So as most of you know, I recently graduated from Gordon College, frankly for me it seems to have been a shorter time ago than it actually was…we seem to be a World Race time warp. I know that it is now October, but it just doesn’t make sense to me that all this time has gone by. But, back to the thing about Gordon. Every final exam period a bunch of emails comes around encourage us to finish the course, finish strong. I have had to channel a few of those emails to finish this race in Ireland. There have just been a very large number of days where I have had to choose joy. It hasn’t come naturally. There have been times when in some ways I didn’t want to choose joy because it was just that much easier to wallow in my dislike of this, or discomfort in that. Ultimately, I would pray at the start of each day that God would be my strength, that God would be my joy because I couldn’t derive it from the work I was doing. The lesson learned has been that there will times throughout the race as well as throughout the rest of my life where things don’t come easily. But more than that, a happiness about what I’m doing won’t come naturally. There will be times when I just can’t “come on, get happy” but it is not about my strength. Much easier said than done…there can be joy in focusing on the negative, but it isn’t true joy. When serving others stops being a service onto God and starts being a chore, it is a lot easier to look at the others who aren’t doing anything and get angry rather than continuing to serve others in love.
I say all of this because this is what my last month looked like. It is so easy to serve others when you love them, and they love you back and you genuinely like each other. But is hard to serve when you don’t get the credit, or it’s people you don’t particularly care for, or it’s doing something disgusting that you wish someone else would just step up and do. I am still learning to grow in this, and I’m getting better, but there are definitely times when I would love to just throw up my hands and quit…and maybe yell why don’t you just do it yourself…but that is me…that is my flesh. That is not love, and it is certainly not Christ.
