Mike: Looking Beyond Race for Congo

I've been waiting awhile to write my final blog posting, perhaps trying to gain some perspective on the event and my experiences. Maybe more will come as more time passes by but this is where I'm at right now.

I found myself throughout this week thinking about where I was exactly a week ago from any given time; whether it was rolling past Wyoming buttes, Iowa cornfields, or climbing unforgiving Appalachian hills. It's interesting, while I was actually doing those things, I wasn't thinking about my life a week prior; I was thinking about others' lives a world away. When you are on the saddle for that amount of time, no matter how hard you are pushing yourself, you still have time to think, and during that time I was forcing myself to think about my experiences in the Congo, the people I knew there, the documentaries I had watched, etc... Now that it is over, my tendency is to reflect more on the race rather than what the race was about.

I think this is normal and natural for all of us, which is why it takes a level of intentionality and deliberate effort to remember and remind ourselves of the reality that our friends and brothers and sisters in the Congo find themselves in. Stephan Bauman said it best at the conclusion of the race, that if over the next five years people would pray for Congo as much as they have prayed for us (the riders) this week, perhaps we would have a different country in five years.

Perhaps.

Oftentimes when people ask me what they can do for Congo and I tell them to begin by praying, they respond by saying "yeah, well, besides for that..." Comments like that betray our confidence in prayer and the one who hears our prayers. Because we cannot quantify (or qualify) the results of our prayer, because the God we pray to can neither be seen, heard, nor touched, because we are an immediate, pragmatic culture we tend to disqualify and discount the power of prayer. But Jesus, the one who saw the invisible and prioritized the eternal, had a different perspective: "without me you can do nothing." Whoa.

Jesus put prayer at the top of his list of strategies. He spent whole nights in prayer, weeks in fasting and prayer, and taught his followers to pray continually. Perhaps he knew something we don't know, or still haven't quite figured out. As we come to a conclusion of sorts in our adventure together (for those of us who followed along during the race) I want to continue to encourage all of us to engage, learn, give generously, and go when we can; but certainly do not neglect this vital aspect of prayer for Congo, that God's Kingdom would come and his will would be done. Certainly Jesus would not have instructed his followers to pray this prayer if there were no chance of it actually coming to pass. For this reason alone, we can find hope and a reason to be optimistic about Congo.

I would like to propose we engage on a grand experiment. Who knows, perhaps if we all prayed continually for the Congo over the next five years we would see a different country entirely. Here's to having a small part of making that a reality.
Peace.
Mike