I feel like a new season in my life is beginning. This year has brought about so many changes in my life I can't even begin to describe them and as the new school semester starts I know it's going to be different. Maybe on the outside where everyone can see I'll have pretty much the same life with the same friends, school, job, and church and nothing will really look radically different. But I know God's starting something new for me in my heart this year. He's already shown me a lot of things over the summer and coming back to school I was afraid I would lose sight of what He's done but I now that I've actually started school I'm just feeling really excited for what else He's going to reveal to me.
Every summer since I was 10 years old I've gone on a mission trip with my church to Tijuana, Mexico. I've been going so long and been on a lot of different types of teams and we've done many different sort of missions and projects there. Last summer I had the opportunity to intern at an orphanage we serve there for about 7 weeks. This summer I did the same thing and was there for almost the same amount of time. It was in Mexico that I first felt my calling to missions and every year I leave a little more of my heart with the people that live there.
Sometimes I have a difficult time with just feeling needed at all in Knoxville. I know this is stereotypical but every time I've really felt God work through me is when I'm serving Him in Mexico. We all have those "God moments" where it's just so amazingly clear that He's present and you remember what you're living for again. Well honestly most of those moments for me have happened in Mexico. That's kind of how I lived for a few years. I would live a pretty shallow life until my Mexico trip, get on a kind of spiritual high, and then start over right back from where I started when I got back.
Last year in Mexico I think I got closer to God than I ever have been in my whole life. The number one thing He showed me last year was how my trips were so NOT about me in any way. They are about the people I serve and Him and His glory, and all I am within that is a tool for Him to use. I remember for the first time feeling in an exact moment when He was acting and actually speaking through me. It's an awesome feeling, knowing that something you did or said was His intention and being used for His glory. Great as something like that is, I realize now that I connected it in my mind to being in Mexico and that I counted it as nothing that I can use here when I got back.
This year Mexico was very very different for me spiritually. I kept waiting for my moment, waiting for something special. I was getting kind of impatient at one point because my trip wasn't really turning out to be that amazing or inspiring. It was fun, and we were serving Him, but I felt no closer to Him than usual. I started getting worried and about 2 weeks in I was praying for God to show Himself to me. There were a few times when I actually started to question if I should have came to Mexico at all this summer, and whether I had come for the right reasons because even as I continued praying for that big moment for Him to reveal Himself clearly, or feel myself being used by Him, or really anything that I could recognize as my big "God moment", the only response I could get was "Have patience."
Have patience? I felt as if my time was already running out in Mexico, my trip was halfway over and I didn't understand why or even want to have patience. The next week or two I still wasn't having my big connection with God but I kept my trust in him and eventually I realized I didn't feel stressed that all I'd really accomplished so far was that I'd made a lot of new friendships and strengthened my old relationships with some of the teens in the orphanage we were staying at. I kept looking for opportunities for my patience to pay off, but it wasn't really a worry anymore and I just started trusting in Him that He knew what He was doing.
I'm not going to lie and say that at the end of my trip I finally did have that big life-changing-God-spoke-to-me kind of thing because that's not what happened. Not that I'm saying those moments aren't good, or that I'm disappointed that didn't happen like I thought it would this summer. Actually what was different about this year was when I came back from Mexico I was still struggling with my walk with Him. I didn't know what exactly I had accomplished as clearly as I did last year and I felt blind and confused. On top of that I was missing my friends so much it hurt.
Instead of getting back home and being like "wow, it's so cool God did this and this on our trip! That was fun!" I felt more like I was asking God what He DID do and why He even had me go. I've been spending more time in His word and just talking to Him than I did even when I was in Mexico, which honestly is a switch for me.
God doesn't always move in one big surprising moment . He has for me in the past, but this summer in my patience that I've prayed for I've discovered God moves at His own pace in our lives. Sometimes we can't see why, but He always can. We also don't always know WHEN He's moving. He can work through the tiniest little things in our lives, and sometimes we discover those things later, and sometimes only He sees the glory being brought to Him.
I guess that's what He's been telling me since I've gotten back. Every relationship and conversation I had He could have been working in ways I couldn't see. Maybe I wasn't seeing those ways because something I needed to learn is Mexico is just a place. It's where I first remember feeling God stir in my heart but that doesn't mean He's in anyway limited to that place. Maybe it's because I know more spanish and could communicate with and understand the people there more, my view about God and Mexico has changed. I no longer want my life to be centered around Mexico and only Mexico, it's still one of my favorite places to be and I still feel like my heart is called to that particular place and those people, but I want God to become more evenly distributed throughout my life. Even if my life here feels repetitive and boring He can still use me, and I just have to be ready because I won't always know when that is. I'm not sure if I explained that exactly right, but I'm really excited about it.
This past sunday our pastor talked a little about how God uses you in your workplace, and how God puts you in your particular workplace for a reason. He mentioned how sometimes it can be just little things that bring Him glory and that most of the time, you don't even realize it's happening. I guess that God using me or working through me in a common setting like at my school or my job is something I've always desired to become a reality, but never put much effort into searching for Him in my daily life unless I had a specific purpose I could see clearly, like in Mexico.
I really want to touch peoples lives, and I want them to know who's behind it all. Let the glory be to God forever.
