It was a Sunday afternoon and I was reading my devotions for my current internship and felt God pushing me to think about the WR. I was so frustrated with feeling like He was giving no clear answer, so in my head I started arguing with God, bringing up reasons of why I couldn’t go.
First, I told God it would be too hard for me to leave my family, my home. The next thing I know, God swung the bat: I started reading my assigned chapter for that week and this is what was written:
I seriously was sitting on my bed in complete shock. I read that paragraph about 20 times and was like “alright God, you answered that one, but I have more”.
My second question for God was “how would I fit in with my fellow teammates? I am not an “outdoors” person, and have had some not-so-pleasant experiences in the past with people judging me because I’m from beautiful, sunny southern California”. And here came swing number 2 from God: After I asked this, my phone rang. It was one of my best friends, Jade. I told her what was going on and she told me that I needed to listen to this sermon that our other friend had sent us in an email about 2 months back. I had received the link but never checked it out. So I went online and started listening. To sum it up, it was this missionary sharing her story of how God led her to the mission field; and I must say, I felt like I was listening to my own life. The clincher for me though was when she was on her plane to China and still felt like she didn’t fit in. Her fellow missionaries were reading Chinese/English dictionaries and playing worship songs on the guitar, and she was sitting their reading a vogue magazine. I seriously almost fell of my bed, as I am a avid subscriber to People magazine. This random womans testimony opened my eyes to see that there is no “mold” of a person called by God, but that we are all called. Her motto was “every door He opens I will walk through, and not worry about when the next one is coming”. I was in love with this perspective and right then and there gave this prayer up to God. But for some reason I still wasn’t convinced. I started doubting and attributing everything that had happened to random coincidence. I needed one more hit with the baseball bat. There was a series more of random phone calls from people telling me things that I know where directly from God and it was through all of that that I felt Him just directing my heart to go on the WR. The very next evening I received a call from WR staff telling me I had been accepted. I knew God’s hands were directing the timing of that entire process and I was so confident in my answer to say yes to His calling for my life.
He has placed in my heart what is called an “Apostolic Passion” Passion means whatever a person is willing to suffer for and apostle means a sent one, a messenger. So, “Apostolic Passion” is a deliberate, intentional choice to live for the worship of Jesus in the nations. All of the questions I had for God are still big things in my life, but I know that He has called me into something bigger than myself, something bigger than my home, and something bigger than my family; and I want to be obedient to His calling in my life. I want to live out my apostolic passion.
