What’s been happening?

Hey everyone! I am so sorry it has been such a long time since I last posted, but life has been a little crazy! What a struggle and a blessing these last 3 months have been. In this post I just want to catch you up on how God has been blessing my life and updates on what I am going to do on the Race now with COVID changing plans.  

So first of all. God has blessed my life abundantly in the relationships I have made with my friends and family around me and with my teammates for the race. I have been so blessed with the time to pour into the people in my life and to live my life with them in a way I’ve never been able to before. It’s going to be hard to leave them when the time comes. As for my teammates, they have been the biggest answered prayer. On July 23rd, I left my house to go spend 10 of the best days ever with up to 20 of my teammates. This is going to be a long story so if you don’t want to read so much just skip ahead to the update ;). 

On July 23rd, I drove up to Kansas City to meet up with Kailee and Hailey so that we could carpool to Virginia together. Along the way we picked up Micah and Andrew who live up North and met us in Louisville. Our vehicle became known as the Party Pilot because we were all wedged into a Honda Pilot! Haha what happens when you put a handful of people who have just met for the first time into a car for hours on end? They become instant family. We were headed to a Lake House in Virginia to meet up with something like 15 other teammates, which was only possible thanks to the hospitality of our World Race Parents Kathy and Howard Pride (this doesn’t exclude how amazing all the World Race Parents have been!) They opened their lake home to us for the week and blessed us with the ability to become a community like no community I have ever experienced! I have never felt so safe and loved and encouraged by a group of people I had just met in my life. They are always going to be a part of my family! While at the Lake House we had the greatest impromptu worship and discussions centered on how amazing our Father is. We had crying laughs and laughing cries. It was an incredible adventure and no one wanted to leave at the end. We had found a beautiful, life giving community. Here are some pictures of the amazing people I met during this part of the trip!

Now for the second half of the trip! On July 29th, the Party Pilot (Micah, Andrew, Kailee, Hailey, and Me) said our sad goodbyes to the last of our teammates. We were headed to the Smokey Mountains for the rest of the week to camp. Haha no showers, no camper, just our tents and the great outdoors. That was a complete polar opposite experience to the lake house we had just left. We also had our honorary Party Piloter (Katelyn) with us. Pretty much we spent 4 nights camping and I think survived thanks to the generosity of our neighboring campers. Our first night cooking, all the wood was wet and we struggled to get a fire. So we ended up borrowing a hatchet from one neighbor and the coals of the other neighbors fire! Haha we had to duct tape our canopy together by day 3 because a thunderstorm had taken it out, but we did a great job of making it work! Duct tape fixes anything. We also had to cook all our meals with a shovel because we didn’t pack anything to use for cooking. Just silverware. Haha it was a laughter filled weekend. We bonded over cliff jumping into freezing cold waters, an 11 mile hike with plenty of beautiful views and lots of tripping, flooded tents and games played by the light of a single headlamp. I wouldn’t change a minute of that trip. We also got to meet up with a few more of our teammates for dinner at Pigeon Forge, which was so exciting! Here are some pics from this half of the trip!

On to the World Race Updates. 

August 3rd, we received our update email giving us our current options for the race. Obviously, we won’t be leaving the country this October so we were given 3 options. The locations for all of these options are different from the original locations. They are all also chosen based on regions. This just means that instead of routing out 11 countries, the racers will travel to an entrance country in a specific region and move to different countries as they open or become available within that region. So here were my 3 options:

1. Leave in October and serve till January in the States, then launch internationally for the remainder of the race. 

2. Pick one of the 3 routes leaving in January and join them. 

• Classic: Central America (starting in Costa Rica), Southeast Asia (starting in Thailand), Southern Asia (starting in India), and Southern Africa (starting in eSwatini).
• Expedition: Central America (starting in Guatemala), Europe (starting in Spain), Central Asia (starting in Kazakhstan), Southern Asia (starting in India), and Southeast Asia (staring in Thailand or Cambodia).
• Unscripted: Europe (starting in Romania), Southeast Asia (starting in Thailand), and South America (starting in Ecuador).

3. Defer my trip until August 2021.

This was a very difficult decision to make because I knew that I wasn’t going to get to serve alongside some of the amazing people I had just been blessed to meet, but we are called to follow God’s plans not our own. Seeing my teammates make the hard decisions to leave in October or January, even though it meant the team would be split, because that is what God is calling them to brought peace to my heart and mind. I realized that even if we aren’t serving on one team, this amazing family I’ve become a part of will remain together and supportive from all over the world. Also, it means God can bless more people in more places with this love that is so unexplainable that it can only be Him.

So I have made my decision. I will be leaving out in January on the Classic route. I am blessed to have some of my original teammates joining me on this route. I am also blessed to get to cheer on my teammates who will be stateside this October. Please keep my October teammates in your prayers as they serve people throughout the U.S. This is a bold and humble decision for them to obey God’s call. Also, please keep all of the world racers in your prayers as they make decisions on what this new change will mean in their world race journey. 

Thank you all for your continued support and I can’t wait to see what this new route has in store for all of us. 

Love y’all!

Ashton