Harlem so far...
It's sort of crazy how the Lord completely shatters expectations you didn't know were there. Specifically, I'm talking about my team, I expected my team to look like the "ideal christians" with their lives neatly sorted, but instead I found us to be a group of people who have a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. We all sort of ended up on this trip, leaving home with hesitations about where we are being led and what's next. We aren't perfect. We know we aren't perfect. But for some reason we felt an undeniable stirring only caused by a God who knows us. He beckons us from different parts of the country, He encourages us to trust His plan and leave behind the plans we were comfortably making for ourselves. He calms our hesitations about leaving fragile family situations and security we have found in our education and career. He unites us with this passion we all have to serve Him. He continues to give us glimpses of who He is in small moments spent with a group of strangers that would only meet on the basis of knowing a God that sees them in their plain, boring, ordinary lives and calls them to an adventure that is carefully planned out by their Guide.*
Another shattered expectation was the training we went through the first three days in Harlem. I assumed it would be preparation for our minds, like learning some of the language and linguistics to the cultures we would be living in but I should have expected God to shatter that one too. (The thing with God is you always think you're catching on to what He's doing and you never are. He will always surprise you in big, scary, crazy, beautiful, loving ways. Embrace this.) Training was about preparing our minds but more importantly about preparing our hearts and spirits. The Lord stretched me with questions about worldview, creation, dignity and brokenness. Questions that ask things that have never occurred to me, like how to serve someone in a way that upholds their dignity, and how worldview affects the relationships we are building. I've never thought about the difference between nature and creation, or how negatively the impoverished would describe themselves. I never saw that handouts destroyed dignity and only create open, expectant hands, or that there are seven types of poverty that all equally lead to a brokenness that only Jesus can heal. I am not going to Africa to change lives. I'm not going to Africa to do. I'm going to Africa to live. I will not put God in that old, familiar box that I used to. I will not search for comfort or ways to feel useful. I will not give until I realize how much I'm receiving. I'm faithful that God will unite my heart to the hearts of the people He will bless me with in Africa, no matter how different our cultures and our lives tell us we are. We serve the same God who sees us, and wants to walk hand in hand with us through everyday.
No comments:
Post a Comment