You know what sucks? It sucks when you are almost done with a blog post and you reach over to take a sip of coffee only to slide you arm against the mouse and accidentally exit out. Well clearly the Holy Spirit wants me to write about something else. When I started this race I came with expectations of what God was going to do. None of my expectations have to come to pass. But what God has done instead was infinitely better than I had planned. For the past month my team and I have been serving along side a school for kids with special needs. Not my original forte. I went to that school with a closed heart. I didn’t want to be there because it wasn’t my expectation of what living on the mission field looked like. I expected supernatural, I expected miraculous healing, and I expected God to show up in big ways. Everyday I went to ministry with a bad attitude. Definitely not a Jesus centered heart. A girl on my team has a phrase that she says all time. She says, “Choose Joy!” She even wrote a blog about it. Personally I don’t always want to choose joy, but Jesus made that phrase stick out like sore thumb! I couldn’t get it out of my head. Soon it became a team phrase we used everyday. CHOOSE JOY. hhhhhhh! Finally I decided to give in. (There was probably some hallelujahs in heaven about that) Every morning I decided to listen to that phrase, I decided to smile even when I didn’t want to, and I decided that Jesus would control my day not me. I began to see a change in the way that I looked at these kids. They were HIS kids. They were loved by the same Jesus loves me. He died for these kids. I began to see Jesus in them and through everything they did. These kids who were none verbal and sometimes incoherent, Jesus used to speak to me and my team. I saw that Jesus does still do miraculous healing but much of the time through doctors and that He works in not only the big ways but the little ones as well. He doesn’t just need missionaries but He needs caretaker, nurses, teachers and all the above. I am in awe at the change He did in my heart in just a few weeks. I wish I could have come to realize this all sooner than that, but sometimes we as humans are much more stubborn than we think. By the last week at this school, We struggled to say goodbye. The Lord moved in me through these kids and now we are going to another city to work with more special needs kids and couldn’t be more excited. A little nervous but still ready to see what the Lord has planned for these next two months. We still saw the big miraculous things but it was when we were least expecting it during our one month debrief, but that’s a story for another blog. Basically, month one of the race has been one of the most challenging months in my life, but Jesus is teaching me that with challenge comes fruit. Also Jesus seems to show up the most during the struggle bus times in our life. Our job is to hop off the struggle bus and start walking toward him.
