It’s Friday night. And I’m at home sick, away from my team.
My body is struggling, tired, and frankly…violently revolting against its current fate.
This week has been a struggle for me. Softball camp went really well. We showed up again on Monday, taught the kids the basics, and by Thursday there was a pretty competitive Ukraine vs. America game going. Each day we got to know the kids and teenagers more and more, and shared the gospel in huddled groups multiple times. As I write this my teammates are at the local church event that we invited all of those kids to, just to get them into the church building. Which is a huge answer to prayer, because the goal is not just to share the gospel with them, but to hook them up with a community that can train and grow them up in the faith.
However. Softball is NOT my element. I like watching baseball, just not playing it. I mean. It’s okay, and fun, and I’m not half bad at it. But it’s just not the type of ministry I’d prefer to do. Give me a dying, exsanguinating person in a medical clinic, or a sex slave to counsel , or an orphanage with a bunch of toddlers to play with. But please. Don’t stick me on a field with a hundred untrained screaming children running around with bats in their hands, balls whizzing by my head every second. And then expect me to get excited about the game, and oh yes, stand in front of said hyper children bursting at the seems to play and preach the gospel.
Is this what obedience looks like, Jesus?
“Yes, my daughter. This is what it looks like.”
And apparently, spending every second with 5 other people, living in a house with a total of 12 people, and being constantly around about 25 people for ministry purposes isn’t my element either. I mean, I’ve had over 24 roommates since the start of college, done summer camp, and work in a people intensive environment back home. But the difference is, at the end of the day, I was able to get in my car and drive off, close my bedroom door and shut the world out. I was independent. Able to go where I want, do what I want, eat what I want, and sleep to my heart’s desire. Although an extreme extrovert, I’m beginning to see how much I value solitude and freedom. Setting my own schedule and getting my own way. I also valued letting my problems be my problems, and your problems be your problems.
It has dawned on me in the last 48 hours that this attitude is not going to get me very far on this race. I have 5 team members now. Whose wants and needs are going to collide with my own. I have no car, no bedroom, no safe haven (save my ipod and pillow) to escape to.
God has spent this week, amongst other big things He’s got going on, teaching me exactly what it looks like to die to myself. That this year is going to require me to DAILY pick up my cross, my electric chair, my noose, and die to what I want, to the naps I want to take, to the food I wish I was eating, to the internet connectivity I wish I had, to the escape, and the quiet, to the lazyness I want to succumb to. Dying even to the ministry I’d prefer to do. Because, this week I’ve learned, that I have the right to nothing, to no space or time. I’ve learned that I am called to one thing, and that is to drop all of the things that formerly comprised my identity and will, so that I may follow Him. I’ve learned that, though I previously never considered myself a preacher, evangelist, interceader, or pssshh, a good singer: I am one now. Or have to try and figure out some way to become these things…real fast.
And He said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himsel and ake up his cross daily and ofllow me. For whoever wold save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Luke 9:23-24
Jesus goes on in Luke 9 to tell the disciples the cost of following Him. He informs them that they can not even go home to bury their father, or to say goodbye to their friends. He tells them that foxes will have holes, and birds will have nests, but the son of man will have no place to lay his head.
FACT: I am called to be here. I am having a blast, my team and I laugh all the time, and God is richly blessing us each day, and WILL heal my body from this fatigue. But this I can be sure of, no in fact, adamantly positive of, that I have yet to even scratch the surface of what it will mean to die to myself, of how much it will cost me to follow Jesus this year. As it seems, ech hem, that this is only week 2.
