This morning I woke up in that town that the ancient Mayans carved out of the jungle. This group in the photo just beat four other teams racing the length of Mexico and climbing to the top of a Mayan temple.

Today one of the local pastors killed a cow and we’re going to go have a party in his village, the same village where this team will live for the next month, helping an unreached people group to discover Jesus. It represents another step forward in my dream of waking up a generation to the greatness within them and to God’s agenda for their lives.

If you read the blogs of the participants, they are thrilled. They are living life at full throttle and
discovering new depths in themselves that they didn’t know were there.

I had always been frustrated that young people are under-challenged. We don’t trust them to do the stuff that Jesus did – to leave home for a long time and focus on ministry. We don’t trust them with risks and with discomfort. We saddle them with school debt and lock them into a career, and we call it “responsible behavior.” Last year, I had this dream called the World Race that shows there’s an alternative. Yes, we launched it much too quickly, but I’ve learned that you have to just make a start and then keep improving it if you want to reach your dream.

Most dreams never get to stage one. Too much risk, too many resources required. There’s the embarrassment of failure. Better to live in safety.

In stage two, people begin to sit up and take notice. But to get here, we had to live with "good enough" in stage one. Yes, we didn’t do a great job of recruiting, yes, we didn’t screen participants like we wanted to, yes, sometimes we didn’t have a clue about what we were going to set up. Yes, we didn’t debrief them like we wanted to. And the list goes on.

But all the while, the dream was taking on greater focus as we added new second stage details to it. We found ways to recruit committed participants. We found new leaders. We gave everyone a month of training. We pioneered new countries.

People ask me how stuff like this happens. You have to believe in your dream enough to start and make a multitude of mistakes and in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, believe that the dream is worth it. We're not there, but we're getting closer to it.