Fully Funded. *Deep Exhale*

Since I signed up for the Worldrace in September, almost everything about it has excited me. ALMOST everything. Every person who chooses this adventurous path must at some point address the elephant in the room: fundraising. The thought of raising $16,900 to almost any person, especially to a high schooler, is daunting. It’s not like it’s impossible, but it just really sucks to look at y’know. I’m lucky to have had way more time than most of my co-racers; however, I am a procrastinator at heart and a people pleaser who hates asking anything of anybody. I knew it wouldn’t be comfortable, but eventually I got the wheels rolling.

I started letting the world know what Sam was up to next year, handing out support letters, meeting with people, texting old friends. I had so many people who came up to me enthusiastically wanting to donate to my trip, and it was so encouraging. I thought to myself “This aint so bad” but then a week would go by, and then a month, and then 2 months, and then all of a sudden we are 3 months later and I had received very few donations. It’s not that people lied to me or didn’t mean what they said, they just simply hadn’t gotten around to it yet and as it turns out, I’m a lot more impatient than I thought. I trusted that god woud provide the money at the right time, I just hated having to wait. It was frustrating.

In the meantime, I was taking most of my paychecks and donating them to my fund. This is partly because I’m impatient and wanted to see that looming number disappear ASAP but mostly because I felt this deep conviction that if I’m going to ask others to sacrifice their finances for my ministry, then I should also be willing to make that sacrifice. Some people say that you shouldn’t self fund because one of the biggest fruits of the fundraising process is that it helps you trust god more as a provider. I wholeheartedly agree with this. However, I dont think a little self-funding is necessarily a bad thing.

As I started receiving more and more donations, I realized that I could probably have saved myself a couple thousand dollars if I’d just waited patiently for people to give. But if you ask me if I regret donating my hard-earned money into my trip fund, I would give you a confident no. I was losing many hours of making sandwiches and washing dishes with every deposit. However, god was using that sacrifice to cultivate something new within me. As my savings and my paychecks began to disappear, I realized that the stingy, stubborn part of me that gets outraged when Subway raises their prices by 50 cents or when I never get that venmo for the burger I bought someone a week ago, began to slowly take a backseat in my thought process. When I started to approach the final stretch of fundraising, that new mindset didn’t just go away. That money that I was giving to myself just started flowing out onto other people, and it didn’t really pain me at all, in fact it felt really really good.
“A generous person will prosper;
whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.”
Proverbs 11:25
It has become an increasingly small thing to grab the check for friends, donate to fundraisers, tip more than I need to etc. I realized I was starting to see my money and generosity in a more biblical light. That’s a lesson that was worth every penny. This could easily come off as a naive high schooler who doesn’t pay bills and doesn’t know how money works, trying to lift himself up as some righteous man of god for buying someone food, but dare I say, this may be one of the most overlooked, underpracticed areas of the bible. I think this idea that our money is actually god’s money is a concept we accept in theory but rarely in practice. I dont completely get it yet but it feels like hes put me on the path to figure it out. Even if its just a taste of the complete generosity of Jesus, Im grateful to be able to already see veils being pulled back from my eyes. I hope this trip keeps allowing me to see fruits of the spirit manifesting in my life, in this case, generosity. If you have been blessed with much, which in America is pretty much all of us statistically, than consider where your security comes from, how we clutch money for our sustenance rather than clutch the bread of life. We might discover that the presence of money and various responsbilities have muted our best and most vibrant spiritual lives in stealthy, undercover ways. What is the answer? I got no idea, but I do feel like the more we manage to let go of our lives in the world, the more we are able to grasp the full richness of what a life following Jesus could be. The sacrifices we make might be hard at first, but I think we will find that none of them were anything but worth it

“no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age”

Dont be afraid to pour out the alabaster jar onto Jesus’s feet at the risk of being considered a reckless fool. Im inspired by all of the people who blessed me with their resources in a way that didnt make sense. People giving vastly more than they would ever be expected to, people donating to a kid who they only met one time or in some cases, never at all. It all goes to show that even though I think we have a long way to go in terms of how we handle our possesions, the fruit of generosity is still alive in the church today. That being said Im writing all of this because I just got fully funded to go on the race! So thats pretty cool.