I tried so many times to write this blog, and every time I did, something stopped me. I would get frustrated and walk away. I was pumped about things the Lord was revealing to me and couldn’t understand why He wouldn’t just allow me to write this to share. I got my answer during this time of debrief in Brasov. For two nights, I felt like I was suppose to share this with my squad, but didn’t do anything about it. Finally, I got pushed up to the front the other night to share, and after I did, I heard the Lord say: I now release you. You see, I am in this thing with 52 other people who need to learn lessons from each other. It is important to show the world what the Lord is doing, but how much more important to be sharing things with the people who are serving beside you?
By pictures and posts, it is easy to make it seem like life is a fairytale on this adventure with the Lord. Many days it feels like that, but pictures don’t always show what’s happening behind the scenes. Life is still life…you clean bathrooms, you have conflicts with people and you get a spiritual butt kicking almost everyday.
There are many people who come on the World Race thinking they have things figured out. I regret to admit that I was one of these people. I knew I didn’t know everything, but I had been a Christ follower for many years and thought that I knew quite a bit. The Lord firmly, but gracefully brought to my attention that I know close to nothing. It has been quite the humbling process and is still ongoing. This post is in process, and I hesitated to write it because I wanted to have things figured out before I shared it. I think part of the humbling process is to admit that we don’t always have things figured out, and that’s ok. So I am going to process what I have been learning as I write this and hope that the Lord guides my fingers as I do…
In Honduras, there were wounds that needed to heal in different places of my life. In Guatemala, I found places in my life that I needed to reconcile in order to grow closer to the Lord. After I did that, some freedom came. In Nicaragua, the Lord then told me that I had no idea who He was, that I had been putting Him in a position that I thought I needed Him rather than allowing Him to be who He says He is. I wasn’t allowing Him to be the I AM and allowing that to be enough. Along with that, He revealed that I needed to learn who I was in Him…to dig deep and really understand it. I have been learning more and more about that and about His love. All of this brings me to the lessons in Romania.
The themes of this month have been joy and thankfulness, and a big covering over those, has been a shift in the way I view life around me. I am typically a joyful person and usually choose to see things in a positive light. But, Lord has gifted me with new and even better eyes. I am able to shift my mindset to be eternal rather than wordly much quicker and more beautifully than ever before.
Let’s back track a little. Around the second week of this month, I found out some news that really upset me and took me down bad trails of thought. The details aren’t important, but the lessons are. The Lord showed me that the situation was no longer mine to have my hands in. That the cost of following Him was greater than the reward of following my flesh desires, and that He had different things for me to focus my attention on. The following day, He placed a precious 10 year old in front of me who was struggling with much deeper wounds than I was and He trusted me to just love her. He said:
The moment you said YES to me, everything became eternal. Each thing you do has eternal impact, because I live inside of you. It doesn’t matter what the situation is, you bring me wherever you go, therefore, everything has eternal value.
I was thankful that He put this sweet little girl in front of me and just said love her, it could change her life.
Fast forward a few days later. A group of us were chosen to do manual labor at the church we were working with. On this day, we were leveling ground in order to lay a patio in the back of the church. I was happy to help the people we had come to love, but the flesh side of me had enough of manual labor. Our team had done manual labor the past 3 months, and on this particular day, I was so over it that I thought I would throw a shovel at someone if I had to pick it up. I wanted relational ministry. I wanted to be with people. I sat down and prayed for the Lord to change my heart and to walk with a joyful heart into what He was asking me. He said:
Lauren, stop looking at things through wordly eyes. You are missing it. You can choose to look at it as another shovel full of dirt. But what if that very spot is where someone encounters me in a way that changes their life? Don’t miss what I am doing. You are missing it.
I got up and started shoveling the heck out of that dirt.
To be continued in Humbled By My Ignorance…
