Preparing for HOME!

Ok so I know I have some catching up to do on this blog and hopefully I will find sometime go back and finish up soon. It is not that I have not been trying to process some of my thoughts it is just that I seem to hit some road blocks along the way … Not bad ones but just can’t seem to get it on paper (or computer screen) right away.

But for now… I am starting to prepare my heart to return back home. God has a crazy way of ripping your heart out on a mission trips and molding it to be the way that He wants it to be. It is an incredible time to really reflect on GOD and His plan… not ours. I have thought a lot about submission on this trip. Submitting to God’s plans even when they don’t always match with ours.

Ok, I have to go back and tell you about the day we met Jude JohnPaul. He is a young 17-year-old boy who at the age of 5 started having seizures. His mother showed us his school pictures when he was a normal active young boy running around and playing like everyone else. The problem was when the seizures started they had no medication for him to control them like they would in the U.S. They became so severe that Jude John-Paul must of sustained brain damage at some point and for the last 12 years he has been bed ridden, his mind and body both completely affected.

As we laid hands on him and prayed for him I was overcome with emotions (YES, AGAIN!! ;-) ) So many things were running through my mind all at once and still do when I even try to process that moment. I guess the bottom line for me is that of submission. I will never have all the answers to the questions before us. I do not completely understand why God allows Jude JohnPaul to remain like this for so long.

Verses flood my mind like…

…“Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Matthew 17:20

(in which I know 100% that God could heal Jude JohnPaul if he wanted to, is my faith really so little)

“…You do not have because you do not ask God. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” James 4:2-3

(LORD, We ask for this that your Glory be Reviled!)

Yet, I feel Jude JohnPaul is another example of us learning to submit to God. learning to trust that His ways are better than my ways even though we don’t always understand. For those of you who know me well and have read my other blogs know this is a repetitive subject for me. WHAT IS GOD TRYING TO TELL ME?

For now I will just …

“Keep on asking and it will be given to you; keep on seeking and you will find; keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you

For everyone who keeps on asking receives; the one who keeps on seeking finds; and to the one who keeps on knocking, the door will be opened. Matthew 7:6-8

Kerry Ann is reading the Seeing God – by David Roper. I was looking through it and just need to share with you a part of it that hit me as I am preparing to go home.

“Everyone thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself” – Tolstoy. From the beginning of the trip Jeff has repeatedly said.. maybe this whole thing is more about US and our HEART then the people we are here to help. …

The book goes on to say …

“I can talk about compassion for others and yet be utterly tactless and inconsiderate to my own family. In which case, what I am at home is what I am. Or I can think myself reasoned and self-controlled, but what I do and say when angry and unobserved gives me away. My character is what I am when I am alone.

…. There’s old Adam within, with vast potential for greed and selfishness. I know I can’t change him much. Frontal attack has never worked for me. As soon as I resist sin, I endow it with more power. This same power it usese against me. Inner transformation, thus is God’s work. As Mother teresa put it, we may will holiness, but He must do it.

What I need is more of God in me. He must work His work. Righteousness is His gift, which I may receive, David’s prayer in Psalm 19:12-14 becomes my own.”

Psalm 19:12-14

But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults. Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. 
Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression.

May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.

I am making this my prayer…. praying that God continues to make me and mold me (no matter how painful it is at times) into exactly who he wants me to be.