He is Faithful

"Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful." -Hebrews 10:23

Looking back in my journal from what I wrote 2 months ago, before moving to Buffalo and starting a new job and meeting new people and attempting to do things that I didn't feel prepared to do, I'm reminded of what Jesus has done. How faithful He has been. Where He has brought me from and what He has brought me through and where He is bringing me. It's something that even since writing it a short 2 months ago I have experienced to be true again and again: He who promised is faithful.

8/24/15

There's so many changes happening and I don't know how this is all going to work out. How I will pay for things and how I will live with all these other people. How I will be able to help the overwhelming amount of patients where I'll be working. I don't know how to start the discipleship group that God put on my heart to have, or who will be in it or if anyone will even come. I'm hanging on for dear life to Jesus. Because I just don't know, but I know that this isn't the first time I've felt like this, or that Jesus has proven Himself so, so faithful.

I remember when I didn't know why I felt so strongly about doing my thesis on water purification and how it related to malnutrition in developing countries. When idea after idea for the experiment I needed to come up with kept falling through and I was out of options and time was ticking. And I somehow stumbled onto a plant that could purify water, and was able to base my experiment off it and miraculously graduate on time. 

I remember when I said yes to an organization I had previously never heard of, to spend 7 months in Africa after graduating when I was supposed to be taking a certification exam and finding a job. When I had no idea what kind of nutrition help they needed or what they could offer and they told me they needed help with was the exact same plant I had used in my thesis study.

I remember going to Ivory Coast knowing barely any French or what I was doing and 7 months later being able to explain in my non-native tongue to a father how to manage his young son's diabetes with the education materials that had been written in French for a diabetes support group we had started. This was so not me. It was all completely just GOD. 

I remember coming back knowing nothing again and waiting waiting waiting for something to do next, frustrated and impatient and unstable. And even though I didn't deserve it He was constant, patient, and unmoving, and I came to know Him even more as the anchor for my wandering and restless soul. 

I remember when I wanted to get involved with refugees in Buffalo and was matched with a mentee and had no idea how to communicate with her or what we would do together. And watching her baby being born and hearing her say at the end of our "mentorship" that it never mattered what we ended up doing because just that we were able to spend time together made all the difference.

I remember when I was invited to be leader as a part of a group called Young Life, an outreach to teenagers that involves going where the kids are and living life with them wherever they are at so that they will have a chance to hear and know and respond to the good news that is Jesus, and every part of me that wanted to stay in my comfort zone fought the idea. I didn't like teenagers, I had no idea how to relate to them or how it would work out. And even with this, all Jesus needed was my yes because He changed my heart to love these kids and know their names, stories, and lives. He gave me a family made up of the other leaders that I serve with and have grown with and been challenged by, and all I can say looking back is that God is so GOOD in the middle of it all. He is faithful when I don't know (which is often). But I know Him and that He is God, again and again, and He will not fail. 

So here we go again. Trusting over all the unknowns that Jesus is greater. And knowing that I will see His faithfulness again, experiencing His grace and provision and things that would be impossible on my own. His power, love, forgiveness, freedom, joy. Him. Jesus. I don't ever want to stop knowing Him and falling in love.

The Will of the Father

After returning from spending almost 2 weeks in Haiti, I am surprised by how easy it all seemed to transition there and then home again. One day I am bouncing over a narrow crowded street on a taptap, the smells of street food and sweat filling my nose between the gusts of dusty wind that gets blown into my face. (A taptap is the Haitian version of a taxi, basically a truck bed with benches and then covered with a metal roof).The next, I am driving to my house along smooth familiar roads to see my family again, a place that is comfortable and can make me feel like I never left.

It's strange (and kind of concerning) how easy it is for me to go from place to place without thinking too deeply about anything and really looking for what the Lord is doing around me in the "ordinary-ness" of life, asking Him and listening to what my role is in it, or how He is calling me to be a part of it.

But I want to think about it. I want to ask, and listen, and be changed.

I want to be intentional about letting Jesus transform my heart daily, and wreck my life for anything other than a life lived radically for Him. I don't want to be a casual observer of the life that is going on around me. I want to be learning and growing, being challenged and stretched to love more and follow closer.

