Welcome to my blog!
My name is Abby Thornburg. I am 22 years old, and I am from Johnson City, Tennessee. For the past season of my life, I have gone to college at ETSU (East Tennessee State University). I graduated this past May of 2016 with a nursing degree, and have been working as an RN at a local hospital. This transitional period of my life has been difficult to process and walk through, but I am learning to rely on the Lord to lead me and plant me where He desires me to be.
This leads us to the current reality that I am going on the World Race soon! How did this come about, you may wonder? In college, I was very involved with a ministry called Cru. It was there that I found my greatest community and friendships. I was discipled and challenged and really for the first time was able to hear about and better grasp God’s heart and vision for the entire world. The Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost, as the Scripture says. He desires all nations to hear the Gospel, receive Him, and glorify Him. Amazingly, He invites us, His rescued and adopted sons and daughters, to co-labor with Him in this endeavor! One of my favorite passages of Scripture which is so crucial to us in our walks with Jesus as His disciples is the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20. Christ Jesus Himself says that He has all authority and that He gives us this same authority to do what we are called to do, which is to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” and teaching them what Jesus has taught us to do! Along with this colossal calling, Jesus offers the promise that He is with us “always, even unto the end of the age.” If I had ever wondered what my ‘calling’ was or what the will of God was for my life, hearing and grasping this growing up, especially in college, hit my spirit like a ton of bricks. Thank the Lord that He cuts through confusion with such clarity. So I have this passion for people to come to know the Lord–to be brought from death to life by the opening of their eyes through the Holy Spirit to truly see Jesus and their need for Him, to simply accept the gracious and free gift of salvation that was won for us at such a high price, and to be saved and eternally secured as sons and daughters of the Living God by the finished work of Jesus, as I had experienced! The Lord calls us to live missionally and to be His ambassadors wherever we are, and the Lord had been teaching me through my last semester at school that a ‘normal’ job is no less holy than other, more seemingly spiritual jobs, which I can tend to idolize and put on a pedestal. I knew the Lord wanted to use me in whatever working circumstance He put into place, whether that was a hospital or working on a college campus with the ministry that had so impacted me or going to international mission fields.
In considering all of this and in asking the Lord what the next chapter of my life could hold, I felt excited about all the opportunities available to me. I knew that being finished with school and being single, I would possibly not be this essentially “free” again in my life. I considered delving into some missions opportunities straight after leaving school, and applied to a few of these, one of them being the World Race. Around the same time, I was offered a nursing position while still finishing up the semester. I felt conflicted, but was amazed that a job was offered to me so soon. I took the job, which shut a few doors as far some of the other opportunities went. But I felt a stirring to wait and see what could come about with the World Race and if I would get accepted. Fast forward to now, I have been accepted, as you can see. And I feel that the Lord gave me the choice to stay in the job I have recently started or to choose to invest a year of my life outside the ‘safer’ plan that I had sort of envisioned for myself.
So I chose to take this incredible opportunity that I know will be more difficult and beautiful that I can imagine right now. I am choosing to be challenged and stretched to a dependence upon the Lord that I don’t think I have yet experienced. I am choosing to step outside the comfortable place I have grown up and spent the past 22 years of my life in to see and do things that I know will break me, but I want the Lord’s heart! I want His eyes for these beautiful and broken people who have such desperate need for Him, just like me. I pray through this journey I am chiseled and molded to look more like Jesus and better reflect His image in the earth as I was created to do. I pray that I experience a sense of family alongside my teammates that gives me a taste of what life-on-life, vulnerable, raw mission together truly can be. And I pray that light is shone into some of the darkest places of the world so that men and women who were created to be image bearers, worshipers, and enjoyers of the Almighty God are awakened to life through Jesus and begin to walk in that profound purpose.
[Side note: I tend to be quite verbose, as you can see, but I promise, this blog is wrapping up! :)]
I think the idea of maintaining a blog throughout the journey of the World Race is brilliant. It provides a place for expression and vulnerability to portray to you all what the Lord is doing in me and in all the people of the places we will be going, the ones He longs to reach with His love and His light. So I welcome you to my blog and am excited to offer you glimpses into this next season of my life. The best I can, anyway.
PLEASE, if you have any desire to be part of God’s workings in the nations and part of this mission that has eternal impact, if you would like to support me as one with the incredible opportunity to go, prayerfully consider supporting me financially! Be a ‘sender’ if the season of your life right now doesn’t look like ‘going’ into the mission field of other nations yourself.
For this mission, I have to raise around $17,000, which I will truthfully admit is daunting. But I believe that if the Lord calls us, He will make a way. His provision is unlimited and so graciously given to us through His Son, and I am believing Him to provide the finances that will make it possible for me to go. I invite you to be part of this!
Thank you so much for trucking through this entire novel of a blog post! Thank you for taking the time to learn a little more about me and what I long to be part of this next year. Please stay tuned!
In Christ,
Abby
