Hey everybody! So once again, I apologize for the late update. I only have access to internet about once or twice a month, so please, bear with me.
Ok, so last month (March) our squad was in Costa Rica. My team and I were stationed in a small village town called San Bosco where we were living on a farm. The scenery was beautiful, the showers were freezing and the internet only worked between 2:00 and 4:00 in the morning. It was nice though. We built amazing friendships with some of the farmhands. This one guy in particular, Emma (short for Emmanuel) will forever be in our hearts. He cooked for us, killed bats for us, and even saved my life on one particular excursion to a nearby waterfall. Oh, and did I mention that the farm we lived on was a dairy farm?! That means unlimited supply of fresh yogurt, milk, cheese and, you guessed it, ice-cream! It was a pretty sweet set-up. So you’d think that’d it’d probably be my favorite month right? Wrong…
A week after we got to the farm, our ministry contact left to go back to the United States. Her absence left us all feeling confused at what the rest of the month was supposed to look like. Usually contacts are the ones who set up your ministry so that you have something you’re doing everyday. Now that ours was gone, we found ourselves confused on what to do for ministry for the rest of the month. We prayed about it and tried to form some type of work schedule (which did help slightly), but I was still left with this extreme sense of frustration. I caught myself thinking, “This isn’t what I thought my Race would look like. I came on the World Race to DO something. To change the world. To make a difference. And here I am eating ice-cream…”
With no ministry, television or internet to keep myself entertained, I found myself having a lot of time to be with the Lord. Whether I was reading my Bible, listening to worship music or listening to a sermon podcast, I had hours where I could simply focus on God without any interruption. It was during these moments that I began to realize that my whole view of my Christian walk, God and even myself was not what God intended for it to be. During those moments with the Lord, He showed me that my entire life, instead of viewing God as my Heavenly Father, I have been viewing Him as my Heavenly Boss. He also showed me that my entire life, I have tried to earn my salvation. That if I did what I was supposed to and didn’t do what I wasn’t supposed to, and if I served enough, THEN I would be a good Christian and THEN God would be pleased with me. I was always striving to EARN it…….which is why I was so frustrated when all the sudden, here I was in the middle of the mission field and I didn’t have any ministry to do in order to earn God’s favor.
My last week in Costa Rica, I read this book called Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship by Jack Frost. In this book, Frost talks about how so many of us have the heart of an orphan – a heart that feels as if it does not have a heavenly home that it can go to. A heart that feels like it has to fight so hard just to eat the scraps off of God’s table. A heart that feels as if it has to EARN God’s love. The cool thing that I’ve learned about God’s love though, is that it can’t be earned. He loves you because He loves you because He loves you because He loves you because He loves you. God doesn’t know how not to love us. And it took me a month without an ministry to realize that I don’t have to earn God’s love. Well scratch that. I did have a ministry that month – and I was it. I was the one who needed to learn about the true character of God. And I learned that He loves me the same amount if I’m building a church or sitting on my butt eating ice-cream.
