Honestly the last thing I want to be doing is looking at a screen after countless hours staring at my computer this past workweek. But here I am still inclined to write. Still encouraged to utilize the power of words and the blatant fact that people read, retain, and understand when they are ready. Key word there is “they,” not “you.” Not when you shove your experiences onto them. Not when you tell them the easy x, y, z to get to where you are in a season of knowing. Not even by loving them well. People don’t change for other people. People don’t give up the lifestyle they are living, the ignorance is bliss mentality, simply if you ask them to. People don’t just decide to change one day without reason or reckless intention or reverence to something bigger that they want to be different. So how does change implant itself into our systems of thinking, loving, learning, serving, and being?
Sometimes it takes a heck of a lot more provoking then just being bold and sharing your perspective. I’m not even a paragraph in to writing what I know I’m supposed to say and there are tears of my eyes. This last year of my life shaped every single cell in my body. Every thought. Every mindset. Every emotion. Every decision to spend money. Every choice to invest in people whether the world has deemed them worthy or not. Every single chance no matter how awkward, hard, persecuting, or ridiculous it may be to share about Jesus and all that’s happened in my life because of my yes to God. I don’t fear death. I don’t fear rejection. I don’t fear mocking or hatred or lack of love. I don’t fear poverty. I don’t fear evil. But you know what I fear? I fear my own inability to share enough about what God’s done in me, through me, around me, and because of my obedience.
Most know that I spent the last year of my life doing one of the rarest things you can imagine. For 11 months, in more than 15 different countries, meeting hundreds of individuals who changed my life for the better I gave 2017 to God vowing to serve His people relentlessly. You know what? It’s really easy to forget in the crazy lives we live and here I am remembering, re-remembering, and soaking up what I learned about myself, the world around me, and God all over again from my after World Race life. I yearn to always keep learning but I want to elaborate on something many people have been asking me lately.
“Paige I never thought you would be doing what you’re doing. You sure you don’t want to lead a missions trip to Africa?”
“Do you feel like you are walking in a path of purpose and fulfillment?”
“Do you like working at Bader Rutter?”
“Is God enough to keep you satisfied in the corporate world?”
“We could get you a spot on the trip? You could be back spreading about Jesus and loving people like you do so well. Consider going?”
“Don’t you miss being a missionary?”
“Doesn’t your life seem a little boring compared to last year’s wild adventure?”
Basically, everyone’s asking the same thing? Am I happy?
They all look at me and wonder, even some of you reading this, They wonder how a girl like me that did such an extravagant, life-altering, kingdom-bringing, adventure-seeking, love-filled, God-funded, fast-paced, community building, passion-filled, World Race deed can come back and find herself knee deep in a business job at an advertising agency. And I encourage them to wonder more, wonder deeper, wonder in every way they can. Why am I choosing to have a career? Why aren’t I back in Africa with red dirt all over my face and in my nose kicking a soccer ball around with kids or painting a school? Why have I not chosen to go back to serving women in the sex trade whether in Milwaukee or the Philippines or anywhere else in the world? Why did I choose a job that pays instead of another opportunity to fundraise and ask people to partner with me in my next vocation? Why does my life seem uneventful now? Why do I think God’s asking me to “be normal” now? And I rebuke all of that. Purpose is everywhere. YOUR PURPOSE is right where you are. Wherever your feet are planted is where you’re asked to provoke change by JUST being you. Something that often times aren’t preached on the pulpit is that actions speak LOUDER than words. But the hard part is that it’s not about you at all. What you’re asked to do isn’t to bring glory to you at all. My life in accordance to God’s will isn’t about asking Him to send me on the grandest of escapades, it’s about choosing obedience and knowing there is contentment and a coming to fruition in the yes I said initially to Him, but also continue to say every day.
Thank you for those of you who have — in love — called me out and asked if I’m okay where I am and what God is having me pursue in this season. To be candid, God really had to work with me on this one. I had BIG DREAMS for my life that I was leaving God out of. I applied to every position in the book revolving around ministry, churches, Christian principled-organizations, writing a great tale on what I had walked through, even looked into starting up the fundraising process again, but God shut every one of those doors in my face.
