1 Peter 1:6-7
“So be truly glad! There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold-though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.”
Thank you so much for tuning into a week six update! This week has been both beautiful and heartbreaking. This month we are so blessed to work with an organization called Agape ministries. This ministry is passionate about caring for vulnerable woman and children. Their mission is to rescue woman from sex trafficking and children from being abused and off of the streets. This week we got to go into the communities referred to as the slums as well as dance bars to be friend the women who work there! It was so beautiful to meet the people who are in these communities and we are so excited to go to breakfast with one of the woman and her baby son from the dance bar who became our friend!
This week is beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. The conditions in the slums, the darkness and bondage at the dance bars, and the children who live on the streets will break even the toughest of hearts. Jesus always is bright even in the darkest of times. The children are so radiantly beautiful and the women are about the same age as me, in their twenties, and have wonderful dreams! Jesus is always there.
This week, Jesus has been showing me through heartbreak in Nepal and through heartbreak in missing loved ones at home that in the furnace, trials, and storms, He is walking through it with us. That He wants us to choose to walk through the furnace with Him. It was so amazing how God spoke this what seemed to be three times a day each day this week! Last night, our squad read Daniel 3! The story speaks about three men who were brought into a blazing furnace by a King who sought to kill them for not worshipping his gods and gold statues. The three men were tied up in the furnace as it was set ablaze with full faith that God could carry them through the fire untouched. Yet, they had the reverence of God that they would only praise God even if he chose not to carry them through the fire.
“But suddenly, King Nebuchadnezzar jumped up in amazement and exclaimed to his advisers, “Did we not tie up three men and throw them into the furnace?” “Yes, Your Majesty, we certainly did,” they replied. “Look!” Nebuchadnezzar shouted. “I see four men, unbound, walking around in the fire unharmed! And the fourth looks like a God!”
The three men came out of the fire victorious and stronger than ever! For Jesus had walked through the fire with them! This story shows us that God came not to free us from our trials, but to walk through them with us. There are beautiful benefits to walking through the fire with Jesus. The fire leads us into deeper intimacy and freedom in Jesus because it shapes our hearts to look more like His and leaves us with only Him to depend on.
I have been thinking about the fire that Jesus is walking me through in this season of my life. The deepest fire is the sacrifice of being away from loved ones. It pains my heart to be so far away for so long of a time from my family, friends, home, and boyfriend I love so dearly. I hold onto the promise that God will return me home. My fire is a temporary fire. I feel so blessed as my fire has provided me the sweetest blessings. An amazing family here and at home, the blessing of sharing the gospel, intimacy with God, encountering my deepest passions, and meeting beautiful people all around the world God created. I ponder my sacrifice and it seems so small in the light that my sacrifice will be given back to me in full as God returns me home once again.
This promise of home places a perspective in my heart that makes the pain seem so temporary. I remember our brothers and sisters around the world who suffer for the sake of the gospel and I am so humbled by my fire. I remember Paul in the Bible and how he counted it great joy to suffer for the sake of the gospel.
God reminded me of eternal perspective this week. In the same way that I hold onto the hope of returning home to loved ones in the midst of the fire, we, the body of Christ, hold onto the hope of returning home to heaven someday. In that light, all sacrifices seem small! In eternal perspective, our life is a small sacrifice because we also get to return home! Heaven is our home and thankfully God is our home even here on Earth, here to walk through the fire with us. In the midst of the fire, He is refining us into the shape of His heart. Pure as gold!
Let us run the race with endurance set before us! Thank you so much for reading and for your love and encouragement! That means the world to me!
