Musings from Graceland

BURNING BRIDGES

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Casey Barefield is a fellow Southerner and follower of Jesus Christ. Like me, he's also just had an experience that has left him changed forever. Casey, and scores of others, just finished up a year trekking around the world with Adventures in Missions as a "world racer". He touched lives with the love of Jesus and felt his life touched in amazing lives as well. He saw things and met people that have made an eternal impact on his life. But he would have missed it all if he had let fear stop him from stepping out into the unknown that God was calling Him to. It was unknown to Casey, but never to God.

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Here's how Casey tells it:

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I want to tell you a quick story about how I got on the World Race. I picked now as the time to tell you for no good reason at all. The preface is that, at training camp in April, we had a 'Spiritual Retreat' and focused on burning bridges. Any bridge that was going to hold us back, back to the life we lived, back to anything that kept us from walking ever more closely with God, we were to burn. When Ben "I play mind games with you" Messner introduced it, I knew immediately what my bridge was.

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My bridge was fear. My story is that I was back in Hattiesburg in January when I got the email I had been accepted to the World Race. I was at a time in my life where I had no idea what was next. I grabbed my best friend, the amazing Mr. Flood, and we went to the porch to talk through it. I began talking and spend the next little while just hashing through things - pros, cons, logistics, the future - you name it, I verbalized it. The indispensible Mr. Flood took all this quietly, as he knew I was going through some important things and just needed some ears. I eventually stalled on the point that the World Race is assuredly the scariest thing I could think of, especially considering I would be going from not knowing what was next in my own backyard of life to not knowing what was next in a dozen different places around the world with 30 brand new people. Fear, I had concluded, was the one and only aspect that I wouldn't be able to rectify; and it would be my most serious obstacle.

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This is where the essential Mr. Flood, the wise mountain sage that he is, spoke his only words. "You've got to come up with something better than fear." That was it. That was all he needed to say. I had to look outside myself and into the words of the Father through a friend to finish clearing all the hurdles. That wasn't just the turning point, it was the point. After that, I had nothing. And so here I am; living out of a backpack, traveling the world, spreading the Good News of an amazing God and the Son that died for you, and learning more about myself and the God of Glory than I ever thought possible. Why am I doing this? Because I love God and He loved me first. How am I able to do this? Because His grace is new every morning and He and I burned the bridge of fear.

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To read more about Casey's year of world racing and to see where God is taking him now, visit his blog, CASEY BAREFIELD, A WORK IN PROGRESS...

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