For most of my life I have known that I have a heart for missions....to reach the most unreachable people with the life, love and power of Jesus. Even as a little girl too small to really get faith in Jesus Christ for myself, I would sit in Sunday school at my father's church and hear Buddy the Barrel talk about BGMC (Boy's and Girl's Missionary Crusade) and reaching children all over the world for Jesus, and would desire to be a part of it! As I grew up, my theology and reasons for believing in God might have been wrong (I was afraid of hell and didn't want other people to go there) but my heart was always in the right place.
But then something happened and somewhere along the line I gave up on that heart calling. I guess it happened about the time I began to realize that it wasn't normal to want to live in a mud hut, thousands of miles from home, for the chance of telling one person about Jesus. I figured out that a life like that was weird...and I didn't want to be weird. Plus I also began to understand the kind of sacrifice a life like that would entail and I wasn't ready to pay the price. So instead, I started looking for a more comfortable dream. At first it was with variations of "missions"...just formed in ways that fit better with the American way of life...but eventually even that got to be too much....and soon I let the "dream" go..completely....or so I thought.
Then almost a year ago now, God began capturing my heart again with the desire to reach others with the knowledge of Him. In the last nine months or so, it seems to me, that God has been working to reverse the course of my heart and thus has brought me back to that place of being willing to give everything, do anything, and live completely out of the box in order to share Him with the World! It's kinda crazy!
To be honest, I don't really know what all this means. I know God's working in my heart, I know He's leading me and training me....but where this is all going to bring me...I don't know...except closer to Him. It's exciting though! I feel like God's spent the past several years bringing me back to my first love (which is Him) and now He's restoring unto me all the the devil tried to steal. I feel lucky....I feel loved....and I feel overwhelmed by the knowledge that in spite of me, God's never given up on me! This is the good life! Thank you Jesus!
We are so very similar. I have a picture of myself in my head as an old woman, living in squalor in some third world country and giving myself entirely over to service and coming home once a year to visit my kids in the states :)
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