Halfway through the race! Can’t even believe I am almost done with month 5. Part of me can’t believe we are already at midpoint debrief and the other part of me can’t believe we are only at midpoint debrief.
I was going to start this blog doing the basic christian thing and type out the definitions of small and insignificant but I think we all get the gist. Processing the past month and a half here in Ethiopia has been a battle for me. Half the time it’s everything I love about it and the other half it’s everything that’s hard about it.
Life here is simple. Like the most simple life I’ve ever lived. I find joy in the really little things and I get perspective from the big things. A big difference I’ve noticed in myself between Guatemala and here is ministry. In Guat each team went out every day to a different village with different schedules. Here we don’t leave the base, everyones ministry is here with the same kids and women. And as much as I have grown to love it, I have also learned that ministry comes second. The bottom line of the race isn’t ministry, its a relationship with the Father. And you can’t pour out of overflow if you aren’t intimate with Him. After a few weeks here I was struggling with the lie that I wasn’t impacting the kingdom and the Lord reminded me that I just need to focus on my relationship with him and ministry is just icing on the cake.
My days are spent playing with kids, teaching the training center women English with the hope they can get a job in Addis one day, helping the staff plan get togethers for the kids, gardening with the house moms, drinking coffee, and teaching the kids how to write English. As fun as those things are a lot of my time is spent doing small, tedious jobs. Hand cutting grass, breaking up dirt for the garden, cleaning out the craft closet, making notes for the house moms to hang up. I’ve had to wrestle with God about these things. How is this helping? Why did you send me to Africa to do things I could do anywhere else? Why am I hand cutting grass when it’s just going to grow back? I have learned the hard way that these small tasks are making kingdom impact. We are taking tasks off of other peoples to do lists, we are setting an example for the kids that see us every day working, we are making the space that these people live in better so that they can more easily learn the gospel.
The Lord has been chasing me even on the days I wake up not chasing him. He has been waking me up at 6am to run when I said I wouldn’t the night before. He has been teaching me so much through my morning devos even when I am exhausted. He has taught me that these small tasks are so significant to the kingdom. I could go from house to house reading the Bible to people and it could have zero impact if it wasn’t what the Lord told me to do. The Lord has loved me so much he has disconnected me and put me here just to know me better. He has sent me all the way to Africa to sit for hours and cut grass or to sit in a house mom’s house and paint her nails. And I am doing it because he has told me to. But it has not been easy. I came into Africa with so many expectations because of how much I loved Africa when I went last year, but it is totally different here and that’s okay.
A big part of me feels like the lord is teaching me this because it is so applicable for when I get home. I was actually looking in my journal this morning and my exact prayer to God the week we got here was “show me ways I can apply the race back home”. Kind of ironic how sometimes we ask the father for things then complain when they come in a form we don’t expect. A huge lesson I’ve learned.
If I go home and to my college campus with the mindset that I have to do huge things to make kingdom impact, I won’t move the kingdom forward at all. In fact, thats something that I’ve always been passionate about- showing people that you can move the kingdom forward anywhere doing anything. God is the same God on the world race in Africa as he is in the car on the way to target. He is the same God in my big church back home with all the lights and production as he is in the church here with plastic chairs. And I think that is such an important thing to teach kids and teenagers as they grow up. You don’t have to be across the world to make a difference. You don’t have to have a lot of money, or status, or experience to make a big difference. I would dare to say that buying a random persons meal can have just as much impact as me living in Africa for 3 months as a missionary. Or that handing someone a $20 gift card to Walmart can have just as much impact as tipping a waitress $200 during the holidays. Small but very significant.
My time here has been difficult in a bunch of ways but I know for a fact I need to be right here to learn the things I’m learning.
Thank you again for taking time to read this. I have so much to say about my time here and some things I’ll never be able to put into the right words.
Here’s to building the kingdom one -small, but significant- step at a time.
