This February, I have lived on top of a mountain in Swaziland that overlooks the most amazing scenery I have ever seen. El Shaddai children’s home is one of the most beautiful places that I have ever been.
This month, we have held babies, tutored kids, dug trenches, planted fields of crops, cleaned pig pens, painted signs, and so much more. Ministry has had many different faces, but everything we have done has gone to help the orphanage and create a self-sustaining property here at El Shaddai. It has been an incredible month that I will never forget.
“What has God been teaching you?” This is a question that gets asked a lot on the race. Frankly, I hate this question, because usually I don’t know how to answer. I know that God is constantly teaching me things, but I don’t always know what it is. It takes a combination of a bunch of little things and a lot of conversations with God for me to get the big picture. And more often than not, it takes a couple of weeks before I finally get it.
This morning, during my Jesus time, I finally got it…
Since I got accepted to the race, I have been asking God to allow me to love like He does. I want to be able to look at a person or a child and have them see Jesus in me. I want to be able to have a presence about me that just radiates Jesus’s love. However, for the past two months, the love that I have been feeling hasn’t felt any different than the love that I usually feel. I started wondering what makes Jesus’s love so different. Am I even capable or ready to love like He does?
This was the answer that God gave me: (A journal entry from this morning.)
You are ready to love. Sometimes allowing yourself to open up and be loved means that you could potentially be hurt in the future. But don’t worry, when you feel like your heart is broken, I will be there filling the spaces and gluing the cracks back together. If you want to love like I do, then you have to open your heart completely. You can’t do anything like me, half way. If you want to love like me, you have to go all in. When you love the people I love, your heart is going to break for them. You are going to feel pain when you see them in their circumstances. But it is good. By loving them like me, you are bringing me to them. Don’t only reach out to them, but truly let them into your own heart. When you show others my love, sometimes they will pretend not to receive it. However, when you let them into your own heart fully, they can show you my love right back.
Jesus didn’t just show love, he really felt it. He loved everyone with out fear of being rejected. He didn’t just act loving or say the right things. He really felt them.
Changing countries every month, it is hard to really let people into my own heart. When we leave, those people keep a piece of our hearts with them, but that’s where Jesus comes in. He fills our hearts right back up with his love.
Going into India, I am opening my heart. I am ready to really love. I don’t like to hurt, I don’t like to feel pain, but hurting for Jesus is totally worth it. I know how to love well, but that isn’t good enough anymore. I want to love like Jesus.
1 John 4:7-19
Beloved let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love… No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us… So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him… We love because he first loved us.
