From the WR Media Kit (which can be downloaded from the homepage)
The World Race taps into an ancient human compulsion to take a spiritual pilgrimage. Aussies have their walkabout, Muslims have their Haj, and most Western Europeans have a “gap yearâ€� between high school and college. American college students have an abbreviated bacchanal [an occasion of wild and drunken revelry] – a week’s trip to Ft. Lauderdale in the spring that barely voices the urge to go somewhere and do something different. Many young people are coming of age without being truly initiated into the rest of their lives; they’re waiting for a meaningful rite of passage. They are under-challenged and ultra-coddled. They didn’t sign up for the future they’re being handed…This generation wants to do more than just see the world and do good things for it; this generation wants to be fully alive. This generation wants not just to be significant but to bring significance. The World Race seeks to be the impetus to set this generation’s growing momentum in motion.
I don’t know about you, but that description certainly resonated with me the first time I read it. Though far from the sole reason for the WR’s appeal to me, I think it would be insincere for me to deny the significance of such a motivation: the desire for a challenge, an adventure, a change from the patterns I’ve grown accustomed to, an opportunity to look at life through another lens before I spend the rest of my life staring at the same one. If you’ve talked to me for most of my college career and possibly before, maybe you’ve recognized it. I think there have been echoes of this desire, whether being drawn to the Peace Corps informational table my freshman year or the unshakable intrigue I had with Chris McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp, whose life is documented in Jon Krakauer’s book and subsequent movie, “Into the Wild:”
“The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything. He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd an onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence. Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfiltered experience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he even adopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he was now Alexander Supertramp, master of his own destiny.� (p22)
Similar themes in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club:
“You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.” (p149)
The Lord has granted me the incredible opportunity to go on the World Race, an adventure with eternal consequences. The goal goes far beyond a personal desire for escape or a challenge, but the glory of the God who designed and created these desires. As C.S. Lewis says in The Weight of Glory, “God makes no appetite in vain” (p56).
“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” – 1 Cor 10:31
Also, Training Camp starts on Saturday! I’ll be in White, GA from July 24-Aug 1, finally meeting face-to-face the incredible people I will be sharing the next 11 months with. For a brief FAQ of what training camp consists of, check it out here. I’m expecting an intense week, and would definitely appreciate your prayers for this week of preparation. It’s about to get real.