I met three little girls during my time there who shared my name. The girl from the village who I got to speak French with. One little girl from another village who barely spoke at all. And another little baby who came to the clinic we held at our guest house, carried in her mother's arms. "Her name is Christine," she tells me, so that I can write down her name on a card, part of a system we are using to keep track of the hundreds of patients we saw that week. At one point the thought just hits me: any one of those girls could have been me.

I wonder what would change in my life if I really knew that. I know that God has specifically given me that life I have for a reason. But it is NOT so that I would do nothing for the ones whose situations I wouldn't want to be in myself.

A story that I read recently and have been thinking about is the one Jesus told about a great banquet. The master of the house had prepared an amazing meal, and called his servant and sent him out, telling them that the dinner was ready, and to come! But all the people who were invited made excuses. In one way or another, all the invited people gave the same answer. "I'm busy with this or that or money or my job or other people.  Please excuse me, I just can't come,"

What is God's reaction supposed to be when we turn down His invitations to experience the life He has for each one of us?

Also. The most ironic part? The ones invited didn't realize that this banquet was far better than anything else they were occupying their time with or obsessing over.

In this God is teaching me something important, something that I so needed to hear in my life right now. It's a lesson on the will of God, and it's bringing to light some common beliefs about it that just aren't true. Like the idea that, "Oh, I'll just do whatever I want to do and if God wants something different for my life He'll just change it". No. There is a way to be in a place in my life that my Father doesn't desire for me. And I don't want be there. I don't want to miss the life HE planned for me to have.

I don't know about a lot of things in my life right now. A lot of things are uncertain and needing answers. But I know that there is no other voice I want to be listening to for guidance than the One who created me and knows all of my days. I don't want to answer any other invitation to life except the one that Jesus invites me to, a life that is full in ways that I don't quite know or understand yet, but that I can only trust is better than my own ways and excuses and more than I could ever ask for or imagine.

The difference between being nice and being LOVE

The struggle is real because I feel like so often the two words are confused with each other. It's like they're interchangeable, synonymous, but I really don't think they are. At all. There's this rebellious part of my heart that makes me want to fight this idea that love is "nice". Maybe especially because I struggle with figuring out how to really live out the differences in my own life.

When I hear the word nice, I think of pleasant. Proper. Sweet. Good, agreeable. Getting along with everybody.

It's like I see these words painted with neat handwriting in their own neat colors and I just want to take my hands and mess up all the colors and words until it's a multicolored chaos on the paper.

As someone trying to follow Jesus, when I look at His life I realize that neat and proper and "nice" is NOT what He taught. "Nice" was NOT the life He lived. 

The life He lived was scandalous. He talked to "different" people that He shouldn't have talked to. He stood up for the guilty and accused woman when she should have been stoned to death. He flipped over tables and called the religious people hypocrites. And then He forgave them when they had Him killed on a cross for speaking the truth. He touched people with disgusting, contagious skin disease and smeared mud on a blind man's eyes to heal them. The life He lived was dirty, messy, wild, and driven by a love that was absolutely crazy and near impossible for people to comprehend. It left people without words, stunned with awe at the grace and fierceness of His teachings and actions. 

So I guess this is my prayer...to love like that, to live like the one that I claim to follow. And to know what that even looks like and how it plays out in real life. To live with a fire burning in my heart, and in such a way that people won't be confused through my life at the difference between being "nice" and "good" and truly loving like Jesus taught me to. 

Family

I've missed it. Not that I've been totally out of community. But a few weeks ago after gathering to hear a message about Jesus I ended up staying later when people broke up into small groups. I sat in with a group that my friend was leading and I just fell in love all over again with my family, the one that Jesus makes us part of and stronger than any hereditary genes. We shared ideas for raising money to help rescue girls from sex trafficking, talked about what was going on in our lives and what we learned from the message we had heard that night. We prayed for each other, encouraged each other, learned from each others stories.  I just felt so thankful to be apart of it, and like it was the kind of community Jesus had in mind when He talked about the "church".

The next day I had coffee with two lovely ladies that I met in September at a park shelter for an afternoon of food and hearing from God. Again we shared life stories, encouraged one woman with Jesus' freedom and how it was so much better than the rules she had always tried to follow that had left her feeling far from God and like she was unable to love Him.

A few days after that, me and a friend were messaging each other about both of our struggles with anxiety that seemed to hit us out of nowhere, and there was such a comfort knowing we weren't in it alone. We encouraged each other knowing that we only need to stand firm because Jesus has overcome, and we belong to Him! We already know the ending, and that the One we hope in is able to save completely, no matter how life feels at the moment.

