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.
