(Bunna is Aramaic for coffee)
These are three things I got to experience everyday in Ethiopia. What more in life could you need?
On our first day of ministry in Ethiopia, the team sat down all holding our new babies, that we would come to love and beg to adopt, for a coffee ceremony. Warm pita/tortilla-esque bread was served to us along with (close tie to India) the best cup of coffee I have ever had.
As I dive deeper and deeper into the Race, I realize the things I love- teaching and education, playing with kids, holding orphans, drinking delicious coffee, carbs, are things that God loves. And I love these things because He has given me these passions because these are things He is passionate about.
“Enjoying life and enjoying God go hand in hand” Judah Smith
My passions have been revealed to me throughout my life, some at the most random times. I was 13 years old on my first mission trip to Guatemala when I realized how much I loved kids, yet I was just a kid myself. The Lord placed a special place in my heart for orphans and broke my heart, maybe for the first time, for abandonment, which is something that breaks His heart.
It was at an even younger age that I knew I had a special connection and love for babies. God only grew a heat-felt love for children and babies more throughout the years, and a yearning to be a mother someday- not only to my own kids but to adopt, as He has adopted us.
All these connections to loving children became a passion that I decided to turn into a career. I decided to enter into college studying Elementary Education, still very wary of becoming a teacher. I wanted to get a degree, graduate, then figure out what to do with my life. But as I studied in college and delved deeper into education and why it is so pivotal and the power that it has to change a child’s life, education too became one of my passions.
Now this isn’t all a coincidence. It also isn’t a coincidence that I have gotten to experience and live out my passions (and many more) on the World Race. God is allowing me to partner with Him this year to do things I love and that are fun because He loves me and He is fun. I didn’t just make up what I love in life and decide one day I would seek those things. God divinely orchestrated my passions by weaving them into my life slowly and beautifully. He knew by taking me to Guatemala it would lead to a love of children (orphans) and by having a love of children that I would want to devote my life and future career to something that revolved around them, which led to teaching. And with His funny humor, that through teaching I would absolutely need coffee to live and come to find out He would take me to the country where coffee was created and I would get to enjoy it to the fullest.
The Lord is good in all He does. He puts things and people in our lives that we get to enjoy and love but most importantly that glorify Him. He longs for us to enjoy this life we live and thank Him every step of the way- every baby rocked to sleep, every sermon preached, every lesson understood by students, every warm piece of bread with jam, and every delicious cup of coffee.
*Also, a restaurant in Ethiopia has the best bread I have ever eaten in my life… and macchiatos.
