The Race is over! We’ve completed everything that we were sent to do and now we are all back home, back in the “Real World.”
It has taken me a long time to write my last blog, because well, what can I really say?
So I thought I would share with all of you the thing that changed and affected me the most this last year. . . .
I could tell you how the kids at the orphanage challenged how dedicated my own faith is, or how sleeping on the streets made me think of how I have viewed the homeless in the past, or how seeing the mountains and the sunsets all over the world made me realize again how incredibly big God is …. But …. the one thing that changed my life the most is none of the things that we saw or even really the places that we went, it was the people I was living with. You see, because I had been on the mission field before, I had been to many of the places and seen many things before. I’d even been to some of the same countries before, so I had already experienced the impact that happens to everyone the first time around, and God had a more personal experience for me this time.
This time… well… it wasn’t really about changing everyone and everything else… this time God wanted to change me. This time wasn’t about living and working with other people it was about loving them and being loved by them.
God used this year to sometimes gently, and sometimes not so gently come to the realization that loving other people wasn’t just about them, but that it brought great healing and happiness to my own life. Just because others didn’t understand me at first, they didn’t stop trying to get to know me and to love me. They challenged different areas of my life not necessarily by what they said, but by the way that they lived their own lives. I saw different things in their lives, different aspects of their character that I wanted in my own life. I began wanting to spend more time with them as they did different things because I wanted the beauty I saw inside of them to rub off on me. They let me be myself and yet have the freedom to change and grow. There was always someone there to encourage me, make me laugh; help me get through the rough patches when I just wanted to cry, and to give me the best hug ever!
You see I am a better person, more of the woman God created me to be not because of anything that I did or the places I went to. I am a better person because of the ones who loved me ….
Anna-Marie, Anita, Ashley, Cathy, Chad, Clara, Dude, Estee, Gary, Jacques, Jessica Friske, Jessica Sisson, Katherine, Kim Kinsley, Kimmy Lynch, Lana, Laura, Liesl, Lloyd, Paul, Sarah Cruz, Sarah Rinn, Stefan, and Tauna.
Thank you!
Love always,
Casey
