Oh, fundraising.
You small compound word, you. You do not strike much joy into the hearts of humans. Most often you evoke emotions of anxiety and stress. Sometimes you even cause agendas of manipulation and pleading to be considered in the minds of us who need you as a tool to accomplish a great task.
Well, I simply refuse to give into the stress and fear and anxiety.
To my readers:
I’ll be honest. Yes, the $17,017 need for the funding of this trip can seem overwhelming. Like a mountain in my mind, it seems to stand between me and this challenging and beautiful opportunity I have to be part of the World Race and to be part of God’s ever present movements in His redemptive plan all over the earth that I long to jump into with Him! And I do have anxiety about this. I have fear that what I feel the Lord has drawn me to and opened up doors for will not be reached. I have fear that I will somehow not “work hard enough” to talk to people and cast vision for His vision or get people excited about this opportunity for them to be partners and co-laborers with Him in the same capacity that I am on the World Race!
YET, the greater reality is that I serve a God who created mountains. I serve a God that breathed stars and breathed life into the dirt He created on the ground He created when He fashioned man in the likeness of His own image–to know Him and walk with Him in intimate and dependent fellowship. He creates out of the very overflow of His own being, out of the overflow of perfect interaction and fellowship that eternally occurs within the Trinity. He is good in His very nature. He is kind. He is Almighty and Holy. There is none like Him and no one or thing that can be compared to Him in any sense or facet.
And I think the most mind boggling truth of it all is that HE loves ME. I mean, what?! This eternally existing God who needs nothing and is entirely self-sustaining and sufficient, entirely satisfied in His own being, created me. Knit me together, actually, with great purpose and detail and foreknown plans. And “me,” as a result of the Fall of man and sin clouding the perfection that once was reality in the world, is a broken, inherently selfish, proud, rebellious, and wicked-hearted creature. And THIS truth is what makes the Gospel so difficult to fathom in my mind. We just struggle to grasp this in our polluted, sinful minds. It doesn’t add up to me that this kind of selflessness and pure love truly exists.
Yet it does.
For me and for you! After the rebellion of man (and even before!) from their Creator, He had a plan. And a flawless and breathtaking one at that! To pursue us and provide a way back to perfect relationship with Him when we completely rejected the opportunity the first time! He sought out covenant with His created ones again. He vowed to be their God and that they would be His people if they would simply follow Him, to choose Him above other false things, to walk in His ways and worship Him through that. He made a promise, and hundreds and hundreds of years later, He came to us as Jesus. He came wrapped in flesh and humanity, fully man and fully God, to do what we could not do. We could not follow Him. We could not be righteous as His law demanded. We could not stand beside His perfection and His righteousness. And He knew this. Jesus came and lived the perfect life that we could not to fulfill the law, to take on our punishment of death that we had earned as sinners and pay the debt of the whole earth in full with His perfect sacrifice. He overcame sin and death. He tore the veil of the temple in our hearts by allowing His own body to be broken and torn, making way for us to enter the Presence of God and into intimacy with Him now and eternally through the shedding of His blood. He graciously offers His righteousness to us, clothing us in it. And as we have received this righteousness, as we trust that His perfect and finished work truly is enough to make us pure and spotless in the sight of the Father, we become just that. We humbly receive and submit to His authority and sovereignty as King, and we are made co-heirs with Christ!
This is the most gracious and infinite provision that has ever existed! And though my faith is small and doubts try to overshadow the blinding light of this truth, He has given me a measure of faith, as He has to every man, and I am trusting Him to grow that in my needy self. This God that I serve has always been faithful. He has always been gracious. And the truth is that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8) So I believe He will extend His grace and provision to me to fund this endeavor He is leading me to.
I believe that He will help people see that this is an opportunity for them as well, to be worshipful in their giving and in their finances. I believe He will open the eyes of people to see that this isn’t supposed to be a guilt trip or some sort of manipulation to fund some “year long vacation,” that some may misperceive this mission as. This truly is a chance to “go” to the nations, even if you cannot physically go yourself, and be used to cause eternal impact all around the world. How amazing is it to imagine the ripple effect, the big picture that we will finally grasp in heaven as we see how our actions and choices and followings of Jesus in the smallest (and largest) of ways brought about change and caused people to see and come to know Christ by our obedience paired with the perfect work of the Holy Spirit! I believe we will be indescribably overwhelmed with the knowledge of these connections at that time. And your financial giving and prayers are the catalysts to that as God works in you to stir in you a desire to give and/or be committed to praying for me and my team as we go. Friends, the only pleading I want to do in this fundraising process is to plead with you not to give out of compulsion or guilt or any feeling that giving will somehow earn you brownie points with God or make you look holy. God absolutely still uses our actions even when they are polluted with our wrong motives, but I believe the Holy Spirit changes our hearts to become more like Jesus, and that means that our hearts become more gracious like His. I am praying that the Lord aligns me with people who are really just longing to give and are waiting for an opportunity to invest in an eternally weighty cause, which is the cause of Christ and the spreading of the Gospel that is at the heart of the World Race’s mission.
All that being said, I am so excited to see how the Lord surprises me with His goodness and His provision. I am excited to see how my team is overwhelmed by the Lord’s nature in His immeasurable tendency to do above and beyond what we can even ask or think or imagine. So fellow squad-mates and teammates that I really haven’t even met, let us remember this:
“He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32)
Let’s jump into this often (and let’s be honest, usually ALWAYS) feared task of fundraising with expectancy and excitement for what our perfectly faithful and lavishly giving Father will do to provide for us, His own. This fundraising aspect of the World Race is so challenging but so growing and chiseling!
[Insert plug here] =
IF you feel led to donate to this cause and this mission and would like to support me, please click on the donate tab above on this page to give!
Thank you again for taking the time to read through this blog-novel and all my rambling, processing thoughts!
Until next blog,
-Abby 🙂
