When I dreamt of going on the World Race four years ago, this was certainly not the topic I had in mind for my first blog post. I don’t want to talk about this. I want to tell you about myself, how I run for hours in the forest and beatbox in the car. I want to tell you about my family and friends, and all the times I’ve forced them to try my weird food combinations. Not this.
Yet I cannot begin to tell my World Race story without presenting this question. It is a question that has haunted me for more than a year, one that almost drove me to give up my future plans of Public Health outreach in developing nations. It is a question I presented to God day after day, never encountering a satisfying answer.
“God, do I have a white savior complex? Does my motivation to serve come from a learned belief that people who don’t look like me are incapable of helping themselves and need my saving? God, I thought I wanted to help people, but the more I read histories of missions gone imperialist, the more it seems I’ve spent my childhood lusting after the image of Kate: the adventurous philanthropist. Not you. That image is so far from your gospel.”
I get it. Most racers post their “too real” blog posts sometime around month 7, when they’re physically and spiritually exhausted. And here I am, sitting in high school in the middle of St. Louis, Missouri, and I’m questioning everything I thought I knew. I’m learning about missionaries who killed non-believers in the name of Christ, whose self serving “charity” abandoned orphans as soon as they snapped a picture. I’m learning that much of what I have is built on the backs of the oppressed. And I’m having a crisis. Is “missions” about feeding the hungry, or feeding a privileged person’s pride? Does God even want me in missions? I haven’t even been to training camp, for goodness’ sake. Yet here I am, in a labyrinthine spiritual battle.
I cannot ignore this question. Am I racist? I wish the answer was no.
The truth is, I am filled with bias and lies and sin, some handed to me by a flawed world, some of my own design. But I believe that there is a God who is more powerful than racism. There is a God who is more powerful than pride. There is a God who is more powerful than selfishness. That God is the opposite of me, but he has given me freedom from sin and he lives in me. I am such a broken vessel, but he lives in me.
Christ was brought to me by broken, sinful people. God’s entire church of believers is made up of broken people. And missionaries are broken vessels. We’re all just super messed up, and that’s the point. God chooses the messed up people in the world to spread the gospel so it is clearly not about the messenger. If Christ was powerful enough to give me salvation, he’s powerful enough to save anyone. Now he’s calling me to pass it on.
So this is my first blog post. Christ is the good guy in this story. Christ is the savior. Not me. It will never be me.
