2020: a year of failed expectations

It’s been one crazy year of promises and seemingly failed expectations of what the promises were supposed to look like. Week after week of uncertainty, where I would go, what I would do, how I would get there, if my squad would stay together. I thought I knew where I would be, I thought I knew what I would be doing and why I would be doing it. I thought I knew a lot of things, but with this year and this journey with WorldRace coming to a close, I can say honestly that we truly never know anything. We can make plans, we can hold expectations about what those plans are going to look like, but our plans never truly work out the way we expect them to. Things always look different. Because its Gods plan, not ours. He knows whats best for us, and most importantly of all He has our hearts in His hands. He knows what we need and He gives it lovingly. God took so many expectations away from me, but in return He gave me so much more confidence in who I am and who He is, a level of trust in Him that cannot be shaken and a hope that I know is true even more than before. He is a promise keeper and even when things look different that we expected, He has never and will never break His promise to us. Here is the first 3 months of my story of the WorldRace. Enjoy!

October 2019

Training camp for what was supposed to be an 11 countries in 11 months mission trip. Before training camp, I tried to look up what the WorldRace would look like, but God told me very quickly not to have any expectations going in. I arrived at the airport in Georgia (without my rain jacket oopps), and quickly bonded with two of my squad mates that were there. Already having inside jokes we arrived, dropped off our big packs and jumped into 10 days of teaching-packed, bonding exercises, and a lot of laughter. My squad was way more than I‘d ever expected it would be. They were beautiful, hilarious, and loving. We all connected so easily, we even begged our squad leaders not to make us break up into teams during the race so that we could be all together. We were told that we showed an unprecedented amount of unity in a squad, we were only 10 people after all, the smallest squad that had ever been sent out in WorldRace history. We left training camp promising to talk every week and keep in touch and we did just that. We knew God had something very special set out for our squad. 

January 2020 

Early January we launched out from Georgia into our first country, Nicaragua after a week or so of training. Separated into two teams, we were headed to opposite sides of the country, one of us to a tourist town in southern Nicaragua and one of us to the a little village in the most northern part of the country. We landed in Managua at 1 AM and drove 4 more hours to the northern village of Palacaguina where we would be staying. We grew close as a team, grew closer with God, and made a home with each other and with the people there in the middle of nowhere. Long days in the sun breaking rock to build a church for ministry, watching for iguana fights in the fields to entertain ourselves, trying desperately to escape both the heat and the mosquitos by lying unmoving in our bug-net protected beds (malaria am I right?) and spending our nights playing hide-n-seek with our hosts 5 year old daughter for hours. We got very attached to our life there and were very sad when we had to leave. 

February 2020

We leave to head to Costa Rica for the month, travel across the country in a van and find ourselves in San Jose, where we are staying at an AIM base. Ministry days there were the exact opposite of Nicaragua. Instead of nothing to do we had everything to do with at least 2 or 3 different ministries per day. We taught English classes at a nearby rec center, served breakfast and hung out with prostitutes in the red light district, did prison ministry, helped lead a kids sports night, entertained some kids in low-income neighborhoods, did prayer walks through the streets, talked to families and prayed for them face to face, did evangelism and many other things all while fasting everyday. It was a month of craziness, overwhelming with a lot of new things being brought to us. We were together all as a squad living in the same building for the first time. We then headed to Jaco, Costa Rica on the coast where we did some ministry, had debrief, I got a really bad sunburn (reapplying is key y’all), and we found out the first failed expectation; we would not be going to Chile as planned. Instead because of civil unrest in the country we would be headed to Peru! We were all super excited about the change and not really that thrown off, we knew this was Gods plan all along. We talked about how we thought there would be more changes coming. Oh boy, were they coming. 

March 2020

Our whole squad landed in Lima, Peru and were picked up at the airport by a friend of our host and we were driven to our next home, a YWAM base in the side of a building. We started ministry teaching English classes, where I got to lead teaching and had a blast! On the second day of teaching we got an email from our squad mentor saying that because of the recent virus that was becoming a problem in the U.S. some of the squads were being sent home from the field for safety-purposes. However we were told, our squad would not be sent home since we were not in the areas where the virus was breaking out as seriously (Asia mainly). We weren’t all too concerned, for us in the middle of South America COVID-19 didn’t seem like that big of a deal. It wasn’t until that 3^rd day when people in Peru started shying away from us and treating us like we had the plague because they saw we were American that we understood it was a bigger deal than we thought originally. Late one night our squad leaders were pulled into a phone call and my team felt the Holy Spirit tell us to get together and pray. In the middle of prayer the Lord told me to pray over disappointment and I knew what was going to happen. But before I could even pray we were pulled into a meeting with our squad leaders. Their faces were wet from crying as they sat us down and told us that we were being pulled off the field now and that our race was over. I was in shock and kind of in disbelief as every one of my squad members burst into tears. I had had a dream the night before that I went home to my parents house, dropped up my stuff but then picked up new stuff and went back on the field so I was positive our race was not over. God was teaching me how to hope this month so I was clinging to my hope and just the gut feeling (Holy Spirit!) that this wasn’t the end, that we would be relaunching, that we would be together again to finish this race as a squad. So I clung to hope. 

Our plane was booked for 3 days later but then we got the news that the country would be closing its borders the next day so AIM had to move our flights to the next day so we wouldn’t get trapped in Peru. 10:30pm the next night was our flight so we went to bed, trying to get a good nights sleep before our traveling. At 5 AM we were awoken to our squad leader telling us that in the middle of the night the government of Peru had canceled our flights late that night and that our flight was now leaving in 3 hours. We had to get up, pack and get out before it was too late. We rushed to the airport, barely made it through the hectic airport and I mean hundreds upon hundreds of people slammed together in lines longer than the building, news vans everywhere doing live coverage and people everywhere in panic. It looked like a clip out of a zombie apocalypse movie. We left Peru and got to the Dominican Republic where we had our 24 hour layover. The next day we were informed in the middle of the DR airport that because of the presidents law of no more than 10 people being able to gather in one place, instead of debriefing what happened we would be immediately separating upon reaching the United States and would be sent home. We were heartbroken. After giving God an entire year of our lives to be international missionaries, preparing and fundraising for 8 months to a year before, some of us selling our homes and cars to be able to go, and finding a crazy sense of family in each other we were being sent home. It was all gone like that. A year of plans, expectations, dreams and hopes seemingly crushed. We came back to the U.S., a strangely different world than what we left, and we came back different too; changed by the experience of having to cling to trust in the midst of very sudden and heart-wrenching change. 

Stay tuned for part 2 of how God redeemed this for us, and restored our hopes after having all of our expectations crushed and for what God has taught me throughout this crazy year! (Hint: it doesn’t get any less crazy!! Haha)