I wanted to be a missionary. But what even IS a missionary? The word “send” is lost in translation most times but that is where the word “mission” derives from and every other derivative off of it like “missionary.” People often tend to have a love hate relationship with this word: missionary. A missionary is “one who is sent by God into the work to join in the kingdom work of Jesus.” No one said a plane was involved or children who speak a different language or squatty potty toilets or carrying your life in a 65L hiking pack or cold showers or countless nights sleeping in foreign beds or even lice/parasites. Who said the title of missionary was stripped from me in the first place?
So, He asked me to go forth in peace and faith with the job I now have. There’s not a forever stamped onto it, I don’t have to spend the next 38 years tapping my foot waiting for retirement doing the same old thing— I know that this isn’t a forever. Nothing is forever except eternity, people, and that is something to celebrate about. But whereas the job I currently have isn’t what I had hoped God would send me off into, I am content. There is good right where I am. I have more love for God knowing that He deemed it appropriate that I AM here. It’s almost as if HE said, “I want Paige there, right there…” in Milwaukee. Working a job that intellectually stimulates her and gives her coworkers who know far more about the world and it’s goodness than people have given them credit for in the past. Getting to be reconnecting with people and places she thought she had left for a much longer time. For now I’ll allow her to rest and her life will be pretty simplistic. Not unimportant or stagnant or in the least bit rewarding, but FULL in a whole new way.
After my last heart cry of a blog I received a call from a dear friend who told me “Paige, honey, your next purpose may not come until you are 40 years old and it could be to simply be a mom to your little girl.” She told me to wake up and just be the woman God wants me to be, that’s it. Just love the people around me and have perspective. Deep perspective as to the hurt and healing and joy and love and life going on around me. And to proclaim the good in my life by living in gratitude of all I DO HAVE. And shortly after that I listened to a sermon by Graham Cooke that talked about the hiddenness of God, how He builds resilience in us in order to send us into situations in which we need to be prepared. That God isn’t strictly our emotions or the times when we see Him manifested in the world, that’s just not realistic. And I think that’s what most people think Christians are. These weird thrill seekers looking to get miracles out of God and believe He can do things that just don’t make sense.
The God I know is good. He’s the reason I cry happy tears that I have five siblings who are amazing, brilliant, beautiful, and healthy, that my parents love and support me in everything I do, that I was gifted the education that I have had at Marquette, the experiences I got to be a part of, the clothes on my back, the opportunity that awaits me because I speak English, know how to network, and can befriend just about anyone through conversation. God did all of that for me, but that doesn’t mean if someone else doesn’t have the things that I have that God deemed them unworthy of those very blessings I get on my knees about and thank Him for. And maybe I look like the biggest hypocrite for saying that believing in God is necessary when I DO have all of that, but I have to start somewhere in vulnerability and truth.
WE LIVE IN A BROKEN AND SINFUL WORLD. Quite frankly it doesn’t look like the plan God had for it, but the BIGGEST lessons come from choosing perspective in the midst of all of that. And really, I am more than just happy, I am beaming, I am thrilled, I am overjoyed that God has asked me to live out this next season of my life in this way. This is a season I spent the whole World Race praying about and asking God to lend an ear in hearing about how I wanted it to look like. But all too often on the way I heard a bit of the promise He had coming and filled in the rest of the blanks only to make God out to be the fool. THAT is exhausting and not honoring to God.
Whereas last year in April I was in Cambodia with little men and women who loved visitors fearlessly and without exception while we filled raised beds with dirt… this year I smile every day at four individuals who sit alongside me, computer to computer as we shuffle between status meetings, client drop-ins, countless real-time updates, tractor picture upon tractor picture, news publication research after news publication research, and wholehearted dialogue.
Just as earth shattering conversations as last year, just as blessed as last year, in love with God more than last year, but still serving Jesus just as much. Knowing where He wants you to go is easy IF you want what HE wants more than what YOU want.
