When I left for this race last September, I honestly never imagined this time would come. A time where I can email friends and family in the United States and say “see you next month!” It has been a crazy whirlwind and I have loved every second of it. I could go through all of the lessons God has taught me, but honestly I might be writing for days! So I thought I’d better just hit the key points!
•Be still
The bible tells us plain and simple that we are not promised tomorrow. Are lives are literally like vapor. I’ve experienced a lot of loss in my life, and I’m sure most of you have as well. If any of you have ever lost someone, especially when they are young, you can attest to this first hand. Life is unpredictable and hard and fast. Specifically in the Philippines and Nicaragua, God has been teaching me to live in the moment. To treat life as a grand adventure where you utilize every second because we are only promised the present- the here and now. At the end of the Philippines I found myself disconnecting from ministry and looking ahead to Africa. I spent days daydreaming about all the ways God was going to use me and all the new faces I would meet, when there were hungry mouths right in front of me at a feeding or warm embraces from the sweet girls of the Jazz house. God snapped me out of it and refocused my attention so that my last few weeks there were some of the most amazing and it was my hardest goodbye to date. Be still, be in the moment, and utilize what God has given you today. With less than a month left, this is something I have to remind myself daily. Plans for the future and reunions with friends and family easily consume my thoughts and time if I’m not careful and don’t remind myself why I’m here. It’s okay to dream big and have a plan for the future, so long as we are always relying on God’s will over our own and those things aren’t affecting our being present in the present.
• Helping one is better than helping none
I can not count the number of times my heart has broken over the past couple of months. God has opened my eyes to the world- a world of great beauty and need and absolute brokenness. I’ve cursed God, had my hope ripped away, been confused, and at a loss for words. I’ve seen children living on top of sewage and garbage at a dump and rummaging through the trash for scraps of food. I’ve heard the stories of beautiful and innocent girls who were being raped every night by their step father while their mother let it happen because he was the only source of income for the family. I’ve met children who were found tied to a tree where their parents left them so they couldn’t follow them while they were being abandoned. I spent a month getting to know a sweet boy who was abandoned by his mother and forced into hard labor at age 5. Countless faces that have absolutely nothing but smile back at me with joy are forever engraved in my memory. Through all of this heartbreak and truth, I have never felt closer to God. He has broken me down to nothing to a point where I have absolutely no understanding and have to rely on Him and His promises completely. I don’t know why people starve to death every day, or why girls have to grow up to fast because of some one else’s lust. But I do know that God is good. And I do know he has blessed me tremendously. There may be people who have nothing to eat, but I have been blessed with the means to help them. To love the and council the girls that have similar testimonies as me. To help just one, is getting one step closer. Is saving one life by introducing to the everlasting hope of Jesus Christ. God will save the world, God will perform miracles in the masses. He is all we need in life.
•love, don’t fix
Before the race, I would have considered myself a fixer. I liked to play God and control how and when things were going to happen. Most of those things were for good and I had good intentions, so I used that to justify my trust issues with God. I spent more time identifying problems in people and trying to make sure they stopped the mistakes they were making than I did actually loving them and walking besides them. Sidenote: most of the time I was struggling with the same problems I was trying to fix in others, but it was internal and no one could see it. I didn’t understand grace, or unconditional love. This was a lesson I learned solely from living in community. Which, I might add, is HARD. But so great at the same time (:
I have been living with the same amazing group of people for a good 8 months now. We’ve shared our life stories, gotten in arguments, confessed secret sin, shared struggles, and laughed until we cried. Through this I’ve learned sometimes-actually scratch that- most of the time, we don’t have the answer. Yes sometimes God uses us to speak into someone’s live and encourage, but I’ve found a lot of the times, at least for me personally, God calls me to just love them. To do whatever they need (which sometimes included a tub of ice cream and sometimes meant a worship session) and honestly just be there to serve. Only God can fix. Only God can heal. Only God can convict. And he does so in His perfect timing, which is definitely not something we can orchestrate ourselves. When we actually trust God with all our hearts, both with our lives and the lives of others, that is when we find true peace.
Prayer requests: Please pray for me and my team to stay present and for God to show up even more in these last 3 weeks of ministry!
see you soon america
