…is matters of the heart!
What kind of person leaves the country, for almost one year, after her father was diagnosed with brain cancer?
This kind.
I did.
Before leaving for The World Race, my heart was torn between following what I knew was God’s plan for this season of my life and doing what seemed to be the right thing- staying, serving, and loving on my family well. When I say torn, I mean ripped apart, shredded, and void. In its place I was with left an endless amount of emptiness.
Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. Prov. 4:23
This year completely crushed my spirit. It took everything in me survive through the summer and make it onto The World Race. When I arrived in China, Month One, I had nothing left in me to give. I realized over the last several months that before the race I had built up walls, fortresses really, around my heart in efforts of ‘guarding my heart’ in self-preservation at my best attempt to keep smiling while ‘considering it pure joy.’ What I actually did was walled in my pain and scars. I numbed my heart from validating its hurts. The wall guarded me from fully feeling incoming pain but also from communing with God and sharing love with others. The point of realization came when I no longer had control over accessing my heart, feelings, and emotions because the wall of guardedness caused a great divorce between who I am and who I was trying to be.
Over the past three months, I spent countless hours alone with God giving him control and allowing him to open the dusty box that I had hidden more and more of my heart in over the years. God has been reminding me that ‘guard your heart’ doesn’t mean guard your heart with a wall built out of control, pain, and fear against loving vulnerably. Rather, guard your heart against the schemes of the enemy and the power of self-destruction. He invites us to open our hearts to be filled with the fruits of the Spirit- love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23). And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love (1 Cor. 13:13). Guarding your heart means giving over that control to the protection of the armor of the spirit: Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Ephs. 6:10-12).
Thankfully, the very best place that I could have begun this journey was from a place of brokenness. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted (Psalms 34:18). As I have entered into this journey of heart, through brokenness, I have been able to draw nearer to His heart. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me (2 Cor. 12:8). You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. ‘I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and will bring you back from captivity’ (Jer. 29:13-14).
Words of Affirmation are most definitely last on my Love Language list. So when God allowed me to spend this month wrapping my arms around little children and communicating with them through a variety of voiceless methods, the emptiness in my heart was refreshed by love from above. At the beginning of this month, I actually began to feel the shift, a change, that I have been yearning for for so long. I am still long from the place that God wants to take me, but I am getting there. And it’s going to be good, really good. I just know it.
So again I ask, what kind of person leaves the country, to be gone for almost one year, after her father was diagnosed with brain cancer?
- Someone whose faith is that God is immeasurably bigger than cancer (Matt. 19:26)
- Someone who believes in the literal gospel, the literal cost of following Jesus, and the literal meaning by the answer given, “Follow me now” (Matt. 8:22 NLT)
- Someone who chooses to believe that there is a bigger picture that we can’t see (Ecc. 3:1)
- Someone who is willing to risk everything, even favor with men (family), to join Him in what He is doing (Romans 8:28)
- Someone who clings to the promise that by choosing to obey and follow God into the unknown, demons will shutter, and God will be given full control to rein in His glory (Prov. 19:21)
- Someone whose trust is without borders. (Oceans by Hillsong United)
- Someone who knows that above all else, even cancer, God is most concerned about matters of the heart (Luke 10:25-28; Jer. 29:13).
