How do you know that you’re being called away from your comfortable stateside life to spend a year living out of a backpack?
The truth is, you don’t know. If we could just accept the tuned adage that each day is a gift, we would admit that nobody really knows what tomorrow will bring. The whole “5-year plan” mantra is a complete joke. We can plan ahead, make predictions, and do our best to follow the pretty paved path we painstakingly excavate for ourselves as we go, but those plates below us are shifting every single day, and an earthquake could shake those plans at any undisclosed moment.
The fact that my proposed “life agenda” isn’t solidified doesn’t scare me – since graduating high school I’ve never lived in the same house for more than 9 months and none of my plans have worked out as I thought they might. What I do know about my future is that it’s not my job to plan it out, and through many trials and errors I have realized a lot of things that I don’t want in my future. And that’s a great thing to know, if nothing else.
Though it may seem like a wobbly foundation to some, I do have some insight as to why I am being pulled out of my comfortably southern lifestyle and thrown into the mission field next summer. All of my adventures between being a college-dropout and getting to the place I am now are exactly why I am confident that this is my next step.
I believe that I’m a missionary to the nations because I am fearless. I’ve taken a solo journey across the sea, jumped out of a plane flying at 20,000 feet, conquered a cancer with a scar to show for it, and came out of all of it wanting more. My heart thrives on spontaneity and a challenge and when my life slows down, I can’t help but daydream about what’s coming next.
God’s Word is peppered with notions telling us to go out into the nations and spread His gospel. It says He loves me so much that He likes sharing His beauty with me through the vast expansion of the earth’s terrain. He gave me a deep, unchanging passion for this expanse in which I stand in wonder of every day.
Aside from a daily realization that the colors of the wind are highly underrated, I recognize there’s a much more beautiful totality he wants me to see and love: His people. The beggars with empty pans, the harlots in torn clothing, the orphans lining the dirty streets – these people are His pride and joy and they simply have no idea.
Many of us have grown up either surrounded or touched by the Christian faith, and most of us have decided to either accept it or reject it. We had a choice whether or not we would follow this person named Jesus, or go searching for an alternative. On the other side of the world, it’s hardly a choice. There are people in Cambodia who have never heard Jesus’ name. There are families in Botswana who would be overjoyed to know that there is a way to live eternally through the sacrifice of the cross. It daily blows my mind that there are little children across the globe in tears because they’ve never heard someone say “I love you.”
I was made to tell them that Someone does.
