I’m not a background sort of person. I like to be in with the action, to know what’s going on with everyone and everything. At one point I was actually dubbed the “social paste”. Yet for some reason God has seen fit to flip that upside down.
For the last couple of weeks I have been in Peru, a country I have never been to, where they speak a language I don’t understand, with people I really don’t know. They don’t know I like to be in on the action, and so it seems as though I am the last to know everything, and the action just sort of happens all around me. This happens a lot of the time in many different aspects of our life here. Lunch plans get made and I just stumble across them. Evening outings and day off activities just happen, at least I never know of advance plans, or so it seems. It could be that plans around here are non existent, or just that I end up being the last to know.
Two particular times that I have been in the background is during ministry. Twice while my team has been praying for someone (once for evil shadows following a woman and once for a man with AIDS) I have been sent away with the child. “Laura you should take the baby out of here, they shouldn’t see this” and with that one swift sentence I am shunned from the room, banned from the prayer circle and the connection with the people whom we are ministering to. Now I don’t pretend to be any sort of spectacular prayer person, in fact the whole situation actually relieves me of my nervousness, but on the other hand I just wondered why I have this target on me that says Laura should be the one to take the kid. Especially since I am not the most kid friendly person on the planet.
I was telling this to my mom the other day, asking why I was always pushed outside, pushed to the fringe of what the team is doing and she reminded me of what I had said before I left. At training camp we were encouraged to ask for certain spiritual gifts, and I felt God was saying to me that I wouldn’t be the one in the front, that this year I was going to learn to be at the back, encouraging my team in their prayers for healing, and for the people. I was going to be the one in the back praying for them as they prayed for other people.
When I read that in the e-mail I said “oh yeah” and I felt a lot more comfortable with my position in this ministry. It made me think then why has it only happened twice? Then it dawned on me that we have only been here for two weeks. It’s not that it has “only happened twice” but that it has happened TWICE IN TWO WEEKS. I may not be in with all the action, but I am where God wants me to be. I might not understand why this is where I belong, but it is where I belong.
