Speaking of Passion, going to Ft. Worth was life changing. There were added bonuses, like cajun food in Louisiana, crossing the Mississippi, cowboy hats, country music, Texan barbeque, hanging out in Georgia and Memphis, and getting stuck in Nashville while 7 tornadoes blew around the city. But back to Passion - it wasn't like your normal weekend event, worship service, or winter retreat, where while you're there you get all pumped up and then the next week you get back into the normalcy of life. In fact, while I loved being there, I was SOOOO tired. I hadn't been sleeping (like, I got a total of 7 hours in about 4 nights), and I was moody and having trouble concentrating. Not to mention I'd never heard most of the worship songs. Still, my prayer throughout was that God would move in my heart and cause change in me. Oh, how He did, and still is continuing to! I've never been in a setting with so many people united for one purpose - the glory of God. The sermons, the songs, everything was with one specific focus - that His Name and Renown are the desire of our hearts. It was spine-tingling and like a taste of heaven to sing at the top of my lungs alongside ten thousand university aged Christians "COME! MAGNIFY THE SON!" I wish you all could experience it. Having a weekend where you were led into the presence of God by people like Chris Tomlin, David Crowder, and Kristian Stanfill, and then had the Word preached to you by Francis Chan, John Piper, and Louie Giglio, while praying for the Lord to be glorified in your life, is something where you'd have a hard time walking away unchanged.

One of the things I appreciated most about this conference was the prerequisite that worshipping with song is just one part of worship - justice is the other part. As we experienced this event, we looked at the scripture where God says "I hate your feasts and your festivals - your empty praise, let there be a flood of justice!" Uh, AMEN. So there were 10,000 of us at Ft Worth. We each brought in a pack of socks and a towel to give to the homeless population in the city. (That's a lot of socks and towels!) We also all gave $1 which bought 9,000 mosquito nets for villages in Mali, Africa. It didn't stop there, however. We raised over $200,000 which was enough to meet our goal to fund Bible translation to an unreached people group in Mali! This people group is a half a million people large, and there are less than a dozen Christians. They don't have ONE word of scripture in their heart language, and its such a blessing to be a part of what God is doing in Mali. We also began to raise money for Haiti-Rising, which is part of the DO SOMETHING NOW campaign of Passion. You can click here to be a part of what God is doing :) http://dosomethingnow.com/causes/haiti-rising/

Because of some crazy stuff going on in my life, I've been dealing with some serious fear about the World Race. I don't do "change" well. I get mad when maintenance cuts trees down by the pond at school because things are different. So needless to say, when in the next two months I'm saying goodbye to family and friends, graduating college, leaving for a year, and returning home with no safety net (house, money, PBU community, single, etc), I have had more than my fair share of freak-outs. (Thanks to all of you who have put up with me through this process.)

I am still scared. I am still working on that whole "trusting God" thing. BUT God has begun an awesome process of transformation in me of not only accepting this, but finding delight and joy in it. After talking to some missionaries, including a former world racer and my stepmom, I realized that this is something that God does in the lives of all true missionaries, who seek to glorify God and are aware of the severity of His call - it's scary! But He will provide and bless abundantly!

Rather than share my experience, I'm going to type up some excerpts from my step-mom's book called Here am I Lord, Send someone else! It makes me feel less alone in all this.

I have never felt God's finger so firmly on me as I did that moment. My reaction was not Isaiah's but Jonah's: "No way, Lord! You can't mean ME!"... During my devotion on one very anxious day, my eyes fell on Luke 14:

Can God be trusted? Will He provide? I was out on a limb with no one else and no other resources left to depend on but God. No safety nets under me. I pleaded for God's comfort...TRUST! Why can't I trust?...

...As I pondered the events of my life, I realized that looking ahead, down the corridor of time, God's footprints seemed invisible. But Faith and Trust were the arrows. Now looking backwards, His footprints are plain and from His palette the face of Jesus is outlined in the path. On His course I learned that when my world collapsed, I could see His world more clearly... Compassion and love are the guard rails on His trail, and TRUST is the name of that road. Though Your footprints are invisible, I will follow You in trust In thanksgiving I will glorify Your Name all the days of my life!

So why is it, that someone like me has trouble trusting God? Sure, I've had some hard times in life, losing a mother, losing friends, various heartbreaks, etc. (Even typing it that simply is weird - those were all huge, significant, devastating losses in my life.) But I've always had a place to sleep, never gone hungry, never been sexually abused - I've had it pretty good. I grew up by the beach, in a middle class family, I've been around the world, gone to a Christian academy and a Biblical university, interned at social service agencies including the Salvation Army, worked in leadership and ministry at a ton of places, have a pastor for a father and a stepmother who was a missionary. You'd THINK. That I. Would know. The peace and benefits. Of trusting GOD. But I still struggle.

On one particularly rainy (and to be honest heartbreaking) days last week, I called up the World Race. I was reallllly struggling with this whole going away thing. I literally couldn't handle leaving friends and family and everything I know, venturing off into the unknown, and coming back with nothing. (Even as I type that, it still freaks me out a bit.) I called up crying, not wanting to show them my weakness, explaining what was going on in various areas of my life, and what I was clinging to that made me not want to leave.

After hearing my story, Marisa talked to me about something in my life that I had not previously recognized. I was acting as an orphan, not a daughter of God. To illustrate this, I'll give you the example she gave me. She works with street children. When she was in Kenya a couple weeks ago, she visited some of these children - the kind in the slum with glue addictions to curb their hunger, sleeping in potato sacks on street corners. The kind of children that have to fight to survive, because they have no one to take care of them and provide for them. At one point, she brought out a granola bar, and they practically trampled each other to get a bite of it. They literally fought for the crumbs. They didn't know her, didn't trust her, and didn't know she wanted to provide for them, and fought for tiny morsels.

Conversely, she works at a children's home where some of these kids have been taken off the streets. They've been given a home, education, care, love, provision. It hasn't been easy, sometimes these kids run away back to the streets because it is familiar, and they only trust themselves. When they come into the home, they have to give up their glue habit (comfort), their old clothes (familiarity), and begin the process of rewiring their brains to learn to trust. When she visited, she got to bake them a cake, and they all waited patiently in line for a piece, knowing that they were love