone and dared me to change the course I was on. A number of profound and at times excruciating experiences as well as meaningful connections and relationships that I have encountered have reinvigorated me; have pushed me to reevaluate God, my faith, and myself. God (and I myself even) put me through the wringer spiritually. When I finally stopped looking at myself in the mirror and seeing just myself but God as the true unchanging, never-failing foundation of everything and life and started paying attention to the world around me the dismal, dreary clouds that had bogged me down and blinded me began to lift. I am very much so thankful to those people and those experiences that touched my life and helped me get back on my feet. They have given me something I have lacked and longed for for a long while: resolve.
It’s working on a year since I rounded that corner in life and it’s been every bit the roller coaster ride you stalwarts of the faith would expect it to be. I’ve picked up where I had left off in pursuing God’s call in my life by beginning the process to ministry within the church and have already reached several milestones in that process! It was in pursuing that process with my mentor, whom I mentioned previously, that I underwent a period of great uncertainty as to what ministry specifically God was calling me towards which ultimately led me to this point. I had come into the process feeling fairly confident that I was meant to become a pastor (yeah, SURPRISE to those of you that I didn’t get to tell yet! 😀 ) but after a month or two into it I went from being certain to being anything but that. I prayed and dwelt upon discerning that specific call for several months on end to no avail. It was during that time of seeking that I felt God pulling on my heart again, this time in another direction, and the direction I felt Him pulling me towards was the ABSOLUTE LAST one I wanted to go.
See, God has stirred within me the recollection of a friend’s casual invitation she had submitted to me a year prior to this thing called The World Race. Now at the time I thanked her kindly and, as you might expect, I swept it promptly under the rug. Go around the world to 11 different countries for a year? And not to the countries you exactly daydream about going to, either. To take someone like myself who’s a fan of consistency and turn his whole world into chaos? Not my cup of tea, to say the least. But what had started out as tugging of my heart turned into a full-on, uproot-a-mountain kind of pull! When I finally threw myself down before God and let the realization that God wasn’t just politely asking me but TELLING me, shouting to me that I NEEDED to make this leap of faith, to grow into this next tier of my relationship with Him and accepted it… it was the first time in my life… that I KNEW I was on the right track; that I was running the race Paul spoke of to the Corinthians. I stopped fighting this war with myself and with God- I surrendered myself!
There’s much more that could be said and will be said likely in the future on that whole process, but that can wait for now. In the meantime there are a few things you SHOULD know.
While the feeling has been liberating, it has by no means been easy. The faith battle I have fought since that day I made this resolution has been a ferocious one and Satan has quite nearly thrown the whole book at me. Motivation, as I said, has been my Kryptonite these past few years and that didn’t disappear when I signed the dotted line to join this adventure. Quite honestly, I will have you know that I’ve known for nearly two months now that I would be going on this faith journey but have been altogether silent because I allowed Satan to keep me silent out of fear and a drained sense of drive to do so. I will continue to fight it likely every day for the rest of my life because He knows that’s where I am weak, but hey, as Paul tells us in Corinthians so I will also glory in my weaknesses, for it is in those areas that Christ works in and through me. I will need your prayer, dear reader, EVERY day on this journey from now to its completion, especially.
But I hope you take heart from my story. I am not proud of this things I did and I will continue to fail and underachieve in more than one way in my life. I am no more or less human that the rest of you and we all imbued with the stain of sin and failure. But I’m not ashamed anymore to share this, because I know that each person who reads this blog has had things they are not proud of and have experienced trials in life that left you feeling desolate, despicable, and worthless. I want you to know that truly there is NO point so low in life where God will not meet you and reach out to you. I want you to realize that your mistakes, even the ones you made five minutes ago DO NOT have to define the you of right now or tomorrow if you choose to take a stand, to make a change. And I want you to know that while you may feel like you cannot overcome your faults and failures, God’s grace IS REAL; His mercy is unfailing and His love is without measure and readily abounds around you, through you! Listen, I was at rock bottom on the outside and the inside, and even then He didn’t turn away from me and He never thought a moment of taking His plans for my life off the table. YOU MATTER TO HIM!
So now I look to you, my friends. In order to make this possible, I look to you for prayer and words of edification as I take on this race. Yes, that means I will likely be coming to you asking if you can donate financially to help me make this experience possible. But your prayer and support is EVEN MORE important to me and is what I really look forward to and hope I can reciprocate. I rely fully on God and His provision and guidance in this path, but I also need YOU! As Paul tells us, so I impress upon my heart and hope you do as well that while the body is made up of many parts, they all come together to make one, whole, functional body. So I need you now more than ever before, my fellow prayer warriors and teachers and empowerers to lend me your gifts so that Christ may be glorified in not just myself and my actions in this trip but in us all.
So finally (thank you for hanging in there this long!) I hope you may be encouraged through the sharing of my story. May you feel emboldened to claim your own story, your testimony and give it AND yourself now over to God in whatever way you feel Him moving you to make Him the center and focus of your life give Him the glory. And, as you’ll be seeing me post A LOT in the coming year, so may you recall the words of Paul in Corinthians:
“Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it.” + Corinthians 9:24
I look forward to the adventure you and I will be embarking on together! Let’s run the race- TOGETHER.
