Why am I going on the World Race?
That is a good question, and it’s one I’ve been asked a lot since I started telling people that I was planning on pursuing missions. The short answer is that God has placed the desire on my heart to share the great news about Jesus to those who haven’t heard of him before, and I believe that I will be able to do that through World Race Gap Year.
For the long answer, I have to take you back to when I was 7 years old and I went on my first missions trip with my grandparents and my older brother to Cuba. On the trip I got to meet kids from the church that my grandparents were involved in down there, and it was incredible. I couldn’t speak with the kids at all because of the language barrier but they taught me games and showed me their church and their animals, and they were SO happy. Here they were living with so much less then I had and yet they were just as.. if not more happy than I was.
Fast forward to September of 2021. I had just started grade 12 and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Everyone else seemed to know what they wanted to do but I was so conflicted between going right to school, taking a year off to work, or pursuing the mission field. I spent months trying to decide, until a Prophet came to my church and told me to stop getting stressed out over my future and instead try to look for God’s peace and follow the desires he has put in my heart. As good advice as this was, I was kind of annoyed that God didn’t just tell me exactly what to do. Nevertheless I decided that school was not going to be what I was doing next year and I put my future plans on hold for awhile.
When December was finally coming to an end God let me know that 2022 was going to be a good year for me, and I felt him ask me to push myself to get out of my comfort zone in 2022. One night in January I started browsing the internet for Christian Gap Year Mission trips, and that was when I came across World Race Gap Year. Immediately I knew it was something I would love to be apart of, so I set up a call with someone from their team. During the call, everything felt right, then the guy told me that the trip ‘pushed people out of their comfort zones’.. which made me think.. this might ACTUALLY be what God wants for me.
I waited awhile, did more research while waiting for things to open up here in Canada more, but things didn’t get better. I guess you could say that I was waiting for a sign from God.. eventually I decided that maybe God was waiting for me to take a step out in faith. So I applied to be on the Race, and I kid you not, just as I went to press the button to send in my application, my mom texted me saying that a friend of hers wanted to send me some money to go toward a mission trip for me. That was the moment I KNEW that I was on the right path, and I knew that God was going to help me to go on this trip.
There is still lots to figure out before I leave for the trip, but I know that God is with me and that I have such a great community of friends and family that are praying for me and supporting me through this. I am expecting big things to happen this year!
Thanks so much for reading,
Hannah 🙂
(The picture below was taken of my older brother Josiah and I giving candy to some of the Cuban children that we met while we were on our mission trip to Cuba.)
