Coming Home... musings

 It’s difficult to put into words how I see the Lord moving sometimes – until He’s already moved and changed things. It’s also startling to look back to what was less than a year ago and realize that these past months have held some incredible changes. I thought that I came here just to prepare for missions – to understand better what being a missionary means and what it would take. What I learned was that the Lord cares more about what’s really on the inside than what these hands are doing for Him.

As I prepare to finish the program here, I barely even recognize the girl who arrived in January. Over this year, through classes, homework, outreaches, and living in a family environment with people from so many different backgrounds, the Lord has opened me up, done some “heart surgery,” pulled things out, put things in, finished with some reconstructive work and then repeated the process as many times as it takes to bring me closer to Him. On the outside I look pretty much the same. But more has changed on the inside that I even understand.

Let me interject here that I’ve by no means become perfect – and the true changes remain to be seen by those who know me.

But there are a couple of things that help me trust that God is not done with me, just because I’m leaving what we call “the bible college bubble” and going back to “normal life.”

The first thing I’ve learned is that if I stubbornly refuse to let God work in my life, I probably shouldn’t yell at Him for not changing things around me - because much of what needs to change is in how I respond to what’s around me. 

And the second is that there is not a single thing in my life that God cannot take and use for His glory. He can use challenging things like iron sharpening iron, scraping away at a dull edge to make it a useful tool. He can use uncomfortable situations to reveal what’s really in my heart. He can allow pain to draw me close. He can use things not working out the way I want to show me what He’s been planning all along.

It’s an oft-quoted verse, and awfully annoying in the heat of the moment, but true that “God works all things together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). But as C.S. Lewis said “Good is what we ought to prefer, quite regardless of whatever we happen to like any given moment.”

With these two things in hand and in my heart, I think I can say that Bible College has been a success… and that God can keep working on me anywhere.

I have some plans that are slowly coming together for “what comes next,” but I’ll save those to share at a later date. What comes first is that I’ll be back in Central Oregon at the end of next week and I am excited to see people from home again!  

Jemma and me on a walk after our first snowfall of the season