At World Race launch, I was challenged to allow God to romance me this year, to let Him show me His love for me and to fall head over heels in love with Him.
I didn’t understand.
Romance was something I thought was mutually exclusive to relationships with boyfriends and husbands, not God. I just didn’t get how He could be a father figure but also someone that I could fall head over heels in love with.
But I figured I’d be open to it, I’d let God take me on this adventure and if He wanted to romance me along the way then that’d be cool too.
When we arrived in Cambodia, we were told our main ministry would be teaching the boys who live in our home English and more about the Bible and our secondary ministry would be trips to the village to play with children and love on them. A week after we arrived, we got to go to the village.
God began to speak to my heart as soon as we left the city behind. I hadn’t realized how constrained and boxed in I had been feeling after spending two months straight in a bustling city with buildings as far as my eyes could see. I could finally breathe as we drove away from it all. There were rice fields for miles and it was like God had created this whole thing just for me.
As we walked through the village with the children following us, holding our hands, and showing us their homes, God began to do some magical work. When we reached a pond, the children began jumping in the water to pick us flowers. When all our hands were full of the water flowers, we began our walk again.
As we were walking, the children kept searching for flowers for me alone. Every few feet the children had a new colorful flower for me to add to my bouquet that I was carrying in my hands. I had never felt so loved as I did by those children.
I was there to serve them, but instead, they spoiled me and showed me the love of Jesus and for the first time I got the idea of what it meant being romanced by God. He wants to sweep me off my feet like these children had, He wants to give me bouquets of flowers to show me just how much He loves me, and He wants to spoil me with love for the rest of my life.
Photos from Amy Zeller and Emily Schwartz
