One of my favorite teachers at CIU says that you find God’s purpose for your life by finding what you love. God has put all your passions in your heart for a reason, and he’s going to put all of them to use.
What do I love?
I love kids. I don’t ever remember a time when I didn’t know that.
When I was thirteen I found that I loved Jesus, and I also loved Camp La Vida(I’ll be referencing this wonderful place a lot throughout my posts here, but if you want more about what the deal with that is, go here).
Three years later, I spent my first summer working at camp and found that I LOVED kids. Before, I’d just had fun playing with them and got along better with them than with people my own age. Now, they were all I wanted my life to be about. I loved the way their minds worked. I loved how much they looked up to me. I loved making them feel special, especially the ones that no one else liked.
In August 2010, I transferred to CIU and found that I love the Bible.
Over the next three years there I also found that I love learning.
In February 2011, I was somewhat spontaneously asked to speak about camp at a church. I didn’t want to do it, because at the time I hated speaking…but I found that I love sharing camp with people.
Fast forward a few years, during which I kept coming back to camp, and my love for kids kept growing and changing and making its direction more clear.
The last week of summer 2012, I found that I love teenagers.
The next year is a whirlwind.
In the fall, I took a class on communicating to youth. Which of course involved lots of speaking. I found that I love sharing anything I’m excited about. And even though I’m terrible at speaking, I found that I really wanted to get better at it.
Then, I went on a mission trip to Costa Rica in January and found that I love…so much.
I already knew that I loved learning by doing, but this was different. I was learning real things while doing things that made a difference.
I found that I love bonding with people by serving alongside them. The community I experienced in the ten days there was deeper than anything I’d had in four years of dorm life.
I found that I love culture shock. That feeling of being in an entirely new world was so exciting to me. I felt closer to God in that than ever before; not because I was scared and clinging to him for security, but because i was following him into an adventure.
I found a deeper facet of my love for writing: I love being a wakeup call. Writing to make people aware of things that I was totally ignorant to before the experience that I’m writing about.
And I realized that until then, I’d had no idea what missions was. Every misconception I’d ever had was shattered over the eleven days I spent there. Language barriers, fundraising, planning, evangelism, so-called sacrifice…everything that scared me before, God turned it all inside out. He showed me what it looks like to have nothing, and I wanted to give those people everything. I wanted nothing more than to spend the rest of my life loving people and showing them the hope that I’ve carried around my whole life, the hope that they’ve never seen but so desperately need.
Moderately important side note: while we were there, we met a team from this thing called the World Race…we did some work with them here and there, and I talked with a couple of them about what they were doing. I’d heard of the Race before but didn’t know much about it. It sounded cool, but not like something I’d do myself. I even started thinking after a couple days that maybe I’d think about thinking about it, but I quickly reminded myself, “You could barely raise $1600 to go on this trip. You’ll never be able to raise $15,000 to do that.”
I didn’t know what to do with myself when I got home. I had so many ideas for what my plans could be after graduation, but no clue how God could possibly tie them all together.
Well, two weeks later I went to a missions conference for college students and my mind was blown once again. My eyes were opened to so many needs in the world and so many opportunities to get involved.
After that weekend, my mind was spinning. I knew God was calling me to international missions in some way, shape or form, for some unknown period of time.
So that Sunday night when I got home, I laid in my bed and poured out my overflowing heart to him. “WHAT am I supposed to do? I’m excited for like nineteen things. I know I can’t do all of them tomorrow. Can you please, please just tell me the one I get to do next?”
And the World Race immediately came back to my mind.
I jumped right out of bed and went to my computer, and even before I finished typing in the website, I knew what God was saying.
Here’s everything I love, whipped into one great big adventure. I get to love on kids, see new places, learn new things by doing new things, live in intense community, and write about everything along the way.
And…now we’re here. =)
This is so completely different than anything I would have expected to be doing if you asked me a year ago where I’d be today! But I’m finding that no matter how much God’s plan surprises me, it will always make me happier than anything I could imagine myself. I don’t care what I want anymore; I just want what God wants. And as it turns out, he wants some pretty great things. =)
