This month on the race has been one of the hardest. It’s month eight and I’m tired. I miss my family a heck of a lot, I miss my bed & my dogs. After a week with my parents in Rwanda, I started a five day travel venture to get to my ministry site in Bolivia. (yay South America!) After
4 plane rides, a 16 hour bus, a boat ride, 3 hours in a car, & who knows how many taxis later, my team and I were dropped off in an indigenous village in the Amazon Rainforest.
Tired yet? Me too. Drained and exhausted we soon learned that our new home here had walls made of mud, dirt floors, curtains for windows, an inconsistent supply of water, no electricity and we had a chicken as a roommate. The point of this blog isn’t to complain about my temporary living conditions because the reality of the world race is that you don’t stay in each place for very long. The point here is to say that I was drained, a little bit discouraged and dreaming of home.
In a Red Rocks Sermon I listened to recently they talked about singing praises to the Lord in the hard seasons (like living for 16 days in the Amazon maybe? idk. Timing is everything). But, God is a God of seasons and He doesn’t let me skip the hard ones. He doesn’t promise me that everything will be comfortable or easy or fun. That’s the beauty of a season though, it doesn’t last forever.
The most reassuring promise is that the Lord promises to be with me through it all. He’s there on the mountain tops when circumstances are good. He’s also there in the seasons that feel long and hard. This month I learned that power is unleashed when you praise the Creator despite the fact that your circumstances aren’t what you want them to be. Even though I desperately wanted to be somewhere with solid floors and a running shower, I didn’t need a new season. I just needed a new perspective. After all, how many people get to live in an indigenous village in the Amazon Rainforest?
Even though this was one of my hardest months, I learned more than I could have imagined. One of the greatest lessons I learned was that my faith was designed to work in the dark.
Faith was meant for times when you don’t know what’s ahead of you as you are driven straight into the rainforest.
Faith keeps you sane for the times you don know if there is a square inch of your body that is not covered in bug bites.
Faith is for when the village hasn’t had water for two days and everyone is thirsty.
Faith is for when there are people at home that are sick and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Faith is gives you strength when you are tired and you can’t go home for another three months.
It takes faith to sing praises when you can’t see clearly what the Lord has for the place you’re in. My faith certainly isn’t perfect. And I did not find it easy when my circumstances felt hard. But lucky for me (and you- cause we all go through hard seasons, don’t we?), Jesus says that all I need is faith the size of mustard seed.
And I’ve found that in the moments when my faith feels smaller than a mustard seed, singing praises to my God helps it grow.
