Dear friends,
Life is strange, isn’t it? It almost never goes according to plan. When I was a kid, I planned to go to college, get married, have 3-5 children, and spend my time playing with my kids, teaching Sunday school, and decorating my house. I had a spiral bound notebook full of clippings from JCPenney catalogs with my favorite kitchen and bedroom sets, and the pencil drawn floor plans of my huge future house. Every floor plan I designed had a spiral staircase. It was a very Disney-esque life I had planned.
I’m not sure when or why I abandoned that plan. Maybe the plan abandoned me. But the past 3-5 years I’ve really struggled with coming up with a new plan. I’ve prayed and prayed, waited and waited, and for the first time in my life, waivered in my faith in God. As I’ve tried to map out some kind of course for my life in prayer, I’ve asked the same question in a hundred different ways…”Did you forget about me, God?”
A few weeks ago I had two amazing women spend their Friday night praying for me. One of them prayed Isaiah 49:15: “Can a mother forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me.”
This is a humbling and reassuring promise that hit home for me. Still unsure what the plan was supposed to be, I collected about 25 ministry and job applications and started moving forward. Over the past few weeks, God has led me here, to writing this letter… I’ve been accepted to one of the teams for The World Race. It’s a mission organization that sends out groups of about 50 Christians ages 21-35 to 11 countries in 11 months for all kinds of mission work. I’m selling almost everything I have and will live out of a backpack for nearly a year. My team will spend our first five months in India, Nepal, and Southeast Asia. Then we go to three countries in Southern Africa and finish our trip in Haiti, The Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica.
I have this feeling that this trip is a personal invitation to me from Jesus Himself. I can picture Him sitting in a brick pile where men, women, and children are working as slaves. I picture Him in a huge field of trash in India where “untouchables” are searching for food. He is on a Thai street corner where boys and girls are forced to sell their bodies. He is in an African clinic where people are dying of AIDS, and in a Caribbean orphanage with kids who have no one and nothing due to natural disasters and extreme poverty.
He is there. Inviting me. I can almost hear Him saying “Come here, Kayla. I want to teach you new things about Me. And remind you of things you have forgotten…
I want to show you My love in these places.”
Friends, this was not my plan. This is wildly different than my plan. But I think it’s the plan He has for me. And I’m excited. I desperately want to learn new things about Jesus. I need to be reminded of the things I’ve forgotten. And more than anything I want to see how God’s love can work in these desperate places.
So, I’m going. And since life is such a personal and relational thing to me, I’m taking each of you with me. Thank you for impacting my life. If you want to join my support team, I would love to have you. I will need a ton of financial support and prayer. There is a support card attached that explains all that is needed. As you partner with me, I will do my best to share with you everything God teaches me on this trip. And hopefully, on behalf of all of us, I will find myself next to someone who is wondering if God has forgotten them and say to them: “This is what he Lord says, ‘Can a mother forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands, your walls are ever before me.'”
So… here we go,
Kayla Joy
Isaiah 61