Then, meeting up with a girl who I can relate to as a younger me, sitting in her bedroom listening as she tells me with tears her struggles with finding out what love is, and wondering if the sadness she feels will ever go away. Feeling like she is too far gone and unable to get back to whatever "good" feels like. I get to tell her that I don't know a lot of things, but I know what it's like to feel stuck in a hole of emptiness that I couldn't get out of. I share that I know that Jesus was the one who filled up every empty place in my life, and that He is enough to fill the emptiness in her life too.

Thinking about the events of the week brought to mind a verse in Nehemiah..

After I looked things over, I stood up and said to the nobles, the officials and the rest of the people, "Don't be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your families, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes." -Nehemiah 4:14

What a call to remember who we are fighting for - One so much bigger than myself. A call to remember the great and awesome God I serve. A call to fight for love, and for our family, because we are in this together, and we need each other! We have things to give, and to receive.  A messed-up, dysfunctional family at times, oh yes. But a genuine, beautiful family all the same; in desperate need of Jesus, His help, and for Him to shine through us.  So that ultimately, that the world will know though our stories of grace that there is more room in this family, that there is a place even they can belong. And that Jesus always says, "Come."

With me still

When people ask me what I am doing these days, I wish I could tell them that I had some idea. I wish it didn't look like I am lost and not living up to my "full potential". I wish I didn't feel on some days that I had been too naïve, thinking I could just give up developing a career and go to Africa.  Like that would be the only plan I'd ever need because surely something would come up right after. These unsaid expectations are more made up in my mind than communicated by other people, but I still feel so weighed down when I let my mind focus on them. Even though I know that focusing on what hasn't happened yet probably is not what God wants me dwelling on. So again and again, I am learning to just keep keeping my eyes on Jesus.

Not my circumstances. Not my future job. Not what other people think. Just Jesus.

He is my answer to my longing heart, searching for "what's next?"

"Me," He whispers in my quiet time with Him. He is what life is all about anyway. Not my plans or my life or what I'm doing.  And when I realize it's not about me, I feel like I can breathe again. With clear eyes I can start to see that God is still doing wonderful things all around me, things I don't want to miss.

Like special moments that have happened while mentoring a little Burmese woman who has become my friend. Lu Mai had only been in America for a few months and was preparing to have a baby in this confusing new country whose language she barely knew, not to mention our confusing healthcare system. I had asked to be matched with a French speaking refugee if it was possible, but I was so excited to meet her for the first time. God amazed me at this first meeting by providing a girl named Flora to interpret for us who also spoke French! One cold day a few months later, the three of us met in Lu Mai's home to make her birth plan for the baby, and even though it was a cold rainy day outside I felt so happy there, curled up on a sagging couch sipping sweet and creamy coffee and talking in French with Flora.

Even though they are so simple, it's moments like this where I see Jesus most clearly.  Lessons re-learned from Ivory Coast that it's the little, normal, day-to-day "yes"es to love the person in front of me that matter to Jesus. And, that give me this happiness knowing that He sees and cares and is so present in these moments that I can so easily overlook.

Like the time when Lu Mai and I started clapping in excitement at the bank together when we successfully were able to deposit and take money out of her checking account. The time we went grocery shopping together, and being humbled when before I left to drive home she packed a grocery bag for me too, full of kale, tomatoes, garlic, onions. And of course, the day when I received an unexpected phone call from her saying through broken English that she was having the baby, and I arrived at the hospital just in time to witness the birth of her fourth girl. A beautiful healthy baby that I was given the privilege of naming - Liberty.

Finally, a different story, of the girl who I have become friends with as she went through some really rough circumstances in her life.  And as we became friends, being able to tell her about the One who changed my life, filled my emptiness, and gave me something sure and unchanging to hope in. Not some idea or religion but a person whose name has the power to save from the darkest situation. How she's now messaging me bible verses and telling me how good God is. "Wow, Jesus" is all I could think. Through our unexpected friendship, as I encouraged her I never expected how much she would encourage me.

These are the things going on in my life that are hard to put into words.  But they're things that matter so much more than what I can point to in my life that I've done and try to find my worth in.

For He satisfies the longing soul,
and the hungry soul He fills with good things.
Psalm 107:9