So this blog is a follow up bog to one of my earlier blogs that I wrote about my mission story, but in that blog I didn’t tell the story about just exactly how I came to be called to serve in the mission field. So thanks to the encouragement of a close friend of mine, here is that story:
It was July of the summer after I had graduated HS and was preparing to head off to Capital University that fall. My youth pastor at that time had rebooted the annual HS mission trip, and myself along with 7 others headed down to Tennessee-just outside of Knoxville so I was excited to be able to take part on the trip since I remembered a few years before when the HS group would either serve on a mission trip somewhere in the US or go to a work camp in Colorado, and it was something that I was looking forward to once I had reached HS, but during the first 3 years we were going though leadership changes, so a trip like that didn’t happen until my senior year. We had spent the whole year leading up to it fundraising (sound familiar right? hahaha), and we met our goal and embarked on our mission trip (for the record I want to say that I left for the trip 2 days after I had returned home from a family trip out west) So we as a group left early Saturday morning and headed south stopping for the night in a church before heading the rest of the way to out campsite in a State Park where we were gonna be living in tents for the week, and commuting to our worksite everyday. Our job was to repaint the exterior of an elderly lady’s house, and let me tell you it’s a lot harder then I had expected it to be, but it was a learning experience in so many ways.
Flash forward to Friday morning-our last morning there before heading out to go whitewater rafting as our fun day before heading home after the week was done. During our devotional/quiet time I headed to the river in the woods and found a nice large rock in a shallow part of the water, so I walked out, and climbed on top of the rock to sit and have some quiet time with God and reflect on the week as well as what was to come for me in the coming months as me being near water is something that I do when I need time out to just think about things when things start to go too crazy, I was thinking about just how much I had enjoyed the week, and the feeling that serving others had on me. It was at this moment that I looked up at the blue sky, and said out loud that if it was to be then I would take time off to serve God in this way again should it be his will for me, and I even went as far to say that I would be willing to go wherever and do whatever it was that he called me to do.
Well long story short: here I am 15 years later fulfilling that vow I made while a graduated senior, sitting on that rock in the middle of a river in a state park in Tennessee to now where I am preparing to spend a year of my life serving God’s people who need it the most in 11 countries this coming Fall and into 2019, so yeah God does hold you to any promise you make with him, even if its not right away- lesson learned
Come to think about it that’s kinda cool to think about isn’t it?
So yeah that’s the story
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Til next time your fellow sister in Christ,
Bonnie
Psalms 18:2
