Tommy has been asking me to write a blog about my perspective on life these days since all the communication to you, our dear friends and family, has been from him and I have found as many excuses possible to not do it. With four children, garage sale, missions presentations, moving, and life in general the excuses haven’t been that hard to find. Tonight, I ran out of reasons to not share me heart with you but it is not easy. I have started and restarted this post at least five times already. How do I communicate all that has gone on in my heart when I don’t even understand it all?
Being a missionary has always been my desire, dream, and passion. I learned of Mary Slessor, the adoptive mother of so many African children, nurse, and women’s rights advocate, when I was a baby Christian and it excited me. I wanted to live like that, to have to depend on God in ways that I had never experienced before and to be able to show God’s grace to those who were not aware of it. I went to Moody intending to become a missionary. Funny how God works though, it was during Missions Conference that God revealed to me that my desire to be a missionary had become a desire for an exciting, dangerous, romantic life and that I had lost the focus of taking God’s Word to those who did not have it. He reminded me that those in need of His redemption were everywhere and that I needed to learn to love all of His people no matter where they were from. My mom, a middle school teacher at the time, pointed out that her days were filled with hurting children in need of the Gospel. I gave up my dreams that week and submitted to the Lord to go where He wanted me to go.
Now, almost 8 years later, He has granted me one of my deepest desires. I am thrilled. There really are no words to accurately describe my joy and excitement at this change of plans. When Tommy began to talk of going to French Polynesia I almost did not listen because I did not want to get my hopes up. It was torture having to keep our plans quiet but when we arrived in Kansas City and I saw a welcome letter that addressed me as “missionary candidate” I burst into joyful tears, amazed that God would be so good to me. I was more carefree in those two weeks then I have been in many years. I do not say that to downplay our ministry until then but to emphasis my bliss.
I still did not want to share these deep emotions with you. I do not have it all figured out and my elation has faded because the trials of life have set in again and I have failed so many ways so many times since those two weeks. I am so unfit for this great honor of taking God’s Word to valuable and costly lives in France but isn’t that how God works? He uses those of us who are foolish, who are weak, and who are lowly to carry His living water to those in need.
1 Corinthians 1:26-31 “For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption so that, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord."
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