How Did We Get Ourselves Into This??!!??

So for those of you that don't know, we are leaving the country in January to join about 90 other peeps on a mission trip that will pretty much take us around the world. The mission trip is called The World Race, and no, it's not like the Amazing Race, you don't win anything. We will basically spend an entire month in 11 different countries and will come back home December 2011. Check out the World Race website here to see more about what we will be doing. We are going on the January route 1 (you can see more info on the "Routes" tab on the website). We also have a blog through the World Race that we will be updating from now until the time we get back home so all of our family and friends can keep up with where we are and what we are doing. You can see that blog here. Please keep us in your prayers as we will be heading down to Atlanta this Saturday for a week long training camp! Anyways, we just wanted to share with you what all was going on, and we wrote about how we were called to the World Race and posted it to our World Race blog and thought we would share it here. So.....

How Did We Get Ourselves Into This??!!??

Haha, I think that's pretty much what we have been asking ourselves the past couple of weeks! Truthfully, leaving all we know and who we know behind for 11 months sometimes seems like such a daunting task. It's hard to let go of the plans you have made and the money you have saved up and the goals you had for the next year, to basically put everything you are doing or were going to do on hold. And honestly we sometimes find ourselves right there, thinking "How did we get ourselves into this?? Why couldn't God have called somebody else? Why us?" And to be even more honest, we were getting pretty comfortable, getting "ahead" as far as worldly thinking goes, well on our way to a fairly nice, comfortable home for our future children in a safe neighborhood. Now that for sure isn't to say that we haven't been very blessed and that we aren't grateful for all that our families and friends have done for us. But I guess what's most disturbing is that we had grown comfortable in our spiritual lives with just doing enough, just reading enough of the Bible, praying just enough together, giving just enough of our time and money and lives away to at least feel like we were truly loving God above anything or anybody else in this world, so we could for the most part feel like we were living in total abandon for the glory of God's kingdom without actually living in total abandon for God's kingdom. So that's where God met us. And here we are, a couple of months later gearing up for training camp and very soon to be leaving the country for 11 months! So how exactly did we get ourselves into this?? Let's start at the beginning, when God very first laid this journey on our hearts.

We both have a best friend going on the Race, same route and everything (Charles McCall & Sarah Branscom). We very first heard about the World Race from them, more or less in passing, kinda like "Hey have you heard about this thing called the World Race? Ya, that sounds pretty cool." And we really didn't get any further than that with it until one day we got a phone call from Charles letting us know that he was actually going to apply to go on the World Race and for us to be praying for him. We hung up with him and got another phone call about 15 minutes later from Sarah pretty much informing us of the exact same thing (neither Charles or Sarah knew at the time that the other one was applying for the Race).

So a week or so later we go on vacation with Carrie's parents to Florida and while we were there Carrie got on the World Race website to see more about it and exactly what our two friends would be doing out of the country for a year. She started reading some blogs of current racers and then started sharing some of the stuff with me and then she came across the f.a.q. page and our question was answered for us: Can married couples go on the race? Of course! Our immediate thought was "Man, that sounds awesome! We would really love be able to do something like that!" followed immediately by "Yea but there's no way we could ever do that!" followed by a few moments of us staring at each other and then "Well, why couldn't we?"

So on the way back to good ole' Tennessee, we talked a little about what it would be like to go on the World Race, how we would pay for it, what some other logistical stuff would look like, what our family and friends would say and think, and could we really possibly do something like this? So we talked a while about it on the way back home, and kind of left it at "Well it really does sound awesome and we would both love to go and share the Gospel in this way, but really we just can't go do it." About two or three weeks later, we pretty much just confessed to one another that we really hadn't been able to get the World Race off of our minds and that we both really felt like God was calling us to it. So we spent the next week or two in prayer, and then we talked to our families about it and informed them that we felt like God was laying this on our hearts and that we had decided to apply for the trip. And we did. And we were accepted. And we were excited. And time passed and training camp drew closer and closer, and we got our insurance and we got our shots and we realized we were really actually going to do this thing. And then we were just plain scared.

Scared of what a year spent just Carrie and Nathan and God would look like. Scared of being changed. Scared of "giving up" our money and a year of our lives. Scared of leaving our lives that were built around what is safe and what is comfortable. Scared of what are family and friends would really think and how they all would react when they found out we were leaving in a year. Scared of all we would miss out on while we were gone. Really just scared to truly, honestly, openly, and whole-heartedly submit our lives, our love, our relationship, our possessions, our everything to our Creator, and definitely scared of what it's gonna be like to not live for ourselves anymore.

But one thing we have found through this struggle of wanting to serve God completely but still wanting to serve our worldly desires is that we really aren't 'giving up' anything. We aren't giving up or losing the money we will spend to go on this trip. We aren't giving up or losing a year of our lives. We aren't giving up or losing anything, we are gaining everything! We are gaining the freedom in Christ to no longer live for worldly pleasures, safety, or comforts. We are gaining the freedom in Christ to live and work for the only thing in this world that will ever matter: His glory!

Of course you don't have to go on a mission trip or go to seminary or teach a Sunday school class or sell your house, move into a shack, and give all the money to the poor or volunteer at the community kitchen every Saturday morning to live in abandon for His kingdom, to live every day for nothing less than God's glory. But we feel like God has told us to Go! and share His Gospel with the nations, to love all of those that our world has decided are not worth loving, and that's what we are trying to do!

Make no mistake, we are definitely a little anxious. We are for sure getting really excited, but still a little anxious. I guess we see it as this: God says to make disciples of all nations, so we are going to. God says to serve the least, to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, visit the lonely, and give hope to the hopeless (Matthew 25) and we certainly plan to. God says to love him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and man, that's all we are trying to do!

Please please continue to pray for us! Please pray that God alone would be glorified in our marriage and that we would not settle for safety and comfort over the freedom for living in complete abandon for Christ's kingdom.

Love and Peace