I’d like to welcome my brother as the guest blogger today 🙂
Hey everyone, my name is Tim Hendrickson and coming up here in July 2014 I will begin a journey called the World Race. I am twenty years old and will soon be 21 once February 10th gets here. Now to tell you a little bit of my story. I grew up in your average Christian middle class house. However back then if there was an excuse that I could use to get out of going to church you best believe I would find it. I now attend The Gathering and absolutely love my church family. Going through high school I, like many other teenagers, began to care more about what my peers thought and having fun than just about anything else. I began drinnking and partying regularly my sophomore year and I began doing drugs my junior year. This was my lifestyle all the way up to the summer of 2012 when God began to show me just how selfish I was being by living the way I was living as well as convicting me about the sinful lifestyle I was indulging in on a daily basis. God and His sovereignty placed me and the first person I ever got high with in a baptismal one night and I was transformed from the inside out. It’s been over a year since that radical transformation began and God has done so much it’s insane! However I will have to tell you all that stuff later.. So back to the World Race…
One question I had to ask myself when considering going on the World Race is “why?”. Why do I want to do this? I mean yeah I understand that it will be an amazing experience unlike anything I have ever done before but I knew that couldn’t be my driving motive for taking that first step. If I was going to do this I had to make sure I was doing it for the right reasons. Not because I wanted an adventure and not because I wanted to travel. If I was going to do this it would have to be because I thought A) God wants me to go. And B) I can see this helping build both my relationship with Christ as well as the Kingdom of God.
So what is it exactly that got me thinking that this is a part of what God wanted for me in my life? Well It all started way back in early middle school back before I even understood what it meant to seek a relationship with Christ and to deny myself. My cousin Jenny had just returned from a mission trip to Africa and was giving a presentation at her church about all the different things she did. The idea of going and doing mission work had been planted for the first time. I remember thinking “Wow, what an amazing thing to do.. I would love to go and do something like this.. But how?” and then that sneaky little devil put that doubtful thought in my head. “This just seems so impossible, I could never go do something like this”. The enemy since the beginning of time has always tried his best to deceive us. “Did God really say you would die if you eat from that tree?” “Did God really say that He would work all things for the good of those who love Him” “Did God really say He will provide the needs of His children?”. The father of lies has his way of putting doubt into our heart and mind but the truth is that if we can understand who our Heavenly Father is and grasp just how great His love is for us as well as understand what it is that His Word says than all of hell combined will not be able to stop us. So the fact that the enemy had tried to put doubt in my life as to if God could use me to do something like this ended up just motivating me to take that step of faith even more trusting that God would catch me even if I fall. You never know what all God has planned in your life but sometimes God gives us little peeks at the big things that He is doing. I imagine He gives us just the right amount of motivation to keep us going without being overcome with fear of how it is we are going to accomplish the things God is doing .
With that being said I guess I should share with you the dream that I feel God has placed on my heart. I hope to one day see the church as a whole coming together in communities in order to accomplish big things as the unified body of Christ. Things like raising funds together to start restaurants and other businesses owned by people who realize they have enough and ran by people who just needs someone to give them a chance in which all the profit goes straight to different ministries. These businesses would be capable of pumping out thousands of dollars each year to starving people groups all over the world. We would be able to provide funds for international missionaries to take the gospel to regions other people can’t. We could build orphanages and safe houses for the innocent children enslaved in sex trafficking and other forms of slavery all over the world. There are so many people suffering both in the US and around the world and they’re just waiting for Gods love to pour out on them. So one of the things I really look forward to experiencing on this journey is sharing in the suffering that others are facing all around the world and I hope that after I have shared in their suffering for a little while that I will come back to the states with a clearer vision on the larger calling God has for my life to take all the blessing we as the American church have and utilizing it to a greater extent for the glory of God and the growth of His Kingdom.
I’d like to invite you guys to check out his website we’ve created with his story – http://twr.caseyhphotos.com/. If you’d like to make a contribution, please click HERE. If you are not able to contribute, please feel free to pray alongside my brother on his journey, as well as share his story and fundraising efforts with your friends and family. It is greatly appreciated!
