To the Ends of the Earth

Well friends, I have some exciting news: I'm going to Cambodia! And Norway! And somewhere else!

Confused? Let me explain. 

Phnom Penh

I heard about an organization called Hard Places a few months ago, after my friend Carrie traveled to Cambodia to look for a place to live (she's moving there at the end of this month.) It's a Christian organization that works to combat child trafficking in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. They work to rehabilitate rescued children, prevent more children from being trafficked, as well as alongside government officials to try and persecute the pimps that sell children. 

Carrie encouraged me to apply for an internship for the summer, and after I prayed about it for a long time, I had peace about pursuing that. I knew that God was calling me to go, to love in a way I have never loved before, and to give of myself as only God can equip me to do. And I am so excited to tell you that I have been accepted as an intern and will be working alongside Hard Places for 3 months this summer! 

After that, I'll be home in Saint Louis for a few weeks before I head off to Northern Norway for YWAM DTS! (Youth with a Mission, Discipleship Training School.) YWAM is a world-wide organization that exists for one simple purpose: to know God and make him known. I will be spending 6 months at the base in Northern Norway, learning about God's heart for the world, as well as getting my fill of adventures in skiing and backpacking with my classmates. After those 6 months of school in Norway, my classmates and I will do outreach somewhere else in the world. In the past they have gone to Greenland and Nepal, but we won't know where we are going exactly until the DTS begins. 

Youth with a Mission

I am so excited. And so blessed. And a little bit floored by what God is doing in my life. And by a little I mean a lot. 

There are quite a few road blocks that stand between my puny little self and the crazy journey God is leading me on. My heart is so sure that I am called to do these things that I get excited when I see new road blocks appear... New things that say, by all logic, I won't be able to go. It makes me laugh. Because every time one appears, God knocks it down. And I smile, because he's my God, and he is so good. 

One, for example, was the fact that I needed to get another job for the Spring. My school loans will kick in while I'm in Norway, and I need enough money in my account to make the payments while I'm gone. It's not an option. No second job, no Cambodia or Norway. So, I dropped to my knees and told God what I needed to make this happen and asked him to provide. I applied to a few places on Craigslist, and then went to bed. Early the next morning, I get an email from a woman at the YMCA asking if I can come in for an interview that day! 

This is the building where I and 17 other students will have class,
study, sleep, share meals, and everything else :)

I show up, and she starts asking me questions about the Y that I'm not at all prepared to answer. But, what do you know, it didn't matter. She asked me questions about what the Y stood for, and what I thought about that, etc. I believed fully everything that I said, but I never formed those words or thoughts. I wasn't really speaking, God was. I love that feeling. Afterwards I got up to get a tour of the facility and by the time I got back, Denise had a bunch of papers sitting out on her desk and she said, "Okay, here's the deal. We don't usually do this, but we were just so impressed by you that we want to offer you the job right now." God is so good! 

Not only that, but the first day I show up to work, I end up talking to a co-worker for an hour about Jesus, God's heart for the world, and what it means to truly love people. Turns out God is teaching us the same things, and we both had things the other needed to hear. I was thoroughly encouraged by the conversation, and I know she was, too. He provided me so much more than just a job.

Beautiful mountains in Northern Norway

The next roadblock is the fact that I have to raise somewhere close to $20,000. To little ol' me, that's a huge number. But to the God who owns everything in the world? It's an opportunity to show me how faithful and good he is. I'm about to be wrecked in so many ways. And I can't wait.  

Are you ready to watch God move a twenty-thousand dollar mountain? I am. :)

More on that later.

Much love and many blessings, friends.

If you're interested, check out more information on YWAM and Hard Places.

Love is (Still) Wherever You Are

I realized that there is a truth I have been living by that isn't a truth at all. Or, rather, it is a partial truth that I have been accepting as the whole.

As humans, we are relational beings. I certainly am no exception. I hover somewhere between the introverted and extroverted, depending on the day I take that magic test all my teachers seem to like so much. It was through relationships that the most painful moments in my life occurred. It was through relationships with others that I found healing, restoration and redemption. It was through relationship that I found Jesus.

People, in every context, have played a huge part in my life. I know they have in yours too. They guide us, encourage us, shape us, break us, harm us, change us. They all matter in one way or another. I love this. I love the way God uses us to bring each other closer to Himself. He is a relational God. It only makes sense that we would find great significance in relationships too.

I met Jesus because a couple of 20-something year old girls loved the angry, scary 15-year-old me. They were the first example of Jesus that I saw and recognized. They were the first example I had of what it looks like to live with a heart captivated by God. And ever since then, there has always been that constant mentorship in my life. Whether it be brothers, sisters, mothers or fathers in Christ, there has been drawn around me a more loving family than I could have ever dreamed of. I have always had the presence of people older in faith than myself to encourage me towards Jesus.

