Goodbye, India. Hello, Nepal.
We have officially wrapped up our time in India and have began our debrief for Nepal. India was such an incredible month, there was so much growth within the squad and with individual teams. There were spiritual gifts that were being discovered and grown in. There were fear barriers that were completely broken down and chains of struggles that were broken. The Lord moved, and he moved big in everyones lives.
I personally have been learning so much. For the majority of my life, I have been an ‘enough’ Christian. What I mean by that is that i feel like I am godly ‘enough’, spiritual ‘enough’, and wise ‘enough’ to be considered a Christ-like women. I got comfortable in my level of knowing the Lord and was happy with being Christian ‘enough’ for others.
But I don’t want the bare minimum of what God has for my life. In fact, I don’t believe there is a bare minimum for our lives. He has huge, good, and Kingdom shifting plans for our lives. And if we (I) live in the mind set of having just ‘enough’ of Him, we have missed out big time. I want more of Him, I want more wisdom, I want to want more of Him in every moment of my days.
So, why haven’t I done this yet? What was keeping me from going deep with the Lord and letting him work in every part of me? I felt like I was hungry for the Lord, I love the Lord and wanted to grow…but there was something stopping me. I had realized that if I began to grow any more in my faith, it would begin to be painful. I had dealt with everything that was easy to change, shifts that would be painless and *look* like they were producing fruit. But the changes that I needed to make would hurt, and they would hurt bad. I had become so comfortable where I was that the masks I had placed over certain areas of my life had sunken in deep and had become calluses. In order to change and grow in the Lord and what He had for me, these calluses would have to be ripped off. The sin flesh underneath would have to be exposed in order to be dug out, examined, and removed. Basically a spiritual surgery on my life.
I knew that I wanted this change and more than that, I knew that I needed this change. I wanted so badly to continue growing in my faith and to develop and intimacy with the Lord….but the fear of pain stopped me. Didn’t I know that the reward of a deeper relationship with me Father would far out way any pain it took to get there? Somewhere in me I knew that, but the value I placed on comfort and the value I placed on growing in Christ were imbalanced and desperately wrong.
I didn’t want people to see me growing and changing and going through this painful experience! Godly people didn’t have messy lives, did they? Godly people never went through painful transitions, right? I couldn’t let people see that…the comfort of people seeing me as godly ‘enough’ was at stake.
But thinking back on all of the women and men of God that I admired in the past, I realized that the thing that made me admire them so, was the fact that they fought passed struggles, they threw their sins into the light, and they were vulnerable with what they needed. Never did I see them as messy or less than, I saw them as desperate to be like Christ.
I know this year is going to be a time of growing and changing and painful letting go, but WOW its going to be so good. Ready to be fully known, ready to grow, because I already know that I’m so fully loved.
