During our first week of ministry in South Africa, my team and Team Ahava partnered with Hillsong Church as they helped tidy up a school. Some painted, some worked in the garden, others varnished desks etc.
I volunteered myself for varnishing and boy oh boy was it a struggle. As humans we expect things to be instant. We expect them to happen when we want and we expect results immediately. It becomes difficult when things don’t happen on our timing or what we think is best for ourselves.
Before we re-applied the new coat of varnish on the desks we had to scrape away the old with sandpaper. What an incredibly frustrating job. You get this tiny little piece of sandpaper in which you need to scrape away an entire desk: its front, sides, top as well as its attached chair. I was scrubbing and scrubbing and felt my frustration grow because I felt like nothing was changing. It was going to take forever to get this one desk cleaned up.
As I took a step back to take a break, I looked at what I had been working on. It turned out I was making a difference. It was a very slight thing, but you could tell where the dark wood used to be and where I had been at work scraping away.
I realized this is how my relationship with the Lord is too. He is always at work in me, He is always scraping away and trying to polish me to make me more like Him – but sometimes I can’t see the bigger picture. Sometimes I get so stuck thinking about what is not happening and how nothing is changing, that I forget if I take a step back, I have the opportunity to see what the Lord is doing in my life. And even if I can’t see it right away, taking a step back and acknowledging that He is at work no matter what. That one day, in His timing, I’ll be able to compare the darkness of the old, to how much the Lord has been at work scraping away to make me new and more like Him.
Last month I struggled to feel close to God because everything was so new and I needed to figure out new routines to spend time with Him. I felt like I was wandering and I constantly felt lost. Although I couldn’t see where the Lord was taking me, I realized it didn’t matter. He had me perfectly placed where He needed me to be, so that when the correct time came, He would reveal to me what the next step was.
That day was two nights ago (October 4th) when I felt almost all of the bonds that I was holding on to, break. The bonds that were keeping me from the Lord, the lies, the confusion, the frustration, they broke away from me. Instead, I was replaced with a sense of refreshment. A sense of being white and clean again. It was a gentle feeling, but it felt like a light breeze was softly kissing me.
My next step, is to break the final bond that is keeping me from the Lord. My period of wandering and feeling lost was so that I had no one to run to but the Lord. And I ran to Him, hard. Now, as I continue to pursue Him first, He has received me with open arms and revealed to me the next step. It’s not going to be an instant fix, but it’s going to be worth the scraping and the waiting.
“Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6)
We leave for Swaziland tomorrow! During my time there I will most likely have very limited internet. I hope to write blog posts on a word document and then upload them when I get a chance. It could potentially be only once next month but hopefully more. We’ll see how it goes!
We will be working at El Shaddai, an orphanage, in Ekufikeni/Hhohho, Swaziland. Please pray for our travels and our time there!
