Back in September of this year I received a Facebook message from a girl I went to high school with. It caught me by surprise because we weren’t very close in school. But before I got three sentences into her message I was in tears. This is what she said:
“Hey Taylor! Okay, I know this is SUPER weird and SUPER random and we were never close in high school. But I have been avoiding this for probably about a month now because I thought it would freak you out or just be plain pointless. But God keeps bringing you to my mind for some reason and I have no idea why. I finally just got to the point where i would pray for you or asked God to give you whatever you needed during that particular day. I knew it was from Him because of how random it was! So I prayed for hope, peace and love to reign in your life and for you to know how adored you are by Jesus. I also pray for you to have the courage to take risks and take those steps of faith so God can show up in really cool ways. I know it will be awkward trying to think of what to respond to this so don’t even worry about a response if you don’t have one. I just had to finally be obedient to God and speak out to you how you’ve been on my mind. I hope you are doing great. and well… God loves you a lot.. That I know for sure.”
I couldn’t (and still can’t) explain this in any other way than saying it was a “God thing”. After I read it I was just overwhelmed with a sense of peace. God is with me, whether I can see it or not.
I continued to think about her message and our conversation afterwards and tried to think about why God had placed her in my life. I then remembered reading posts that she had made a couple years before about her time on the World Race. I looked it up, read all her and others’ blog post, watched countless videos, and read all the information I could find on this mission trip. Immediately I knew I wanted to do this.
But was it what God wanted me to do? I struggle with knowing the difference between God telling me to do something and me wanting to do it. I prayed and talked to my parents, friends, and my pastor and his wife. Could I ask God to give me a specific sign that I was to do this?
While I was doing a bible study I came upon the story of Gideon. In Judges 6 Gideon asks God to give him a sign.
“Gideon said to God, ‘If you will save Israel by my hand as you have promised – look, I will place a wool fleece on the threshing floor. If there is dew only on the fleece and all the ground is dry, then I will know that you will save Israel by my hand, as you said.’ And that is what happened. Gideon rose early the next day; he squeezed the fleece and wrung out the dew – a bowlful of water.” – Judges 6:36-38 (I find it funny that the verse includes “a bowlful of water”. Like God was saying ‘Dude, I meant what I said.’)
So I prayed that if He wanted me to go through with this, if this was His plan, then I would apply and if I was accepted I would know that this was His will.
I applied the next day and a few weeks later I received news that I’d been accepted! That was my bowlful of water.
All this to say… God works in some seriously mysterious ways, y’all! When Lynda messaged me that day she didn’t know that it would lead me to make one of the biggest decisions of my life. I’m incredibly excited to see how God uses this experience to reach people and to strengthen my relationship with him.
