Well hello there! I know I’ve told you a lot about what I’m doing this coming year, but I haven’t really told you what brought me to this point. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do in this blog post.
So I guess I need to start a few years ago. My senior year at Emmanuel (not to be confused with my super senior year lol) I felt the call to missions. It wasn’t some crazy experience where the clouds split and God himself rode out on a white horse and told me I’m supposed to work in missions. It was actually just a little tug at my heart during a chapel service. It was then that I told God that I would do missions…after I graduated, established my career, and paid off my student loans. It was non-negotiable.
Throughout the rest of my time at Emmanuel it was spoken over my life by several people who didn’t know one another that I would work with children on the missions field. Every time I would say, “That’s great. I’ll do it after I graduate, establish my career, and pay off my student loans.”
And that’s what I did….well kinda. I did graduate and I did find a job teaching fifth grade, but I still had this nagging in my heart that something was just missing. My year as a teacher went just about as well as a train wreck. I was placed with a very difficult class, I wrecked my brand new (to me) car a few weeks into school, I tore my ACL the next day and was unable to walk for weeks then had to be out for surgery and recovery. I felt like I was going through my own personal hell.
At this point that little pull on my heart became something that was getting harder to ignore. But I kept telling myself and God that I had to establish my career and pay off my student loans. So I kept trucking. I thought that my year would get better, but it didn’t. I had never in my life been treated like trash until I met some of the parents at my school. By the end of the year I was done. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I new I wasn’t going back to that school.
When all of this first happened, I was devastated. I felt like the biggest failure in the world. But I’ve just recently realized that God let this happen to me to place me on the track that he designed for me and to get me off of the one that I had created for myself. There’s something to be said for being at a point where you can do nothing but completely lean on Jesus. I had to go through the bad times to give up control to Him.
When I gave up control, I relented to that little tug on my heart that had evolved into a full on tug-of-war situation with God. I didn’t know where I was going to go, I didn’t know what I was going to do, I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I had complete faith that he would lead me to where I needed to be.
A couple of weeks after I resigned from my job, I had a friend mention that I should apply for the Race. Normally I would have laughed it off, but this time I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I applied. I prayed that if this was what God wanted from me then He would make the way clear for it to happen and that if this was something that was not in His will then he would shut the door.
So far He has left this door opened for me. I’m not saying that it has been easy or I haven’t thought about giving up. It’s not and I have, but I know that right now I am exactly where He wants me in this season of trust. He has provided for me in the most amazing ways. He’s sent donors who have blessed me more than I thought imaginable. He has blessed me with two jobs that I could have turned me down when they learned I was leaving the country for a year.
I don’t know what tomorrow holds. But it’s the best feeling in the world knowing that Daddy God has a plan for me. It may not be what I thought it would be, but It is the most perfect thing for me.
