Don’t Go on the World Race.

Dear Kenzi, 

Don’t go on the World Race. 

I really don’t think you should. Here’s why:

 

You’ll find yourself packing up your big pack for the last time, staring at the now much smaller bag that you remember was exactly 46lbs last September. Your throat will get tight and you won’t be able to stop the sting of tears on your sunburnt cheeks as your mind becomes a deluge of memories of everything you have seen in the past nine months of your life. 

You will reminisce on the anger that laid heavy on your heart the first week you arrived in Gainesville, Georgia. You will remember your burning thoughts: “God Gainesville? Instead of Romania? I could be ministering to people across the world right now, but instead I’m on a campus in the middle of no-where because of a pandemic.” You will remember finding yourself one day at the top of a hill crying tears of anger and sadness and brokenness because in your anger God decided to uproot some of the broken pieces of your own life. The dusty greyness that you would have rather kept buried far below in the unseen layers of your life. And, only there, the Potter will show you His beautiful desire to begin molding your deepest cracks and sharp curves unto His glory before you become a vessel to the nations. You will let Jesus put you on His potters wheel and with the same hands that bear the scars of the nails that held Him to the cross, He will begin to gently mold your inmost being. Over the next two and a half months in middle-of-no-where Gainesville, he will tear down the sides of your life that were broken and slowly you will watch new walls start to be built. 

And as you begin this process of saying “yes” to the potters wheel, you will be surrounded by people that you will share some of the deepest parts of your heart with. You will remember it being scary and uncomfortable and painful. And in that hurt, you will be met with a kind of love that loves even on your weakest days; a love that is reminiscent of the your Potter’s gentle touch. As those people learn to love you, you will find yourself learning to love them as you sit around a plastic dining room table for hours with party hats and lacroixe cans filled with wild flowers picked less than 10 feet away. The definiton of celebration that you once had will be replaced by people who teach you what it really means.

The feeling you had that one time you danced in the rain in a parking lot full of cars from all across the country will run wild in your head. Friendships were deepened through the voice of Camp and the feeling of wet clothes stuck to your skin. You’ll remember the mornings you woke up to 30 degrees weather and ended up clutching hot coffee with every piece of clothing you brought layered on your body. You’ll look back one day further on in your race and understand that abandonment in Gainesville was scratching the surface of the abandonment that was to come. All for the sake of Jesus. A cause that will clearly become worth your life. 

So here I tell you, don’t go on the World Race if you don’t want to see the last thing you could have ever desired turn into purpose and a chance to see your Father’s kindness. Don’t go if you don’t want to see that the hours you spent loving your teammates around the dinner table was actually the best preparation you could have gotten for loving the world. 

  

Over a month in, you’ll remember the way your chest filled with excitement at the chance to serve for the first time with the people that now held pieces of your heart so tightly. And you will hop into a van and drive 15 hours across three states to Lake Charles, Louisiana where the evidence of two hurricanes sometimes welled tears in your eyes. 

You’ll remember tearing out ceiling screws in the house where you met Miss Penny. Memories will resurface of the sweet sounds of Miss Penny praising Abba resounding throughout every nook and cranny of her house as you held a screw driver in your hands. You will always cherish the voice memo you kept on your phone of those joyful hymns accompanied by the piano. 

You will remember day two when your team pulled up to one of the poorest and most minority-filled neighbourhoods around. There you’ll meet a women who has been living in her car for months with her husband. The memory of that neighbourhood will always be engrained in your head as you stared down that street too many times wondering where the help was for the rest of the houses that were so blatantly broken. The days following, you will have to completely tear down the roof and your team will fight to build a new one, but the government will tell you it’s not your job. So you will be forced to settle for a temporary one knowing they probably won’t be able to afford a real roof for months and winter is coming. You will learn the dangers of loving big. How grief often beautifully accompanies compassion and yet somehow God makes people all still worth loving. And as you pull away from this house for the last time you will have no choice but to give all the broken pieces that literally lay before your feet back to God.

In those two weeks people will bring the Bible to life by the way they practice hospitality, by the way you’re served by the very people who serve alongside you daily. You will have seen compassion come to life as it takes on it’s true meaning as an action, not a feeling. Gratefulness will come in a box of fried chicken or a bag of fruit from a house owner who believes words alone won’t do to express their gratitude. Those 14 days will be days that the church will come together in a community that begs for every one to come to the table. Young and old. You’ll sit in plastic chairs and relive the stories of strangers before you met them. You’ll sing hymns and tunes and worship the same God who transcends generations upon generations and just can’t help but be faithful through them all. 

