Gap Year? Seriously!?

The Path

You probably think it was a hard decision.

Leaving my home, leaving my family who I love so much, leaving my friends, leaving my church, my city, my country, not to mention taking a year off of both school and work in the middle of my teenage years to take a gap year… and you would be right if it had been my decision to make. I love my family, my friends, and my church so much, and I’m going to miss them like crazy, but the truth is that though I am the one who ultimately clicked that sign up button, I didn’t have much of a choice.

I try not to use this as an excuse when my friends come up to me and ask, “Why are you leaving us?” The famous last words of every convicted fatalist are “God made me do it‼” No He didn’t, and neither did He force me on this trip. But the opportunities that opened up in the wake of prayer could only have been from God, and so when it came down to it, I just decided to walk the path that God had already laid out before me. Here’s the story…

The Story

I’ve gone through lots of phases in my life when it comes to what I want to be when I grow up – everything from hard hat construction worker, to author, to engineer, to musician – and as I’ve gotten older, these dreams have expectedly been becoming more and more serious and realistic.

So fast it back a couple years to about halfway through high school, and this thought popped into my head wondering what it would look for me to go into full-time ministry. Fast forward to last December, and this thought is still with me.

At this point though, it is more on the back burners, because my mind is fully taken up with college applications and figuring out where the heck I’m going to go to school next year (oh, what a miserable process…). I went on the website for something like 50 schools, visited five or six, and then applied to six or seven, but through all of it found no conviction, no peace of mind. My few and far-between prayers about where I was going to go seemed to go unanswered…

until one day…

It turned around…

I was at a coffee shop with some camp guys for Bible study when this older man walked up to our table and started talking to us. It was random and kind of awkward at first, but he seemed like a nice guy, and so we heard him out. He started talking about the ministry he works for called Global Year, and about how they send graduating high schoolers abroad for a year of mission work. Sometime during his spiel, he mentioned that he likes to ask high schoolers whether or not they have prayed about whether or not they should go to college.

It hit me like a dagger to the heart. I had never prayed that before. Sure, I prayed every now and then about where I was going to go to school, and that was answered in its own time, but a gap year? Seriously!? God will blow your mind like that.

He finished telling us about the all-guys trip to Cape Verde that was happening the next year, gave us all his business card, gave me a wink (I’m not kidding), and walked out. No one else seemed to think much of it, but for the rest of our Isaiah talk, I couldn’t get my mind off it. I had such a deep sense of peace and conviction in that moment that I had never felt in all my thinking about college and lifted a heavy weight off me.

I went home…

told my parents…

waited a month in thought and prayer, and then applied to GY’s Cape Verde trip. (Now I know that you have more important things to do in your life than to sit here for an hour and read my blog, so I’m going to put the next couple months on 3x speed to get to where I am now.) I was accepted. A month later (March 15) I sent in my commitment deposit. I was put into contact with my trip lead and students that were accepted to other trips, I started looking at packing lists and info packets – I was in. The only thing I did not do was listen to my mom when she told me to get a head start on fundraising mid March.

Now I feel it’s important for me to put in a disclaimer here for all you kids out there

– don’t try this at home, listen to your parents –

because now I’m going to talk about how my procrastination turned out to be a good thing.

Come May, I was the only one signed up for the Cape Verde trip. “No problem!” I told myself. God brought me here, God will handle it, I just have to trust Him.

Well I prayed…

and my parents prayed…

and my youth group prayed…

and now comes my knucklehead moment…

I was so set on trusting God would bring me other teammates, that when the leader of a different organization called World Race reached out and asked me if I wanted to join their team, I turned him down. What was I thinking? I dunno.

I felt like the man in this story

Don’t get me wrong, I believe the principle of what I did was right, but my mistake lies in the fact that I confined God to a box, and if there’s one thing you get from this blog post, it’s that you shouldn’t put God in a box. He’ll blow that thing to bits and show He’s even bigger than you thought. A few weeks went by and nothing happened. Eventually I looked back on that text from the World Race leader and realized that God’s answer to all our prayers had flown right over my head. I called the man who I met in the coffee shop and told him what was up. I ended up leaving GY, applying and being accepted to World Race, committing, and here I am now, a month out from leaving, about to see what this branch of full-time ministry is really like.

The Path

You see now what I mean when I say I was just walking the path God had given me?

I never would have sought this on my own, and I never even could have made the decision to leave if it weren’t for it being so clear to me that this is what God had called me to. I mean gosh, I’m going to miss my life here so much and I’m already looking forward to coming home, but seeing God at work in all of this gives me assurance that though it’s going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, it’s going to be ok because it’s God’s plan and God loves me.

In Christ,

Jackson

email me: [email protected]

phone/whatsapp: 678-448-7943