Seasons come and go.
Winter freezes. Spring refreshes. Summer scorches. Fall…well, falls.
Hearts break, leaves drop, temperatures plummet, days get shorter…
Upon our arrival in Moldova, our logistics king, Burton Williams, challenged us after a really powerful worship session with the squad. His words to us were something to the effect that we had just been filled to the brim and we were overflowing with God’s Spirit and love, so our challenge was to leave all of that on the field this month.
In other words, he didn’t want us to walk out of Moldova with anything left.
He challenged us to give our hearts fully and let them break, to pour out all of our strength and energy and love into Moldova, remaining confident that God is our sustainer and He will always refill us.
Moldova seems so hopeless. Cornesti seems so hopeless, but I know it isn’t hopeless, and I know that because I was sent there with 23 other missionaries at one time to proclaim HOPE.
It’s been hard, though.
We think we’re poor in America when we can’t go out to eat multiple nights a week, and see every movie we want, and buy a new pair of designer jeans every week, all while maintaining payments on a car that costs more than most housing around the world…
In Moldova, a shower is a privilege and owning a laptop is a dream, running water is too expensive, and heat is a novelty that usually comes in the form of a wood-burning stove.
In America, I had no idea what poor is at all, and God didn’t wait long on the race to show me.
This month:
- I’ve spent days tilling half-frozen fields with a shovel for hours straight,
- I slept in a two-room house with a screaming 5-month-old and a blaring fire that turned our house into a sauna,
- I showered four times the entire month,
- I crunched numbers and wrote a support letter for the mission we partnered with,
- I swept chicken poop in the rain,
- I hauled lumber,
- I weeded and raked a field on a really steep hill in a hail storm,
-
I harvested literally hundreds of tomatoes by hand…
I don’t think my body had anything left to give…
- I also fell absolutely in LOVE with Michelle (or Mihaela, the orphan I wrote about in my blog about adopting a thief) and it shattered my heart to leave her,
- I went through what my team is classifying as a “break-up” (it wasn’t exactly that, but it also wasn’t the easiest decision of the race so far),
- I learned that my mom has to go through an extra chemo treatment,
- there was a death in my family,
- my heart broke more fully than I've ever felt before when I learned that the mission that we worked with all month is holding on by a thread because the financial crisis in Moldova is so vastly great,
- and I went through my first real season of homesickness.
…I'm not sure my heart had anything left, either.
I list all of that to say that during my fall in Moldova…it fell.
Pre-launch, I remember praying that God would expand my capacity to love beyond what I thought I could handle.
I didn’t think I could simultaneously LOVE the people I love in the states and LOVE the people I’m placed to live with and to serve on the race,
but Papa’s faithful and so much bigger than I think He is…
So in the midst of it, through every sore muscle I’ve had to walk off and every tear that's fallen, I've never felt like I wasn't exactly where I'm supposed to be.
and Burton, I’m going to say, “mission accomplished.”
I left all of me out on the field.
And now I’m off to do it again, 9 more times.
P.s. I wrote this during our travel between Moldova and Nepal, so if you read it and thought, "wait, I KNOW she's in Nepal now," you're right. These were my thoughts in the in-between. 🙂 Nepal is gorgeous and I can't wait to see what God has to show me this month!