At the end of the two weeks, you will find yourself standing in a circle with tears collecting on your cheeks as you have to say goodbye to three men who changed your life. Three men who became like your dad in a place hundreds of miles away from your home all while pointing you back to your Heavenly Father. You will reminisce on how Daniel took you and three of your teammates on a 6am sunrise drive to the laundromat because he didn’t want you walking through the neighbourhood by yourselves. Or how Frank taught you how to use a pole saw because, “Girls can do the same things that boys do, most the time better.” And Palmer will always be remembered for the way his 70-year-old joints beat some of you in limbo halloween night and how he believed so sacrificially in the way God is working in your generation.

So here I tell you, don’t go on the race if you don’t want to see the depth of pain and brokenness turn into visible restoration. You’ll see hope abide in the dirt of literal destruction, because where destruction lies, God is even more near. You’ll understand more of the Gospel by coming face to face with loving people. The wealthy, the poor, the hurt. Don’t go if you don’t want to begin to understand a love that can love beyond the four walls of a church building and was actually never meant to stay there in the first place. 

 

Louisiana will rock your world and then you’ll drive back to Gainesville only to watch friend after friend get separated and quarantined. Tears of confusion will be shed as covid results come in positive and your whole squad, the people you just spend loving for two months, will be split into three houses tucked away from the world. You’ll be put in a little house on a hill and covid will look like it’s won, yet again, stealing every expectation and hope and idea of unity you once were holding. And in that same week that you wanted to declare another battle lost, you will watch this loss turn into a place for your Heavenly Father to fight for you. He will arrange the confusing, piece by piece, into a blend of rest and fulness before your very eyes. Some of the best memories of your whole race will spring from a week that you chose to ask for God’s perspective. Once again, you will spit in covid-19’s face and declare that even it still bows to God’s commands.

December will show up out of nowhere and you will go back home for Christmas and heavily grieve the fact that you weren’t in India like you had dreamed of for so long. And then you’ll remember the blessings that show up in the mess. But it’s messy. You’ll be reminded that although your circumstances failed you, God never did. That He remains good. And the blessing of another Holiday being surrounded by the family that fought for you to be on the race in the first place will taste sweeter than you could have imagined. 

So listen to me when I say just stay home in the first place if you aren’t willing to bear the mess of heavenly perspective. If you don’t want to see God give you more than you asked for after you obey and empty your hands of all that you once desired. 

 

The beginning of January will roll around and you will walk onto a plane for the first time after being reunited with all the people that hold your heart so close. The atmosphere of the plane will taste of unrelenting triumph. Covid didn’t win this battle; God made a way. 

Your feet will land in Costa Rica, the first country on your route, and you will see a coast that exalts beauty better than anything else you had ever had the opportunity to lay your eyes on. You’ll pick up the sandals on your feet and feel the black sand beneath your toes, but a sad jurisdiction will leave your heart with a little extra weight than you expected so much beauty to leave you with. You will see the gift of creation become an idol praised by the heart’s of men, and in the same moments you will watch the religion of New Age wrap it’s hands around the hearts of men and suffocate the freedom that is found in Jesus. The burden of “self” will become barefaced and heavy as you see the consequences of worshipping something that was never meant to be bowed down to. And your heart will break for a small, surf town of lost people as Jesus reminds you that you were once just as blind and lost in your own ways. 

You’ll end up sitting on a bench one afternoon during ministry with your Bible and a few friend, and a man named George will sit next to you with a curious ear for what you’re doing. You will be able to smell the alcohol on his breath as he leans in close to the pages of Psalm 117 that you read out loud. A conversation will be started and closely followed by dancing and reading some more of your favorite verses. Then one of your teammates will write a note on the random piece of journal paper found in your backpack and you will walk away praying over and over and over that George would sober up just enough to one day to read the words, “Jesus te ama,” written in messy hand writing and then conjure the memory of strangers dancing and reading and praying alongside him. Not because they felt like it, but because he is made in the image of the one true God and that makes him completely worth their time. 

