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Another Journal Entry
First off, I would like to credit the band BarlowGirl with the title of this post. It just seemed fitting.
Secondly, I would like to share something with you. At the beginning of this past May, I had the opportunity to travel with a Bethel Task Force missions team to Honduras. I learned a lot of things, but this journal entry explains a lot about how God has worked in my life through the experience of this mission trip and a previous mission trip to Ghana, West Africa.
June 30, 2011
“They tell you it will be a life changing experience and in many ways it is. “What is,” you might ask–missions, specifically mission trips.
“The process starts by hearing about missionaries in far off lands doing daring deeds that would leave anyone in awe. Then it goes to week long camps with your church. During this week you go and serve, yet you don’t quite feel like a missionary because you’re still in your homeland boundaries. The path of life winds on and you come to a curve that leads to the opportunity of an overseas mission trip. You jump at the chance. The opportunity to change the world. The opportunity to leave your mark.
“And so the trip begins. You have an idea in your head that going this far out of the country feels like some sort of an alternate dimension. You arrive. It’s the same dimension; slightly hazier, but the same. You do some, if not most, of the same things you did at that first camp you attended all the way back in the states. Your “daring” deeds don’t seem that exciting. And you can’t see your mark left.
“The trip soon ends and you arrive home wishing you had learned more, experienced more, stepped out for God more. But the experience is what it is. When people ask you of all the amazing, life-changing things that God has done…what do you say? “I’m not really sure what that blur of a trip was because I’m still in shock from it.” Definitely experienced that one. Do you have to glorify your trip in order to make it look like God’s hands were in it more than what it looked like from your vantage point? No. EN-OH. Neit. Nine. Nada.
“God’s works are often in that extra dimension that you expect to encounter when stepping into the other country. We can’t see all of God’s work in anything because we are confined to the three-dimensional world and whatever we can see is only the smallest speck of the universe. God does work. God has worked. God will work.
“Proof: God helped me raise, collect, earn enough money, just enough money, to go on a mission trip to Ghana, West Africa. In Ghana, West Africa, I led about twenty 6-8 year-olds in a prayer to accept Christ. In Honduras, God provided clear communication through the use of hands; in Honduras, the children learned about God’s great love for each one of us, no matter the skin tone or language, and a seed was planted in each of their lives.
“Sometimes it’s hard to see the impact one has when they’re standing in the middle of the crater. When you look from above, the impact spreads far and wide.
“Don’t discredit God’s might hand. Its strength is great, yet its ability at detail is extraordinary.
“You can’t get in the way of God.
“God doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called.
“God doesn’t care as much about your ability as much as He cares about your availability.
“Going to another country seems exotic and spreading God’s word there seems easier because no one knows you, and lives with you, and sees the sin filled person that you are. At home, however, your real life is on display and the place to give the best witness is often the hardest–in your own home, among your own family, amidst your peers. While this is also the hardest place to share God’s love, it is also the best place to share God’s love because your actions, especially your everyday actions, speak ten-times louder than words.
“”Life. Laugh. Love.” It’s a popular phrase. But live for God, laugh with joy, love like the Lord.”
Bethel, thank you for letting me go on a Task Force mission trip to Honduras so I could learn all of this.
