I like being here a lot. I love getting to know the people, learning the language, learning what it means to love and learning how far the love of my God really reaches. I love it even when I feel like dirt never comes off my feet and it's so hot and humid that I can't move without sweating, because I know that in this dirt and mess Jesus is with me still. I like learning about people’s lives and their stories and the realness of them. Especially because I feel like people can’t hide the mess of their lives so well here, where as in America we just do a better job of making it look like we’ve got everything together.
Not to say that things are constantly all wonderful and amazing here either. Even though I know I should seek the beauty in every single day, there are days that I forget to look. Days that just seem normal and that nothing special has happened. It goes back and forth, because there are memorable days when I feel so confident and sure of God’s plan for me and stand amazed at all He is doing in my life and the lives of people around me. Then there are the days where I just don’t know what I’m doing here at all. Where I feel like I can't do anything right and I wonder if anything I am doing makes any difference at all.
As I wonder if I am doing anything that matters, God reminds me that I am not the one who will change lives or do anything amazing. That is His job. Mine is to love the person in front of me, and I am learning more of what that means and looks like every day.
Paul writes in 1 Cor 15:58, "So then, my dear friends, stand firm and steady. Keep busy always in your work for the Lord, since you know that nothing you do in the Lord's service is ever useless".
Nothing. No matter how small, every act of love matters. And the love is the most important part, because actions in themselves are empty anyway. It's the love of Jesus that changes lives.
I need His help so much because it doesn’t work trying to make myself love like Him on my own. And sometimes I get so caught up in distractions and little things that don’t matter, that I forget just how pitiful my attempts are.
And even though I really do not like messing up and getting it wrong, the times when I realize how imperfect and weak I am, there is a strange sense of comfort of knowing how impossible it is to do it on my own. Of how short I really fall from the perfect holiness and majesty of all that is my God.
Because when I feel like I’m not doing enough and feel lost and confused and like I failed at loving like I’ve been loved, I open the pages of the Bible and read that still He is with me.
That He is mighty to save, that He takes great delight in me, even when I struggle to grasp why.
That even before He laid the foundations of the earth He chose me to be His own. To be perfect and blameless in His eyes. His adopted child, ransomed by Jesus’ blood, because that was how much the God of the universe wanted me, me, and poured out this love to us all in a beautiful thing called grace.
It’s this kind of grace that doesn’t depend on me and my shortcomings that picks me up and gives me hope that God can use me. A trust that He is doing something even when I can’t see it or feel it. That He started a good work in me, and it is HIM who will complete it. In all of my failures and mistakes that it takes to get there I know it’s going to be okay somehow, because my defense is in Jesus and He will never fail.
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