There will be days in Costa Rica where the feeling of exhaustion and defeat reigns. You’ll hand mix concrete and machete a jungle for weeks and weeks and weeks and be so tired that you can’t physically or mentally do much anymore. There will be too many days to count where you just didn’t think you could get out of bed, when a rake felt heavier than it should have, where the pain in your muscles screamed louder than any other voice you could listen to. The cost of love is high, and you will have to decide, daily, if it’s worth paying. And through the pain of picking up another shovel or rake, the thought of the pain Jesus felt as he hung at Calvary will be painted at the forefront of your mind. Some days, through tears, you’ll stare at the blisters in your hands, and sown deep by your Father, honor will be reaped; you will look at your hands and be moved with greatness that they are a mere shadow of the holes in the hands of the Crucified. An honor that no work could have ever earned you. And that will become the beauty of it all: only at the end of your strength could grace become sufficient for you. 

Yet a lot of your days, the heart of celebration that was set into motion in Gainesville will be clearly reminiscent. Valentine’s Day will roll around and the men on your squad will throw a karaoke night celebrating the women. You’ll eat sweet pineapple out of plastic cups and wear funny hats and feel loved by the men God blessed to be in your life. You will never be able to forget the moment every single women on your squad put on an East Texas Baptist University uniform and played their heart’s out against a real women’s soccer team because they just needed an opponent. You’ll laugh as 18 missionaries step onto a field under the night lights and then you’ll play in a soccer game for the first time in two years. The freedom and reconciliation of full lungs and a burn in your muscles will outpour memories of the twelve years you dedicated your life to this sport. You’ll learn the way God cares so undeservingly for every detail of your life. He doesn’t waste a single thing if you don’t let Him. 

Halfway through you time in Costa Rica, you’ll remember that text. The one from Miss Penny saying she just moved into another temporary home in Louisiana because her’s still isn’t finished. You’ll count the months on your fingers of how long she’s waited for it to be safe to move back into her own home, and you will once again hear the whisper of the Lord say, “Give her back to me.” And trust in the Father will become a call beckoning to not just lay your own life in His hands, but the lives of every one else you have gotten the honor to love. 

More than anything, you’ll always remember Kishe and her baking skills, the way she danced, and her heart for women. You’ll remember Steven and His smile and the ways he grew in his boldness for the Kingdom over just a couple months. You’ll remember Connor and the unique friendship he had with random littles on the streets. Of the times Jordy danced at 5:30am with you to Chance the Rapper while frying sweet plantains for the whole squad and how the faithfulness of God was saturated in the stories he told about His life. Sammy will always be remembered for the way he sang everywhere. How he proclaimed His love for the Lord as he belted songs unashamed just like he was unashamed to know Jesus. 

So then, I say, growth and grace and abandonment and redemption and freedom, maybe it’s just not for you. 

You shouldn’t go. 

 

When you think of the Dominican, your last country, you’ll often feel contradicting emotions. 

You’ll remember the moments of victory, the smallest glimpses of the fruit of your labor that you got to taste, the feeling of dancing in the dark to the beat of celebration. You’ll remember the times you walked up a dirt hill to the only place where you could find good WiFi and how instead of being on your phone, you would end up talking for hours in broken Spanish with two of the most precious littles. They will share their cocoa fruit, and you’ll hold their kitten Lucy and laugh at the cows and stare at their most beautiful freckles. One day you’ll trade your hand washing bucket for the river down the mountain and you’ll gather your dirty clothes and some orange soap and sit on a rock while the river current washes your clothes cleaner than they’ve been the whole race. The lights of the “Show de Talento” will become a disco ball in you memories as you soak up the time you watched the whole neighbourhood gather in your very own backyard. The Gospel will be shared that night through messy skits and the love of sharing popcorn with the stranger on your right. You will laugh when another one of your shirts molds after it rains for a week straight. Then you’ll grab a water bottle of vinegar and scrub it with a toothbrush because it’s one of the only 3 shirts you have left to call your own.  

Yet sometimes louder and harder to remember is the fact that the Dominican held some of the hardest moments of your race. 

You’ll never forget the first time you sat at a hotel restaurant in Sosua and saw a white, older man bring a young Dominican women to a table. The horror and reality of legal prostitution will make your stomach drop with just one stare. You’ll sit there with your thoughts soaking in denial, knowing the common sight wouldn’t make a local think twice. Later, You’ll sit at the top of a makeshift tree house in the mountains and the reality or sex trafficking will become more palpable than it’s ever been before. Tears will be shed for a pain so irreversible that healing can only be sourced from Jesus. The hopelessness of the world on its own will stare at you barefaced and become more indisputable than it’s every been through your own eyes. 

