I vividly remember the day my 7th grade English teacher went around our entire class of approximately 25 students and labeled our learning styles individually, and then got to me and told me – in front of the whole class – that she just couldn’t figure me out.
Many times in my life I have been in situations where people announce that they can read people easily and so they’ll begin to classify the people around them: introverted or extroverted, kinesthetic or visual, etc.; and almost every single time that I’ve been in that situation where groups of people were being categorized into something, the person doing the categorizing hasn’t been able to place me anywhere.
I’m the girl who people have always called “unique,” “an individual,” and, “eccentric.”
It doesn’t surprise me anymore when people “can’t quite place” me – because frankly, I can’t quite place myself most of the time.
During the first month of the race, my old team leader/new squad leader, Christian Sessions Roderick, had read a book specifically about spiritual gifts and had been asking the Lord to reveal to him through observation and prayer what the spiritual gifts of Team WALDO were.
Hello, curiosity!
I wanted to know what my covering saw me operating in, what potential my leader saw in me, so I would ask him; but he couldn’t tell me after Romania.
He also couldn’t tell me after Moldova…
then we got to Nepal, where we began to evangelize for the first time to unreached people groups, and Christian could finally tell me what he perceived my strongest spiritual gifting to be.
After observing me 24/7 and standing beside me in ministry for three months straight, what he told me shook my world.
He told me that he was almost positive that I was an evangelist.
What the crap, Christian. What the crap.
I was terrified, because I thought that being an evangelist meant I would have to be a nomad, and I suddenly had this picture in my head that God’s design for my life was for me to be living in a different grass hut every few months forever!
I would never have a home,
never have a place to belong,
never be able to have a stable family or any kind of routine – which is sort of okay since my circadian rhythm evidently already doesn’t exactly adapt to routine well –
but I didn’t want to be forever stuck in transition!
Don’t get me wrong, I am a transient girl, I always have been, I’m used to change – but I absolutely do desire to set down some roots at some point! Especially after having been away from my family for now 5 ½ months, the idea of being basically nomadic for the rest of my life broke my heart.
So I straight up rejected it.
I sat in that for a few days… and then I started studying what the spiritual gift of “evangelism” actually is.
Turns out I was wrong. The authors of the gospels were originally called evangelists, and Acts has a record of Paul and John staying at Peter’s house on one of Paul’s missionary journeys – Peter (and Timothy) is the most blatantly charged evangelist recorded in scripture…and he had a home where Paul and John were able to stay!
Christian called me an evangelist, I called Christian a liar.
Two months later, I am convinced that I owe my brother an apology:
Christian, I’m sorry, you’re not a liar at all. I love evangelism.
I vividly remember the day my 7th grade English teacher went around our entire class of approximately 25 students and labeled our learning styles individually, and then got to me and told me – in front of the whole class – that she just couldn’t figure me out.
Many times in my life I have been in situations where people announce that they can read people easily and so they’ll begin to classify the people around them: introverted or extroverted, kinesthetic or visual, etc.; and almost every single time that I’ve been in that situation where groups of people were being categorized into something, the person doing the categorizing hasn’t been able to place me anywhere.
I’m the girl who people have always called “unique,” “an individual,” and, “eccentric.”
Yes, I actually wore that to school one day in 11th grade.
It doesn’t surprise me anymore when people “can’t quite place” me – because frankly, I can’t quite place myself most of the time.
During the first month of the race, my old team leader/new squad leader, Christian Sessions Roderick, had read a book specifically about spiritual gifts and had been asking the Lord to reveal to him through observation and prayer what the spiritual gifts of Team WALDO were.
the faces of Team WALDO. I wont pretend we were a group of normal people.
Hello, curiosity!
I wanted to know what my covering saw me operating in, what potential my leader saw in me, so I would ask him; but he couldn’t tell me after Romania.
He also couldn’t tell me after Moldova…
then we got to Nepal, where we began to evangelize for the first time to unreached people groups, and Christian could finally tell me what he perceived my strongest spiritual gifting to be.
After observing me 24/7 and standing beside me in ministry for three months straight, what he told me shook my world.
He told me that he was almost positive that I was an evangelist.
What the crap, Christian. What the crap.
I was terrified, because I thought that being an evangelist meant I would have to be a nomad,
and I suddenly had this picture in my head that God’s design for my life was for me to be living in a different grass hut every few months forever!
I would never have a home,
never have a place to belong,
never be able to have a stable family or any kind of routine – which is sort of okay since my circadian rhythm evidently already doesn’t exactly adapt to routine well –
but I didn’t want to be forever stuck in transition!
Don’t get me wrong, I am a transient girl, I always have been, I’m used to change – but I absolutely do desire to set down some roots at some point! Especially after having been away from my family for now 5 ½ months, the idea of being basically nomadic for the rest of my life broke my heart.
So I straight up rejected it.
I sat in that for a few days… and then I started studying what the spiritual gift of “evangelism” actually is.
Turns out I was wrong (again).
The authors of the gospels were originally called evangelists, and Acts has a record of Paul and John staying at Peter’s house on one of Paul’s missionary journeys – Peter (and Timothy) is the most blatantly charged evangelist recorded in scripture…and he had a home where Paul and John were able to stay!
Christian called me an evangelist, I called Christian a liar.
Two months later, I am convinced that I owe my brother an apology:
Christian, I’m sorry, you’re not a liar at all. I love evangelism.
