benefit the world. (re)discover your soul.

It's been about 5 months since anything in life has felt normal. Coincidentally, it's also been about 5 months since the Ride:Well Tour started. The moment I had spent months preparing for, both physically and mentally, finally came. And in no time it passed. And now, here I am, in a new city, 800 miles from everything I know and love, with new friends, a new sense of responsibility, and an outlook on life that has never been more exciting.

To catch you all up, after the tour ended I took an internship with Venture Expeditions, which is the company responsible for the Ride:Well Tour. I've been here for almost a month, working in the office, helping with design work, creating a communications strategy, working on tour logistics for next year, which will hopefully wrap up with me leading a tour next summer.

But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what this tour meant to me. It's been a long, drawn out process of reflecting, so this may be a long blog post. My bad!

+the diagnosis

Two months and 3000 miles spent on a bike taught me a lot about who I am, what I am capable of, and what things about me that need to change. Before the tour, we were told this could be life changing--that through tours like this people walk away different.

And it was.

But if it was life changing, it was only the diagnosis stage.

That much time on a bicycle gives you a lot of time to think and reflect and pray. Add 16 other people into that equation and it gives you a lot of time to discover who you are. It helps you discover the things you appreciate about yourself. And it forces you to face the things you do not like about yourself. For me, this was mostly overcoming a lack of confidence and re-thinking an outlook and attitude on life that was growing increasingly cynical and negative.

And it was through this that I discovered that the only thing in life that keeps me from being the person God has created me to be is myself.

It's not the things that others may say about me--it's the things that I allow myself to believe about me.

It's my insecurities. It's because I try to find my identity in something other than God. And it's something I feel like I've struggled with all my life.

+benefit the world. (re)discover your soul

It's crazy to think that biking 3000 miles was what God used to show me this. This all started out as my attempt to hopefully change something about our world--something I had experienced in Kenya years back and had become a burden God placed on my heart. This was an attempt to provide something as simple as clean water by doing something completely out of the box--all to be a part of a solution. The Ride:Well Tour was my and my teams attempt to benefit the world.

But in the process, God also used this tour to help me discover my soul. It's funny how "benefit the world, discover your soul" is the slogan for Venture Expeditions. It's also funny how Blood:Water Mission says that through helping provide clean water and health for others, we discover our purpose and impact in life. I feel like God also had a few things to say about that--when we go out of our way to help others and to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others. And it's not like our 'sacrifice' was anything compared to what our brothers and sisters endure in other parts of the world, but it was a way that we could creatively give of ourselves to make a difference. And what we did will make a difference.

We ended up raising $100,000 dollars that will go directly toward clean water and health projects in Kenya's 'forgotten region', the Marsabit District. Who knows what impact that will have. I know it will have at least some. Even if it only helps one person, then I still know that the 3000 miles spent on my bike were worth it. All the sweat caked jerseys, the 100+ degree days, the miles and miles of mountains we climbed, the rain storms and head winds we biked through, and every other moment of hardship and joy we experienced were worth it. I also know that because I was willing to step out and
to allow myself to be used by God, and continue to allow myself to be used by God, that I am rediscovering a part of myself that I feel has been lost for years.

I feel like I'm rediscovering my heart. I feel like Jesus has grabbed hold of my heart and set it on fire in a way that I'm not sure has ever happened before in my life. I desire to do something to make a difference, I desire to do great things, and I desire for God to be at the heart of those things.

It's amazing what can happen when we allow God to live through us. It's amazing to see the journey unfold that God has me wrapped up in the middle of. It's amazing to know that despite how unreasonable and illogical this may all seem, there's still a peace at the center of it teaching me that it is all being taken care of by something that is so much greater and so more powerful than me.

So while it's been 5 months since anything has felt normal, I'm not so sure I ever want things to feel normal again.