Hey everyone!!!
My name is Ashton and I am 22 years old. I am so excited to tell you guys more about myself and share this journey that God has brought me on with you! Something I really struggle with everyday is being vulnerable and open to people. I feel weak if I show my pain or hurts to anyone, but that is what I hope to intentionally challenge in myself during this journey. So I want to share in this post who I am both strengths and weaknesses.
Currently I am finishing up my Bachelors of Science in Agriculture Education, which means I have spent this entire semester student teaching. It has been a roller coaster of emotions, but I have learned so, so much! I have been from feeling complete failure as a teacher to feeling like I am killing it and everything in between. But you know, I have been so blessed with the teacher I am learning from and the students I get to work with everyday. Something God has been teaching me through this is how to love no matter how I am treated in return. This lesson has not always been easy for me this semester, but something I always try to remember through this experience is that we are all human and we all make mistakes and have hurts that others do not know. Overall, I love my students and am honored to have gotten the placement I am in. It has been an incredible final semester in this chapter of my life.
Something I have been recognizing lately, is how blessed my life has been. God has treated me so good and yet in the last few years, all I could see were the things I had lost. I don’t know if any of you have ever experienced this, but I wonder sometimes why is it so much easier to focus on the things we no longer have when there is so many things that we have been blessed in having?
One of the things God has blessed my life with is an incredible family. It has not always been rainbows and sunshine, but I have always been loved and supported. I have been blessed with a loving mom and dad, and an older sister who is there for me even though we can clash at times. I have grown up being brought to church and taught about Jesus and God, which gave me a strong foundation in my identity. I was blessed with a great youth minister who challenged me to find my own faith in God. A church family that supported me in all the opportunities that have fed my love for international mission work and for people of all cultures. Without having been blessed by this amazing family both literal and church, I don’t know if I would have the identity and the heart for others that I have now. I have also had my family grow as my sister got married and had two little girls. They are the hardest thing about leaving for the race.
I have been so impacted by the sacrifice of my friend Alex who would give his last $10 so that someone else can have a hot meal and my friend Krysta who will listen and support all of us college girls and our problems, never expecting anything in return. I have had my heart broken for the Lord when I went to Nicaragua for the first time for a week and he called me to so much more than the life I thought I needed. I have felt more love in the last few years of my life when I faced loss after loss of my friends to death and hated God. I pushed him away and hid my anger and pain, but was so loved by those who God loves that they helped me to heal and find my relationship with Him again. God has been so impactful in my life that all I want is to love and help others. Do you know what I mean? That feeling that is so strong within that you need to go and serve and simply love for Him because he has blessed you so much. That feeling that literally feels like it is trying to burst out of you? I have been feeling this for a while now.
My spiritual journey has not always been an easy one, but God has always had my back and has always led me to where He needed me. I think the times when my spiritual journey has been hardest have been the times when I tried to rely on myself and my means to fix whatever the problem was. When I would cut God out of the equation. Yet another reason to be going on the race. I want to learn to trust and rely on Him in every moment of every day. I think I have explained my spiritual journey already for the most part, but the continuous theme of my whole story has always been love, grace, and patience. He has always loved me, he always offers grace, and he is always there waiting for me to accept those two gifts. One thing I do want to clarify is that my spiritual journey is just that. A journey. I am still learning and growing. I know there are still a lot of mountains to climb and valley I will undoubtably fall into, but I hope that my whole life will be focused and reliant on Him through it all.
Now to lighten it up a bit. Here are some fun things about me. I love to smile and laugh. I don’t think I have ever met a stranger, but I do get shy sometimes and need “me time”.lol. I love just being around people. Anything I can do with others I will probably love to do. But more specifically, I love sports like tennis, baseball, ultimate frisbee, and volleyball. I also love games, especially monopoly and spades. My de-stresser is the piano because I can just get caught up in the playing and music of it all. I am a 7 on the enneagram test and a ESFJ on the Meyers Briggs assessment. I have never been very good at recognizing my strengths, but like everything else I have been trying to be better. So my strengths would probably be that I am very positive and outgoing. I do not like anyone feeling left out of anything. I am usually very good at bringing people into the group and I tend to be very flexible. On the flip side of that is I am not always the best at going deep (aka, learning to be vulnerable), which can lead to me feeling alone sometimes. Also, I can be a bit of a procrastinator at times because I am almost too flexible. Lastly, because I like to be positive and outgoing I can get worn out and have negative emotions spill out when there are too many because I have been ignoring them. All of these strengths and weaknesses are things that I am always trying to find balance too, but they are a part of me. I love Spanish culture. I think it is just brilliant and I feel so comfortable around it. I would love it if one day I got to live somewhere in Latin America and be a part of this welcoming, family oriented culture. I mean I minored in Spanish for a reason, right? haha.
Overall, I decided on the race because I couldn’t shake the feeling that God was calling me to it and that is was a challenge I need to accept. I love that it will give me the opportunity to serve and love people from all over the world for a year, while at the same time teaching me to love deeper, rely on God every moment, and challenge me to really define what is truly important in my life. I know it will not be easy, but I am so excited for all the growth and opportunities to love and learn during this year abroad.
If you made it this far, please just keep my team in your prayers and the people who will be a part of our lives throughout the race next year. Please pray that God prepares our hearts for His work and that we remember whose we are and what that means. Lastly, please be praying that God helps me to focus on the here and now before the race to be loving and serving the people in my life at this moment. I find that I have had a hard time focusing on the present because I am so excited for the future. I think that would also be a great prayer for my team as well.
Thank you so much for reading through all of this and supporting me in this journey. I could not do this without my prayer warriors fighting for the love of God in both our hearts and those that we meet. I will be posting a different article on Why I chose the world race later so if you want to know a little more and a deeper reason behind that, then you can be looking out for that article.
Thanks again and love you all!
Ashton