More days than you would have asked for, you will fight the angry tears that crowd your eyes when another boiled plantain shows up on your plate after another week of what seemed like a lost battle to choose into a ministry. Ministry that stray’s from any concept of desirable that you have ever carried. Some of those same days you will still be able to taste the pang of grief that accompanied the sudden goodbye of the person you woke up to every morning just one bunk bed over. You’ll remember that night you woke up at two a.m. under the Dominican stars to send her back home to the states. And yet somehow louder than the anger and confusion that demanded to be felt a lot of times, was the power and authority that your God reigns. That at His very breath even your feelings have to bow on their knees because His presence carries more authority than any of the most real feelings your humanity can contain. And just like that, grief will become a gift that draws you to the sweetness of your Saviour. 

Night after night the sky will throw you into a state of incredulity as it begs to be stared at. New colors will arise again and again on the same canvas that bears the mountains that encapsulate your backyard view. And you won’t be able to help but remember that the God who holds the paintbrush knew so many of His children wouldn’t care to chose to take a moment to ponder His artwork; and yet, He was still steady in His affection because His faithfulness could never depend on His children’s weaknesses. Only upon His unfailing love. The type of love that can be seen in His faithfulness to paint the skies even on your most painful days. 

Month nine will eventually roll around the corner and you will ask how you arrived to a place in time that seemed so far away as you were once sitting on the front porch steps of Gainesville. The thought of home will scare you, but your Father will remind you that you’re already home. Your home in his truth, where Heaven invades earth in His love. Real love. And you will realize you’ve become more of a stranger to this world than you’ve ever been before. And that’s beautiful because your home is now found solely in fellowship with the Crucified. Both here and in eternity. 

The Dominican will hold some of the hardest months of your race, and yet in the presence of so much pain you couldn’t help but get closer to the feet of Jesus than you’ve ever been before. Not because life was easy, but because without Him you just couldn’t have made it. You will learn that comfort was never and will never be worth it. And the cross you picked up every day was was only evidence of the way Jesus had already sacrificially fought for you. On your most arduous days, you will grab your bridal gear and run to the church because in the light of so much loss you will gain perspective of what truly mattered in the first place. You will fall more in love with your Groom, the one who truly loved you before you had a moment to do anything for Him. And as you saunter in the love of you Saviour, your real identity as the bride of Christ will be undeniably exposed. 

So listen closely when I say, if you refuse to sacrifice the comforts of your own life to experience real life and real goodness and real satisfaction, if you think that a comfy mattress and a room of your own and wifi and even your own daily desires are not worth giving up for the pursuit of the Kingdom, don’t go on the World Race. 

 

Kenzi, for the last time, don’t you dare go on the World Race.

You’ll leave with more questions than you ever thought to ask. New passions will awaken in your heart again and again and again, over and over, all pointing back to your very Creator. Your own strength will fail you most days and you will have no choice but to be sweetly dependent on the True Vine. You will learn what it means to celebrate and be celebrated. You will be surrounded by people that no longer just say “come to the table” but live their lives inviting others to the Father’s table. You will line dance to cotton-eyed joe more times than you could have ever asked for. People will recklessly love you on your weakest days. You will understand the privilege it is to be stretched in these ways by a Holy Father. You will see some of the most heavenly peaks and corners of the world that not many people will ever lay their eyes on. And you will learn that saying “yes” to Jesus really never means you will know where your going. And that’s okay. Because you can always look upon that one dark day on Calvary and know that His heart has always been for you. 

Kenzi, you will never be the same after this.

Not because you went on the World Race, but because you said “yes” to allowing God to use the race as a tool in His hands. So here I tell you, stay complacent and comfortable. Do what everyone else does. Go to college and get a degree in whatever you think you want to do for the rest of your life. Maybe minor in Spanish. Don’t take any risks, go with the flow, graduate in four years, then make sure you get a good paying job and marry a nice man. Buy a house with a white picket fence in the backyard that’s big enough for your kids to play in. And while your at it, maybe open up your own homeless shelter because that’s the right thing to do. Settle, retire, and die. 

These are the ways of the world in which you would be better off obeying. 

So please, for the last time I beg of you, 

just don’t go. 

 

 

(This blog was written and inspired by an alumni racer named Dasia Olivares! My sophomore year of high school I read her blog, titled Don’t Go on the World Race, that she had posted in the final days of her nine months on the field. That was the first time I had ever heard of the World Race and I was captivated by her words and stories. By the end of the blog I had tears running down my face and a dream in my heart. So in honor of the way I was in awe of what God did through the World Race in Dasia’s life, I wrote my own blog inspired completely by her’s. Thank you Dasia for the words you used to tell the nations about the way that God has been faithful to you through such a unique season of your life. He is still using them <3)