Well guys,
Here we are.
The 8 months later that I talked about in My World Race Goals blog has come.
I’ve been around the world and back again. I’ve been away from my family and any sense of my familiar life for 266 days now.
I’ve experienced things I never could’ve imagined.
I’ve seen the Lord work in ways that I didn’t know were possible.
And I’ve grown in immeasurable ways.
So I think now is the perfect time to reflect on my goals from the beginning of the race. I said they were immeasurable then and sure enough, they still are now. There’s no way to quantify what my squad and I just went through. The Lord is VAST and I’d be silly to try to simplify that enough to measure.
When I wrote about my goals at the beginning of the Race, the categories I used were my relationship with God, my relationship with others, our squad’s impact, and other personal goals.
In the category of my relationship with God, I said I wanted to grow in dependence and trust. Looking back on this category blows my mind because of how much I’ve grown. I learned a lot at the beginning of the Race about an eager yes and I’ve seen myself grow in joyful obedience to God. I’m also currently learning a lot about relying on God’s strength and not doing anything on my own. I expected this Race to be all about helping other people, but it’s helped me more than I could’ve ever anticipated. I’ve been learning how to truly love God and live in a relationship with Him that leads to living out of an overflow of His love and care.
My relationships with others is also a wild one to look back on. My team has been one of the biggest blessings of the entire Race. They quickly became some of my best friends and they taught me a lot about what strong, Godly community looks like. My team loves me so well, they encourage me to be grow, and most importantly, they point me to the Lord. It’s a blessing to be able to do the same for them. The devil has used fear to hold me back from a lot of things in the past, including deep relationships with people, but God’s been breaking down those walls in amazing ways! I’m so thankful for it and for the relationships I can now have through that growth.
The next category is our squad’s impact. I love looking back and remembering what God has done in and through our squad. One person being sent out can have a huge impact in the Lord’s work- now imagine 44! We could partner with so many ministries, we could talk to people on the street in every direction, we could hold hundreds of kids, or we could build a bunch of sheds. Whatever we were doing, we were working with a mighty army. God’s been using us so much!! 1 Corinthians 3:7-9 are still the perfect verses for this. “So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.” When moving from country to country, we were regularly reminded of the fact that our job is to plant. We often have no idea what’s happening to the seeds we’re planting. I don’t know if the children’s books or the calendars of scripture we handed out are being read. I don’t know if the kids we taught “Jesus Loves Me” will remember that song enough to ever understand. I don’t even know how shared testimonies, Bible studies, or times of sharing the Gospel are being used. What I do know is that God makes seeds grow and I trust Him.
The category of personal goals was a challenge, but I still saw growth in them. My goals were to focus on letting go and being present. Staying present has been really hard for me in the last few weeks because I’m so excited for what’s next. However, I am absolutely not willing to check out. I regularly remind myself of what God can do with just a week or a day or an hour and I don’t want to give up being a part of that by rushing ahead of Him. The Race also definitely involves letting go of comfortability in many different areas, which is expected to be a challenge, but the work that God does in it is beyond worth it.
Through the roller coaster of life that comes with all the challenges and growth and hard times and blessings, I’m so thankful to have been able to walk through all of that on the Race, with a new found family.
God is good! And He Is Working!
