I have sat down to write a blog so many times. If you’ve followed along this year, you’ve noticed that my typical updates include a lesson from each month of the race and that my most recent post was from month eight: Georgia (oops). However, I have indeed sat down to write an Armenia blog on several occasions and every single time, I felt as if I didn’t have a complete lesson to write. So I went to Papa God and asked Him why this was happening. In response, He told me that the lesson I was supposed to write was for my final three months of the race. And as usual, after bringing it to God, it all made sense.
My last three months of the race took place in Armenia, Lebanon, and Jordan. While the experiences in each were very different, the theme remained the same. Another commonality in these three months was my new/final team of the World Race: Mosaic of Cedars. Every team I had been on, every experience I had had, every challenge I had overcome up to this point led to the very lesson God brought me on the World Race for (twice!). And I feel like I should explain more about these before going into the final three months.
The very first thing God wanted me to know on this journey was that He loved me. I wrote a blog about my very first training camp that you can find HERE, but in summary; I came into the World Race knowing that God loved me but not believing it and not walking in it. And yet, in my first training camp, God used several different people at different times to tell me that I was loved by Him. Suddenly, this phrase became more than a Bible-Belt-Billboard. I realized that the Creator God, the Alpha and the Omega, the Savior, the Lord of heaven and of earth, loves me as His child. He always has. He always will. And that knowledge wrecked me.
“We love because he first loved us.” – 1 John 4:19
And God wasn’t done there. Because as John tells us in His letter, it is FROM His love that we are able to love at all and He calls all of His children to walk in love. After all, the entire law can be summed up in the two greatest commandments:
“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” – Matthew 22:36-40
I thought I loved and trusted God when I left for the race. I remember one journal entry in particular from my very first month on the field in August 2017. God asked me if I trusted Him. My response makes me laugh today because it was, “yes, of course I trust you!” Little did I know, the very next month, my love and trust in Him would be tested when I received word that my dad had passed away at home very suddenly and unexpectedly. People have often told me how strong they think I am or how faithful I must be because I went back on the field within three weeks. What a lot of y’all can only guess from my blog posts from that year is that I fought with God tooth and nail every step of the way. Never in my life had I been so convinced that I was where God wanted me to be, yet felt so incredibly angry and unqualified at the same time. But in my very first month back on the field from the funeral, I journaled with God again. This time, I was very uncertain of my level of trust in Him. It was in the mountains of Morocco that God, rather than say how disappointed He was in me, or how upset He was in my lack of faith, said that He wanted to reintroduce Himself to me.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:1-5
He made a promise to me on that rooftop. He promised me that as long as I sought His face, as long as I pursued His heart and His mind, as long as I made the choice to get to know Him more (and love Him even more deeply in that process), that that darkness I was feeling then, and anytime after, would be overcome. And man, words cannot describe how beautiful Jesus is. The more He revealed Himself to me, the more and more I fell down in complete awe because I could not believe just HOW good He is.
And it is because of that goodness. It is because I came into a deeper realization of His love for me and for His creation, that I said yes to going back out on the field.
