What Do Bravery, Kindness, and Failure Have in Common?
In early August, as the friends I graduated with were packing up their rooms and trying to color coordinate with their new college roommates, I was desperately trying to stuff nine months of my life into a 65 liter backpack. My orientation into this gap year was referred to as Training Camp; a ten-day ordeal in the red Georgia clay in which we slept in tents, took freezing cold bucket showers, and were put through grueling, yet educational scenarios. As my old classmates hugged friends and family they did it knowing that they would be home in just a few short months for fall break, maybe even sooner. I hugged my friends and family knowing that it would be nine months until my feet touched American soil again. Both going to college and taking a gap year require some amount of bravery, in both cases you’re leaving the comforts that for the past 18 years you’ve come to take for granted. However, unlike entering college, the decision to take a gap year came with very little information on what I could expect to experience.
I think one of the bravest things I’ve done in regards to my gap year, was making the choice to step onto the plane that would take me first to Albania, then the Philippines, and finally South Africa. It wasn’t necessarily the unknown of what lay ahead of me that scared me, I was eager to gain the knowledge that would come with doing mission work for nine months overseas; it was the knowledge of what I was leaving behind that frightened me. However obvious this may seem, it hit me that the other half of the world doesn’t stop spinning just because you’ve left it. Five months into this crazy thing called the World Race, I realize now, that in the grand scheme of things, nine months is not a very long time. Whatever comforts I had to sacrifice by leaving the States and holding off on college for just one year has been well worth the lives I’ve changed and the lives that have changed me.
Recently, my squad mentor, Kaylaynn, challenged us as a squad of fifty to split into two groups, one would leave the hostel we were being housed in near the Philippines’ capital of Manila and take to the streets looking for people with whom we could share the Gospel, while the others stayed behind and prayed over us. Surprising even myself, I got up and joined two other girls in a walk down the area’s red light district. Now sharing the Gospel isn’t exactly like selling Girl Scout cookies, it’s sometimes hard to explain, especially with a language barrier like the one here in the Philippines. I’ve found that the best way to show someone that they have a spiritual need to be met is to first fulfill a physical need through love and kindness. We first came across an elderly, homeless woman who had learned the word for money and approached us with shaking hands, cupped in a begging formation. We were somehow able to communicate that we would like to buy her lunch and took her into a nearby gas station to buy water, some chips, and a few pieces of chicken. Afterwards we asked if we could pray over her, wanting to make it clear that the kindness we showed her was not only something we were happy to do, but felt called to do. After just thirty minutes and walking a few blocks, we fed another elderly woman and a family of four boys.
However, not everyday on the Race has looked like this one… There was a time in Albania where I was painfully questioning my team’s contribution to our ministry when an English Bible study class we tried to set up fell through. For the two months leading up to the scheduled start of the class, we walked the streets of Tirana stopping into cafés and stores simply looking for people who knew some English and were looking to improve it by participating in our Bible study. We met many young men and women all eager to know what eight American girls were doing paying for stranger’s coffees and asking for follow up meetings. We made countless strong contacts and many quickly became friends that we still keep in touch with today. However, when it came time for the class to start, we were met with the unpleasant sight of an empty church save for eight, disappointed American girls. That feeling of failure hit us all hard, there were many other ministry opportunities we were also involved in, but we had high hopes in this specific one.
We quickly came to learn that many of our Albanian friends weren’t lying when they claimed that they just didn’t have the time. Some of our contacts would leave their day jobs or classes at the university with only a few hours to eat and rest before they needed to rush off to their night shift. Some who were unemployed spent all day desperately searching for employment, even jobs that did not cater to the degree they had earned in school. Others had elderly parents and grandparents at home that required round the clock care, or children and younger siblings that needed just as much attention. I realized then that for them, taking thirty minutes out of their day to stop and meet us for a coffee was a huge sacrifice for them. After coming to this realization I was much more grateful for the time I did get to spend with them and happy to be a source of respite in their busy days. In the long run, the class would have just been a formal outlet for what we were already accomplishing through the coffee dates and we wouldn’t have been able to put as much time into our other ministries as we did in the end.
Over the past five months I’ve learned that it takes a strange mix of bravery, kindness, and the desire to look for success in what others may see as failures to experience the kind of growth my teammates and I have so far. With only four months left before we return home we are growing more and more reluctant to leave our adventurous lives as overseas missionaries, but for some, such as myself, we will return and quickly start a new adventure by seeking to obtain a college education. To some it may look like I could have saved a whole lot of time and money had I decided to forgo taking this gap year and jump straight into college life, but I believe that the experiences I’ve undergone and will continue to face until the end of this gap year, will only assist in transforming me into the well-rounded and well-traveled student I wish to be when I attend classes next fall at FSU.
