I hate to even admit it to you all but I found myself struggling a lot since we’ve been in Cambodia. Being here has shown me how real idols are especially since this is a country full of them in different religions so it really got me thinking about what those idols in my life are.
I started to realize that this is the first time I’ve lived really even near a city since month 1 on Serbia..that’s nearly 5 months without easy access to a grocery store, places to buy clothes or even restaurants and coffee shops. Do you know how hard it is to go from never experiencing those things to suddenly being surrounded by them at really easy access? I’m dying over here.
We walk through the city or ride in a tuk tuk as we head to ministry and I see all the cute coffee shops I want to go to and all of the cute outfits people are wearing. (Especially since nearly everyone in Siem Reap is a tourist.)
In one aspect I would say it’s completely normal for me to be feeling this way because in reality I’m hitting a point of getting tired of wearing the same 3 shirts over the same pair of pants and 2 pairs of shorts over and over again.
In reality though, I am struggling so much with just wanting all of the clothes and all of the trendy coffees…but I’m not on vacation.
Yes, it would be completely ridiculous for me to come all this way to these countries and not try at least some of the local coffees or foods but what kills me is spending money when I really don’t have an income.
To make it worse, I’ve started getting so distracted by the sudden easy access to coffee shops, wifi and very affordable clothes that they started taking away from my time spent with God.
It’s almost like I just fell back into the routine I was in at home and while I wasn’t in a bad place at home obviously there’s a reason I came on the race and that would be that I knew there was something more to life than going to work and sitting on my phone for hours at a time.
I started to believe the ministry I was doing was just my job and then when the day was over I would figure out what we would eat for dinner, do team time, jump in the pool and then lay on my phone until I fell asleep.
What the heck happened? How did I go from feeling so good about where I was at, abandoning so many things and loving everything that I was doing to suddenly slipping all the way back to the beginning?
Thank God, I didn’t actually slip all the way back to the beginning and thank God that He really has become my sense of fulfillment because suddenly I started feeling emptier and I was aware of it.
The ministry I’m doing is not my job, its a way for me to serve the Lord by serving the people in this community and my desire for materialism started getting in the way of God.
I am not about to let that become a normal thing in my life.
So even if its something that’s not always bad, I’ve decided to accept little challenges from God to give things like coffee or social media up for short periods of time to find balance and to really examine what is becoming an idol in my life and to turn my focus back to God as the God of my life.
So as I continue to process this and figure out what that balance is, I’d really like to challenge you to think about it. What else in your life do you turn to before you turn to God and what are you going to do about it?
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P.s. As soon as I finished writing this out, I looked up to see two little lizards chasing each other up and down the wall. LOL
