During our debrief in month four of this World Race journey, I began feeling a call to go deeper with my art. I had this growing concern that my videography content was shallow. I always try to be as authentic as possible, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t fully appreciating God’s work through my gifting. I decided to lean into that conviction and do something about it, after God spoke to me through a vision.
One night during worship, God gave me this vision where I was standing at to edge of a cliff leaning over rushing water. God was on a tall piece of a cliff that had separated from the mountain, and wanted me to jump there to meet Him. I jumped, and when I landed we were lying in a grassy field. As soon as I realized where we were, God slapped my camera into my open palm, and suddenly I saw thousands of people and He was standing next to each of them all at once.
I heard the words, “People need to know.”
I saw this all in a matter of seconds, and the meaning of it hit me so quickly, like a punch in the stomach of conviction. It all made sense to me: there are stories people need to know, and God wants me to tell them. I was excited, motivated, and began praying He would show me whose story to tell.
Decorating the counseling wing
This past month we worked at a school for the urban poor that hosts more than 1,000 refugees. We did odd jobs around the school, and my teammate Erin and I had been given the assignment of decorating the counseling room. I needed a pair of scissors and went into the school’s sewing class to search for one.
I approached the sewing teacher Shakeela, a graceful, bubbly woman with a nice smile. She gave me some scissors and then asked me if I thought counseling was a healthy thing. I told her yes, and then she just started sharing with me all about her life.
She, her husband and three kids are Christian refugees from Pakistan. They experienced persecution and had to flee the country for their lives. She told me she feels everything she went through in her life is worth it because she can tell her story of redemption to inspire others and to glorify the Lord.
Shakeela and her three children
I suddenly realized hers was probably the story I was supposed to tell. I told her what I had been praying for and asked if I could make a short film about her life. She told me she had been praying that she could share her story with the whole world. Of course she had.
We were both very excited and prayed together with my teammate Erin, who had come into the room wondering why I hadn’t come back with any scissors. Erin and I went on to become very close to Shakeela, and got the opportunity to spend a lot of time with her whole family.
She shared with us unending wisdom, inspired us with her stories of God’s faithfulness, and her constant boldness to share it with others. In return, we gave her a platform for her voice, extended our friendship and simply loved her.
Erin, Shakeela and I getting mango lassie with her family.
Further confirmation for the film came when I was deciding what to title it. I originally wanted to call it “Ripped at the Seams”, a play-on-words, related to sewing, but to further reference how she had been uprooted from her life. It felt off though, and I wondered if God wanted the focus of the story to not be on the pain, but to be on the abundance of blessing that followed it.
The title, “Bursting at the Seams”, then popped into my head. A few days later, at church, the verse Isaiah 54:3 came on the screen:
“For you will soon be busting at the seams. Your descendants will occupy other nations and resettle the ruined cities.”
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know the translation, so when I looked it up I realized the one the church shared was the only translation that uses the words, bursting at the seams. I was now confident both in the title of the film and the certainty that my newly found relationship with Shakeela was a God ordained one.
Meeting Shakeela has taught me more than ever about the power of a story and a testimony. She never preaches, but she shares God’s truth daily by simply sharing the work she has seen Him do. She never misses an opportunity to tell a story, be it from the Bible, or her own life. She feels called to evangelism, and sharing stories is how she plants seeds.
Another lesson I learned from meeting her was that God can be trusted with our passions. I find I sometimes live in fear that He will take them away from me, or not allow me to live them out. This month, however, God showed me that if we take that leap of faith, and just jump, like in my vision, trusting Him with our passions, He will use them in bigger ways than we could have ever dreamed possible.
The reality is that God loves our passions as much as we do because He put them there in the first place. No one respects and understands them as much as Him, so He can surely be trusted to use them with His best for us in mind.
So here is short a film I made about my new friend Shakleela, directed by God. Filmed and edited by me.