This is where the partial truth comes in. And where I finally realized the truth of something that I thought I had understood all along. Because the people around us that love Jesus? They play a huge role in showing us what love can do to a willing heart. But what I have fallen prey to is believing that because my life does not look exactly like theirs, then I must not be as 'far along' as they are. That because my life looks different, it must not be as good. And that if I love Jesus long enough, my life will look more like theirs.

But that operates under a faulty assumption: that the longer I love Jesus, the more my life will look like someone else's who loves Jesus. False. The longer I love Jesus, the more my life will look like Jesus's.

It's a subtle difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. Do you see it?

It's not a lateral thing. It's vertical. I'm not saying we don't grow in our understanding of grace. It's that is isn't about comparing where we are in regards to where everyone else is. I can love Jesus for just as long as those 20-something year olds did when I was 15, and my life still won't look like theirs. Because I am not them. My gifts, passions and purposes are different than theirs. We will never look the same. It isn't about looking around and comparing where you are to where everyone else is. It's about looking up and seeing the God of the universe beaming at you with so much love and joy that there are tears spilling down his face. Right where you are.

Because you either love Jesus or you don't. But if you do, love will change everything about you. And God puts people around us to show us the thousands of different ways that love manifests itself and to encourage us towards himself. Not to make us look at his work in our lives and say "this is not enough." Not to make us look at each other and feel shame that the love in our lives isn't as "big" or as "good" as in someone who has loved Jesus longer. That isn't how it works.

We are human. And as humans, we are all on the same field. We are all in the same place: sinners sorely in need of the grace God offers us freely, every day. It's a gift. Given in whole. Not doled out in increments as we reach spiritual milestones. This leaves us free to be, not who we think we ought to be, but exactly who God made us to be. Which is weird, quirky, unique and incredibly loved for it.

Love is all encompassing. Perfect. Joyful. It changes everything about you. It rejoices in your gifts, your passions, your purpose. It shapes you, it refines you. It comforts you, it fights for you. Love never fails. Love is constantly pursuing you, constantly loving you. In your quirks and everything you wish you could change about yourself. In every way that makes you different, in every way you wish you weren't. Love abounds. Love rejoices. Love abides.

Love is wherever you are. 

Love is Wherever You Are

The amount that I have learned about love in the last few months is something I can’t encapsulate in words just yet. The amount that I have learned in the last 24 hours alone is something I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to explain.

Since August, I’ve been up to my ears in questions, answers and interviews. I’ve been applying for every opportunity that God brought my way. Why? Because it seemed really important. Turns out God was right. With every application, every question, every essay, I learned a little bit more about what I’m looking for. And usually by the time I would get to the end of the application, I would realize that that wasn’t actually what I wanted to do at all and wouldn’t turn the application in.

And now, three months and what feels like a million applications later, I realized how much my humanity has crept into this whole process. Because God shifted my heart a few weeks ago. He showed me what it is that I long for: to continue to be wrecked by love. But I had gotten into my head that this process was going to result in some sort of direction, so I didn’t see that revelation for its true value. I waved hello to it as it settled into my heart, and turned my attention back to pursuing every option I found, determined to continue until God finally told me “yes” to one of them.

And then I was slapped in the face by my own words. Last week I shared a very difficult conversation with someone and was bluntly honest about the fact that they had not been careful with my heart. One of the things I said was that “you have an idea in your head about where my heart should be, and in that you have missed the grace of where I am.”

That is far more true than I realized when I said it. I had an idea in my head about where I should be, and in that I have missed the grace of where I am.

And here’s the truth about me: I’m a mess. All the time. I’m proud, selfish and arrogant. I have a really hard time loving my family. I am jealous and often pretend to be more confident than I am. I make mistakes, all the time. I fail to love Jesus every day. I am a girl with a lot of baggage. I come with a heart torn ragged by abuse and abandonment. And that heart has just recently learned to love and be loved and is still really bad at both. That stubborn heart still throws up walls at any threat, any pursuit, any perceived danger.

And in my head, I have an idea of where I should be. And that ^^ isn’t it. How can where I am be so far from where I should be?

Maybe because there is no such thing as “should be.”

Because this life of mine? It isn’t mine at all. It’s God’s, and he loves us more than we know. God is love. A Love that loves unto purity. A Love that isn’t about being perfect or in the perfect place. There is no map, no 12 step program, no ‘should be.’ Love is wherever you are.

