Expectations: the making or breaking of us
Sooooo we’re actually in Peru now!!!! It’s so exciting to be doing something and be somewhere that I have wanted to do and be for such a long time! Truly Peru has been a dream of mine for years and God has let me be here!
As I’ve been thinking all week on what I was going to blog about, I kept coming back to expectations. Expectations can be such a great thing that enhance your intake and view of all that is going on around you and it can cause you to be excited and pumped up for something you are looking forward to happening. They can be a truly positive, benefiting thing to have in your life….they can be. Or, they can cause you to put something so high on a pedestal and push it up so high in your mind that nothing, no matter how good it is, can measure up to it. They can cause you to be easily disappointed and be negative about a situation when in fact, there is nothing wrong with it, it’s just not what you had thought of in your mind. They can wreak havoc on relationships and havoc on ones mind and emotions alike. Expectations.
I’m not really sure what all of my expectations were for this first month in Peru. I expected to be out in the mountains or rainforests roughin it in tents or shabby houses, getting dirty doing manual labor, and eating weird and exotic foods. I expected to be coming along side a pastor or church that is in some struggling village out in the middle of nowhere. I expected to be out doing the “real” work. These were my initial expectations, I’m just being real. And to be honest, I would have been perfectly happy with all of them….but that’s not how Peru turned out to be.
Instead, we have been completely spoiled and extremely blessed to be living inside the church building of the ministry that we are serving with. We have beds and hot showers… what more could a person ask for?! Camino de Vida is the name of the church we are serving along side. It is a huge, multicampus, thousands attendance church that is reaching the heart of Lima Peru. Yes, Lima Peru…if you’re not a geography fan, that’s the capital of Peru and is home to about 9 million souls. Needless to say, it’s not some struggling distant village in the middle of nowhere.
All of that sounds amazing right? It is! Only one problem, it’s not what I expected, and now I have a choice to make. Do I wallow in ‘what if’s’ and ‘if only’s’? Or do I embrace the amazing opportunity that has literally been placed in my lap to reach a very dark neighborhood in a very huge city.
I don’t want to sound as if I was ever unappreciative of all that we had, I was completely blessed and thankful for it all, genuinely. I just had to wrap my mind around the fact that the way I thought I was going to be doing ministry this month in Peru wasn’t what God had in mind when He thought of me doing ministry in Peru. After the first couple of days of uncertainty and figuring out my own thoughts and feelings about things, I came to the point of not only accepting but of loving where I am and where He has placed me and my team. I wouldn’t trade the people we have met and fallen in love with for anything that I could have conjured up in my head. These people are beyond precious and I cant wait to do life with them for this next month.
Looking back over this first week on the World Race I feel like I have continued the process God has had me on for awhile: have expectations, have great expectations but don’t be jacked up when God decides to do something different. And beyond anything else, don’t limit Him and how He wants to show off His glory.
