Hindsight is 20/20, right? I love when I can look back at
various processes and be able to so clearly see exactly what God was up to!
Sometimes we have no clue until years down the road, and other times it smacks
you in the face. There is so much about this journey that I am on right now
that helps me make sense of certain events in the past and present. It is
absolutely wild! I love how God does this…and the more we say “yes” the wilder
the ride!
I love good stories. And to have good stories it most often
involves some crazy drama, humor, mistakes, out of the box ideas, risk-taking,
etc. My good friend Kari Gibson (www.mycrazyadoption.com,
check her out!) will tell you that on every trip we take, whether it’s to
Uganda, Ethiopia or Haiti…I always pray for crazy drama so that I can have a
good story to tell. Most don’t like that I do that J And if I remember correctly,
right after I was telling Kari G this while standing in the security line headed
to Uganda, she realized that she couldn’t get through security because she was
given the wrong ticket. I do believe I was shortly sent a text message with a
swear word in it blaming me as she was running around the airport (sorry to
“out” you , sinner) J
God has a pretty good (actually perfect) track record of
catching me, leading me and guiding me. You might want to try Him out in this
area if you haven’t yet J
I so want to take the time one of these days and list out every possible way
that He has proved himself faithful and loving and had me wait so he could give
me the absolute best. I didn’t always believe
this about God. In fact, I had so much shame in my life that I couldn’t even
fathom that this all-powerful, majestic, mighty God would actually want to
lower himself to meet me, cradle me, wipe my tears, sing over me and lead me to
the pastures of such an overwhelming, magnitude of grace. I couldn’t make sense of who He was and what
my role as His daughter looked like. I had this deep, unsettling feeling that
for me to love Jesus that I had to completely change everything about me.
Me- adventure
seeker, adrenaline junkie, risk-taker.
Is my life going to succumb to being a
just a bible study leader?
Do I just need to nail down how to have my hour
quiet time in the morning?
How many girls do I need to disciple?
This was all
that was being modeled around me. Please, I get that this is all good, but
there is SO MUCH MORE! I felt like I was stuffing so much of who God created me
to be to fit into this so called Christian box. I hated it. I fought it. I
experienced leaders in Christian ministry judge and hurt others. Where was the
love? Where was the freedom? I continued
to question over and over again, “God, there has to be so much more.”
Africa 2010. This trip awakened my heart and made me feel
more alive than I had ever felt before. Passion, desire and anger engulfed me
as I witnessed the events around me. I began to feel the heart of God and what
He truly desires of all of us. LOVE. He wants us to LOVE. To sit with the broken,
wash the feet of a prostitute, giggle with an orphan, comfort the widow….to be
His hands and feet. God showed me that who I was, was O.K. Who I was, was
enough to be used. That my intense passion, strong-willed, adrenaline seeking
self was everything that He wanted to use to bring others to himself. He wanted
me to throw the rules out the window and to run with abandonment. ….every
single part of me that He knitted and wove together.
God didn’t want me to fit
in some man-made idea that others had constructed and influenced regarding what
it meant to live for Him. Man is full of error, God is perfect. And let me tell
you. When you can get to this place, the amount of freedom that washes over you
is so immense!
I was on the phone with Kari G a few days leading up to the
most recent trip we took to Ethiopia/Uganda this past summer. Some events from
my past had surfaced and I found myself in a place of despair and pain. I was shaken, confused, and I thought I had
moved on and dealt with all of this years ago. I was about take the biggest
risk of my life with just recently quitting my job to spend 4 months with exile
international in northern Uganda working with former child soldiers. So
obviously, there was some spiritual attack going on as well.
7 years ago I was supposed to go on my first trip to Africa.
The same thoughts that I was openly sharing with Kari were the ones that I
shared 7 years ago and was told that I could not go to Africa. My thoughts were
apparently too sinful and apparently no one else ever struggled in ways of
thinking. The words out of Kari’s mouth
were the exact words that I know God wanted me to hear. You see, Kari didn’t
know that what I was sharing with her was what got me “kicked off” the Africa trip
years ago. Her response: “Kari, there is NOTHING that you can say right now
that would ever make me question having you come on this trip. NEVER think that
you can’t be used by God because of something you are walking through. I want you to be on this team even MORE
because of this place you are in.”
THAT is LOVE. That is
JESUS.
My favorite stories have God’s fingerprints all over them.
You know the ones. Where you can’t make sense of anything, or explain why…it’s
just God doing His thing. Now those are my favorite ones to tell….and more of
that in my next post: Journey to the Legacy House.
My challenge to you: Are you running after and serving God
through a man-constructed idea, or God’s idea?