On Sunday, as I was driving home from backpacking and mulling over some of these things when they were still half-formed, I heard that it was baptism Sunday at my church. Something stirred in my heart. I got to lunch and my roommate told me about her experience at church that morning, and how she was going to go back that evening and get baptized. That stirring in my heart intensified, so I just smiled and said, “I'm coming too.”

I’ve loved Jesus for a while now. But there was such overwhelming love in standing up in front of my church family, with new friends ready to surrender with me, with both my sweet roommates who have played such big roles in my story, and getting baptized by Cy, my big brother in everything but blood. It wrecked me. In every wonderful way.

I’ve been wrecked by love. Right here, right now, in all my fear and failure and sin. And all I want is to continue to be wrecked by love. And that’s all there really is to it. The grace of where I am? It’s that Love is wherever you are.

And I’m right here.

For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with him you were raised to new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead. You were dead because of your sins and because your sinful nature was not yet cut away. Then God made you alive with Christ, for he forgave all our sins. He canceled the record of the charges against us and took it away by nailing it to the cross. Colossians 2:12-14

Alleluia, amen. 

Ready. Set. Stop.

Ready
Your heart to follow
Set
Your eyes on me
and
Stop.
Just stop.

You're already here
And so am I
Don't grasp so hard
At the hand steadying you now

Are you ready?
Are you set?
Then stop.
And breathe
Just breathe

Let me turn you around
From the inside out

Let it go
Let it be
Let me be me
And breathe
Just breathe

Ready. Set. Stop. 

La Caja, der Kasten, the Box

However you want to say it, it's still a box. Four walls. No escape. Confining. Constricting. Suffocating.

I put boxes on all kinds of things in my life. More than I know, more than I recognize. I put four walls around things that were designed to be big, bold and reckless. I was designed to be big and bold. My heart was created to love recklessly. My life was designed to be wild. My impact on the world was designed to be not just big, but BIG.

Because my God is big. And he calls all of us to differing but equally BIG things. That is often so hard for us to believe. I know it is for me. I am small. I am just another person in this big, wide world. Why would God do anything big through me?

Have you ever noticed that God doesn't do anything small? Because he's God. And he's in the business of souls. And when you're in the business of souls, even the tiniest thing makes the biggest difference. Because it's the very center of who we are, what we love, what we believe, and therefore what we do. There's nothing small about that. And because it is no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us, doesn't that mean that everything we do is big too?

But there's more to it I think. Because yes, everything we do is important. Eating, drinking, working. It all matters, according to 1 Corinthians 10:31. But it also says over and over and over again "be not afraid." And you know what that says to me? Not "don't ever go near the things that scare you, so you don't have to ever be afraid." No. It's saying "walk towards the things that scare you, not away. Walk into them and keep your eyes on me. And just watch how I show up."

This has laid heavily on my heart for a long time now. It used to make me drop everything I was doing and chase after every service project I could think of. I used to scour for opportunities to volunteer in ways I never had before. And then I would burn out. I'd get tired, and I would stop going, stop caring. But the thing is, Jesus was never the heart of that. He wasn't what I was after. I was after my to-do list, my own greatness. And, lo and behold, it always fell through. It was like grasping at straws.

So, over the last few weeks, as this has burned on my heart more than ever before, I was tempted to do the same thing. But God has just told me to wait, so I have. Even more than that, he has challenged me to take a break from the conventional things of Christianity. I haven't gone to church in months, I haven't gone to bible study, I haven't even cracked my Bible in a week. Instead, I spend every morning sitting on my back porch in silence, drinking coffee and just being with the Lord. Like having breakfast with an old friend, there is no agenda, no chapter to read, no verses to meditate on, no plan. Just me and Jesus, being friends.

This was not an accident. Because he has shown me that doing big things and being used in big ways doesn't come from my own actions. It's about seeking Jesus, and being obedient when he brings things across my path. It's about being still, and obeying in BIG ways when God brings them your way. The catch, for me anyway, comes in the waiting and trusting God to bring them your way.

And bring them my way he certainly did this week.

To make some very long stories short, this week I: found about $2,000 worth of drugs on campus and had to make a formal statement to the police. I watched a friend speak in tongues for the first time in her life. God used me to cast demons out of someone. (Yep, you read that right. Crazy, huh?) That incident occurred while I was supposed to be at work... Obviously, I did not show up. And I didn't even get in trouble. Amazing. And to top it all off, I met up with Bob Goff today.

Life is less about the should's and should not's and more about just loving. It has no agenda, no plan. Not really. God does, but we don't. Loving God and living life in a BIG way is more about seizing the opportunities that God places right in front of us and trusting him to come through. It's about leaning into the things that freak us out, because those are the things I think we were truly made for. Why else would they freak us out?

