Tonight after Team Time with Ruach, I went to go to the bathroom and we had ran out of water so none of us have been able to flush. Nasty… yes. Welcome to Africa my friends. So I grabbed the matchbox that I left in there (sometimes I feel like I am the only one that still strongly believes in this trick) and I went to open the box and I was not paying attention and opened the box upside down, the matches went everywhere. Now, I usually tend to get frustrated really easily when things like that happen and create an inconvenience, but this time was different. I thought to myself right when they spilt… "Well Kathryn, you gotta pick them up, are you going to fuss or just do it and get it over with?” I graciously, started picking each match stick up, ok, I was gaging, I can’t lie, but I was not mad. All of a sudden, as I am crunched down in the Africa stink bathroom, it became something incredibly spiritual to me. God must know my sense of humor…. I digress, so while I am picking them up and placing them in the box again I realized that it was a metaphor for life, and the journey God is taking me on. For so long I have been standing in the ‘stink’ that I called my life, my life of compromise, my life of craving things above God, my life of selfishness, the list could go on and on.
It was such a good example of how God has made me spill everything out on the floor, my hurts, my doubts, my ugly, my pride, my insecurities only to allow me to grab, and reexamine each one of those areas and choose to put myself back together, in the way He desires me to be. Did anyone know if all the matches were placed the same direction before I spilled them everywhere? Well I know they are now, they are just how they should be arranged. Was I frustrated that I had to stay in that ‘stink’ longer? Yes. but did that mean that I was never going to get rid out of it? No. I just needed to pick up what was spilled first.
Once I picked them up though, I had to light the match to make anything change, and believe me, I couldn’t wait to light that match. I just thought about how much control I had to get rid of the smell I was in, and I realized that when I first applied for The World Race, I thought, wow, this is what will fix me. Reality check, The World Race does not fix me, I fix myself, well technically speaking, God fixes me. However, I could easily go the entire race and not grow or change at all. Unless I choose to be in God’s Word, loving His people, striving to understand Him more, nothing will change. I could see all that I see, experience all that I experience, and have nothing internalized. I have to choose to strike that match and by that, ‘stink’ is destroyed.
Cheers to the poop metaphor. I hope you all can start getting rid of the poop in your life, just light that match, and sometimes before you can light it you have to be willing to risk spilling the matches to pick them up again, ‘but don’t cry over spilled matches’, God has a plan.
