Young and Crazy

I remember it like it was yesterday. Driving down a back road in the dark, I was riding shotgun when I looked over at my dad and spit out the words I had been swallowing for the past half hour…

“Dad,” I said, cautiously, “I think I want to go to El Salvador.” 

15 year old me sunk down in my seat and awaited his response. 

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Around the time my peers were choosing sex and alcohol as their drug of choice, I purchased a passport. It wasn’t at all a spur of the moment decision. It was something I mulled over for quite a while.

I remember holding the information in my hand and not being able to get that tiny country in Central America off my mind. Although I was only 15 and ordering my own food in a restaurant was enough to give me anxiety, I simply could not shake the idea of traveling to a far away land and serving Jesus.

I was young and crazy. That’s what it seemed like to everyone else. My parents, my peers, various adults I knew.

If we are “out of our mind” as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. 2 Corinthians 5:13 

After jumping over many hurdles, sending out more support letters than I could count, packing (and then packing again), I stepped on a plane.

The girl who stepped on that plane in 2012, never came back from El Salvador.

And the girl who left El Salvador to come back to America, well, that was one of the hardest things she has ever had to do.

During those 10 days, many summers ago, God began to shape my heart and show me a different kind of young and crazy.

My classmates began to get pregnant, spend the weekends partying, and come to class high. I slouched in my seat, day dreaming of the day I could get on an airplane again. I cried myself to sleep over orphaned babies and lost souls. I resented my life in America and missed hot, Central American dirt roads.

I was trapped in a world where I knew the truth, that many more people than I ever could have imagined were hurting, and I had no clue what to do about it.

I was torn between the world that I had once loved and the one I had just discovered.

And many times, I felt alone and misunderstood.

While everyone else began to declare their future career as doctors and lawyers, counselors and architects… I whispered the forbidden words in a secular culture: “ministry” and “missions“.

I began to realize the cost of being young and crazy for Jesus. It was the kind of crazy that took the most strength and was prepared to be humiliated. The kind that presented it’s future career as “missionary” and received looks like it had just said it wanted to be a Disney princess. Professional sports careers and aspiring millionaires were taken more seriously.

In the eyes of the world, and even some people in the church, I was just a dreamer. With patronizing words and sympathetic looks, it was plain to see they thought it would pass. After all, how does one country change the life of a 16 year old girl forever?

From the outside, it looked impossible. But on the inside, God whispered that it was more than possible with Him. He is the only reason I held onto my crazy dreams most days.

When the next summer rolled around, after what felt like the longest year of my life, I was more than happy to step back on that airplane.

And I shouldn’t say no one ever supported me. They just seemed more for the 10-day version of my dreams, instead of the lifestyle version.

Short term missions trips, helping people for a season- even the secular world can grasp something like that. But when it comes to being all-in, to giving it all up, to jumping out of your comfort zone and taking off running… well, it is harder for people to understand.

Young and crazy. 

The more time I spent with the Salvadorans, the less I wanted to be in America. iPhones, nice beds, roads not made out of dirt, toilets that flushed toilet paper… none of it seemed to matter anymore. Jesus was taking my life and showing me the world through His eyes. It was the craziest ride, the highest high, the only drug I ever wanted be on. And day by day, I cared less what people thought and more what my Savior thought. I had no problem being  young and crazy for a God who held my everything in His hands.

Not that I never feared, not that I never felt inadequate… but it was incomparable to the unshakeable truth that was Jesus. Fears seemed small when I dwelt on the power that ripped my heart from the clutches of the devil himself and gave me purpose and a home.

My heart was bursting at the seams. My newfound passion for Jesus and those who did not know Him was too much to stay in my heart, to stay in El Salvador    it refused to stay in a box, it began to spill into my everyday life in America. It made a mess of everything I knew and shattered every part of me in the best way. It was like a bomb had gone off     but new life was growing up through the ashes.

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah 43:19

And just when I had fallen deeply in love with El Salvador and everyone was beginning to get used to it, just as it was comfortable… Jesus whispered the words everyone around me feared:

“Go to Africa.”

It seemed just fine to me. It seemed just fine to the girl who was already young and crazy.

Things that seem far and expensive and maybe a little scary    those things are just as much from Jesus as church on a Sunday morning. Maybe more.

And running from the will of God is more dangerous than the possibility of the plane crashing, some animal biting you, or a culture you don’t understand. It’s a risk the Christian should never take.

Trips to Africa, led by God, make you understand that God is the best travel advisor. Actually, any adventure He leads is bound to make you realize that.

The things He has led me to do are worth being young and crazy… they’re worth being the weird Christian girl who never shuts her mouth about being overseas. They are worth crying myself to sleep over things that some people simply never give a thought. God is worth a lot of things    He’s worth my life.

I’ll never know what my life would have looked like, it God hadn’t drove me to be crazy at a young age. But I can look deep inside my heart and hold close the memories I have made already. Stamps on my passport cannot capture prayers prayed under the African sky, cooked silk worms eaten in Vietnam, doors knocked on in El Salvador, plane rides, layovers in Hong Kong. But God reminds me of the things I need to remember, at just the right time.

I could have waited until I felt ready and until I felt old enough, maybe bold enough    but then I would have tried to take the glory. Because I surrendered every weak part of myself and allowed God to drown my biggest fears    He got the glory. He got the glory when I thought there was no way His plans were possible.

So instead of coming home drunk and waking up hungover, instead of getting high… God got the glory, because I was young and crazy. Because I was in love with Him and that love propelled me across the world.

There’s a country song by Frankie Ballard called Young and Crazy.

The chorus goes like this:

I wanna sit out on the porch, telling stories about my glory days, when I’m pushing 80. How am I ever gonna get to be old and wise, if I ain’t ever young and crazy? 

I really like this portion of the song, though the rest of the song is pretty off. I have come to believe that being young and crazy does not have to entail the mistakes that most teenagers make. The truth be told, the craziest young people are the ones who follow after Jesus with their whole hearts. That’s what my grandchildren will be hearing about on my front porch when my hair is gray and I’m pushing 80.

Sure, they’ll hear about my mistakes. Because just like anybody else, I’ve made them. But when it comes to being young and crazy, they’ll hear about the time grandma left the country at 16 without her parents. I’ll make sure they hear the story when we drove an hour, off road in Africa, to share the gospel with people who had never heard it. I can just imagine their shocked faces when they hear of the time I ate a silk worm in Vietnam. I’ll let them leaf through my passports and ask questions and when their parents are weary of them getting on the airplane for their first missions trip… I’ll remind them how much God loves when we are young and crazy.

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However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me–the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace. 

Acts 20:24