I understand almost nothing. I don't even know if this made any sense at all. All I know is that loving God means breaking out of the box. It means trusting him and his plan when he puts $2,000 worth of cocaine in your hand. When he chooses to use you to help catch a drug dealer. It means trusting him even though the casting out of demons really weirds you out and you aren't entirely sure what to do. It means skipping work and trusting that His timing is perfect, and that he is the great Provider. It means calling up someone you've never met to see if they'll have coffee with you, for no other reason than that the thought of it makes your heart beat faster.

None of that fits in the box. None of that is normal. And those are some of the moments I have seen God move the most. And I did not seek any of them out. God brought them to me, and I simply followed the sound of his voice. God calls us to big things. And because he's God, he will bring those big things to us. Right now. Right where we are, just as we are. Imperfect, in the day-to-day, in the unexpected. We don't have to necessarily chase them down. Because God's BIG things are all over the place and they all look different, and they are often unexpected and unconventional.

We just have to pay attention

and

"Be not afraid." (Isaiah 41:10, Deuteronomy 31:6, Jeremiah 1:8, Isaiah 54:4, and so many more...)

Pursuing the Uncomfortable

I wrote a few weeks ago that I have been struggling. Now is no different. There is a lot stirring in my heart, and I understand very little of it. But, I am a lot less unsettled by it. God has taught me to embrace this vague place, because it is vague for a good reason.

But there has been something on my heart ever since I got back from Spain, and God has given me some insight into it lately. It took root when I was in Spain, but it has been growing ever since I got back. It's the idea of discomfort. Of intentionally pursuing the things that make us uncomfortable. Because there is a good reason that things make us uncomfortable, and if we would just press into them instead of walking away, I think we'd learn a lot. I know I always have.

The things that make us uncomfortable, like people who are different than us, things we have simply never done before, or whatever it is that makes you uncomfortable... They so often blind us to the people we could have the chance to meet, or the big things we could have the chance to do, and the big God we could have the chance to experience. We are frozen by fear. And we often don't think twice about it. And sometimes there are good reasons for that. But more often than not, I think it is our love of comfort that makes us fear the new, the unpredictable, the intimidating.

I've never looked back and been sorry that I had walked towards something unfamiliar and uncomfortable. But I definitely have looked back and been sorry that I walked away.

I have seen the depth of God to be found in the uncomfortable and intimidating. It's really amazing. He truly is bigger and more faithful than we realize.

Have you ever been put out of your comfort zone enough to see it?

I saw it when I was traveling all over Europe by myself. I had to rely on God like never before, because there really wasn't anyone else. I had to rely on him, not my circumstance, to be my comfort because I was scared most of the time. But he met me there. He taught me just how faithful he is, and how he will always come through for us when we need him to. He began to teach me just how big he is, and how BIG the things are that he can and will do through me.

But he had to strip away all my comfort first. Because it is in comfort that I begin to think I don't need him, that I can do it on my own, and my view begins to shrink. My view of God, of the world, of my own ability to impact the world. It all shrinks to the size of comfortable.

The truth about how big God is and about the big ways we really can impact the world? They begin at the edge of comfortable. And they grow the further you walk into discomfort. When you stop giving God an out. When you stop relying on a backup, the plan B, the 'just in case.' We have become comfortable and unwilling to give it up. We are incredibly unwilling to follow God's voice into the unknown. We are unwilling to follow the sound of his voice when it calls us to things that would be devastating if he didn't come through. But how big is our God then, really? If we never do anything that we couldn't do without him?

I'm tired of comfortable. I'm tired of predictable. I have no idea what this looks like in the context of right now. Because I don't think this unease is just to pursue after May. I think God has just as much intention for it right now. No idea what that means, but I know that I'll know it when I see it. And as for May?

This rebellion against comfortable, and the strong, steady voice of God both call me to ask one simple question: What is the most uncomfortable thing in the world for me?

And whatever the answer to that is... Well, by the grace of God, I'm going to pursue whatever that is.

Which, I think, is exactly the answer to the 'right now,' too.

What would it look like if you did the same? 

For Equilibrium

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,

May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.

As the wind loves to call things to dance,

May your gravity be lightened by grace.

Like the dignity of the moonlight restoring the earth,

May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect. 

As water takes whatever shape it is in,

So free may you be about who you become. 

As silence smiles on the other side of what's said,

May your sense of irony bring perspective.

As time remains free of all that it frames,

May your mind stay clear of all it names.

May your prayer of listening deepen enough

To hear in the depths the laughter of God. 

John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us