Every day I would go to school and have that take up most of my time. Then I would go to church and youth group on Sundays. In my spare time I didn’t really have time to really do anything exciting so I was forced to waste it trying to find something good to watch on Youtube. It was mundane and boring and I wanted something to work towards, a purpose.
I would sit in church and something would come up telling us to “Get out there and spread God’s word. All you have to do is tell him that you’re willing and ask him to use you.” Or something along those lines. I felt useless and I wanted so badly to be used by God! I would literally be begging God to give me something, anything! Yet God remained silent.
You see I know God talks to everyone in different ways but for me it’s never in anything that I know for sure is God. Only through circumstance. And so I sat still and waiting stagnating hoping to find a purpose in life. “Please God please tell me what my purpose is!” I would tell him only to continually have nothing of real value to do.
Prophets would come in and give people these amazing words and I would wait till they had gone through most of the people only to still have no purpose and no response from God. I knew he was listening and somehow I ended up getting frustrated with God. I wanted God to say something to me even if it were just one word, and I felt like I at least wanted to know why he remained silent. I knew he was listening, He’s omniscient, He knows everything. If God wanted to use me so badly why wasn’t he? I mean I knew we’re getting close to the end times and that I’d probably have to die for my faith anyway. Why couldn’t he use me if I was literally willing to die for Him!?
It wasn’t until about half way through last summer that I was finally given a purpose. It was the Sunday before I went on a five day trip with my Youth Group. A young lady just came back from a mission trip and our pastor invited her to tell us about it on stage for a couple of minutes. As she described all her experiences on the trip I was filled with an extreme surge of excitement and my knees waved back and forth in my chair like an excited puppy wagging it’s tail. The words “That’s what I wanna do!” passed through my head. I had heard of mission trips before and even attempted to go on one where they denied me entry because they didn’t know me, but for some reason I never realized that a missionary was a thing. I realized that this was exactly what I had been yearning for.
During my youth group’s trip I pondered this over and over again and asked God if this was really what I was meant to do. I did a little research on how the whole shabang works and when I was asking God and still getting silence I remembered something. You can’t expect God to literally tell you the answer to all your decisions and wait forever, and you can’t expect God to make all of your choices for you. He created us with free will for a reason, sometimes he wants you to make your own decisions. On a Wednesday I made my decision that this is what I want to be(later I realized that this was what God wanted me to be from the beginning) and managed to get one of my youth pastors alone and told him about it and he told me he thought I’d be good for it because I’d be good at not offending other cultures and I’m adaptable.
Not long after this I talked to the girl who spoke on stage during one of the youth group meetings. I was pretty shy back then so I had my youth pastor introduce us and I got a lot of information out of her. She did most of the talking and I just listened. Even though I didn’t contribute much to the conversation I knew she was excited for me partly because she literally said it. I learned about the organization she went with and the location. She went with YWAM to a place in New Zealand, and she gave me the link to the website and told me all about it. For a while this was the organization I planned to go with and the same courses she did seemed to appeal to a thrill seeker like me.
After a while though I started to have second thoughts. “What if this isn’t what God wants me to do? What if I’m just getting myself into a mess because I want to live out my fantasies and have an adventure and help people like in my video games? What if it’s not how I think it’s going to be? Maybe I should just become a backpacker that way I’ll be able to go on an adventure and be free without having to worry about whether I’m doing this for the wrong reasons.” These were thoughts that kept passing through my head and they started to put out my flame.
It was around this time in January that another young person went on stage to talk about missions work. Chandler Whidden. He was just about to leave on the World Race and as he spoke that same rush of excitement filled me and my passion was reignited and my purpose was reaffirmed. After church I managed to work up the nerve to talk to him and find out what steps he took to become a missionary. He was more than happy to talk to me and he gave me his card and we found something to write on. I wrote my contact information down with an extremely jittery hand, whether this was from excitement of nervousness I’ll never know.
I checked out the world race and sort of thought that I’d rather go on the YWAM trip since it seemed a little less commercialized and I wasn’t old enough to go on the big race. The gap year just seemed like a weaker version of that to me for some reason. The next weekend though Chandler’s mom showed up and have me some more information about the organization and talked to me. I had already partially dismissed the world race but I decided to check out the specifics one more time. It seemed like I was gonna be too young to go on the gap year trip anyway since you have to be 18 by the launch date in September, when my birthday is October 2nd. I checked out the routes and they really seemed to excite me to an enormous degree. They all sounded too good to be true.
I decided that I’d Adventures in Missions an email and see if they would make an exception for me despite my birthday being in October. At first I got an automated email which didn’t answer my question at all with no indication that I was going to get one from a real person. This was sort of iffy for me but I decided I would wait and see. After quite a while I got an email asking when my birthday was in October. I told them the second. At this point I knew that since my birthday was in the beginning of October they would make an exception since they bothered to ask, and I ended up being right.
This was confirmation to me on which organization I should go with. The next thing I needed to do was apply and pick a route but that’s another story all together.
