Surprise! For those of you who don’t know, I am currently on the end of the recovery for Dengue Fever. Jesus has been so faithful in bringing steady healing into my body, and I am so much better than I was, so no need for worry.
These past couple of weeks as my team has been out doing ministry, I have been laying in a bed, whether that was hospital, hostel, or my sleeping mat. When I first left the village that my team and I are serving in this month to go to the doctor in the city, I was fully expecting to be back that very same day. Instead, it turned into a three day stay at the hospital in Phnom Penh, followed with a week in a nearby hostel (where my team joined me) for more rest and recovery, before returning. I’ll be honest, when I first was admitted into the hospital I was terrified. I didn’t know any of the people, I was there without anyone who knew my medical history, and I was sick. I wasn’t sure what was happening, and I felt completely alone. I would literally cry out to God in my hospital room and ask Him why He was allowing this to happen. I mean, I’m in month ten of my eleven months of the race, and the very last thing that I wanted to be doing was laying in a hospital bed while nurses and doctors examined me constantly throughout the day. On Sunday, I had a friend of a friend come to visit me (who also happens to be a doctor and a missionary), and throughout the course of her visit, she said that perhaps Jesus has me in a time of waiting, something that she later repeated on Friday when I saw her again. After she left my hospital room that night, I started thinking about what she meant. If God really did have me in a time of waiting, then what was it for? What was I meant to be waiting for, and was I missing it? I would love to say that I understood the exact personal application of what my doctor friend said, but to be honest, I didn’t start to understand what she meant until that Friday, after she had said it a second time.
Slowly, I started to realize that the waiting that she was referring to, was the waiting that Jesus had called Martha to. You see, for several years, I have been growing more and more in giving Jesus my busyness that I tend to get caught up in, and exchanging it for beautiful time spent at His feet. I thought that my Martha tendencies were under control, and that I was diligently giving Him my need to be busy and doing something. But, I realized after coming to the village where my ministry is this month, and seeing the copious amount of time spent doing nothing, that I still had a ways to go before fully shedding the need to be doing. Jesus was calling me to a deeper season of nothingness, because only in the nothing, could it be still enough for me to hear His voice. I realized that Jesus was calling me to be jealous for time with Him, like He was jealous for time with me. My time with Jesus these past few weeks have been sweeter and far more intimate than anything that I have ever experienced. Time has become a thing that I no longer dread, but am excited for, because I know that with time, comes space for me and Jesus to sit and be in communion. I have learned that there are things that Jesus will only reveal through the waiting.
Only in the waiting did I have enough time to lay down and expect to hear His voice. Only in the waiting did I find that I had been neglecting His promptings. Only in the waiting did Jesus bring healing, physically, yes, but also so much deeper than that. Only in the waiting do I have space to experience the fullness of His presence. Only in the waiting do I cling to His peace. Only in the waiting do I intercede for those “doing”. Only in the waiting does my spirit explode with the gentle faithfulness of the Father.
Y’all, Dengue is hard, and there are so many physical and emotional aspects to it, all of which I wish to never experience again. But, I cherish the countless hours that I spent on my mat, in between sleeping, where Abba and I would meet and sit and talk for hours. It was in those moments, where my heart would come alive, and it is those moments that my heart will forever remember and create more of for the rest of my being.
