I have 28 plump burning red bumps all over my legs and arms; spiders, red ants and Mosquitos consistently reminding me of their awareness of my animosity towards them. This is my struggle in Cambodia. Bug bites and very little control over my time. I'm itchy and restrained, but praise God for His leading throughout. Both of those things are not even that big of a deal, in fact to most they may not even appear to be real issues (and that's bc you're just so awesome or you've never been to a third world country and lived with and where the natives did and not a western hotel), and perhaps they're not, but it's still difficult for me to pinpoint my struggle without the obvious culprits. So then, if the bites and time constraints aren't culprits, what is?
The truth is, I still harbor doubt and some fear that I won't be able to handle what God has in store for me if and when I finally "jump cliff", so to speak. I'm still wondering if that's even how I am to go about it, I mean biblically, what does it mean and look like? How does God move? What does trust really call for on our part as weak and broken people?
1 peter is such a jaw dropper when it comes to applying the life of Christ to our own. Read it.
Deuteronomy 1:30-33
30 The LORD your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes, 31 and in the desert. There you saw how the LORD your God carried you, as a father carries his son, all the way you went until you reached this place." 32 In spite of this, you did not trust in the LORD your God, 33 who went ahead of you on your journey, in fire by night and in a cloud by day, to search out places for you to camp and to show you the way you should go.
That to me is mind blowing.
Yet this trust of mine keeps wavering, and I find myself blanketing in the comfort of that familiar sense of resignation or digression of intimacy. Both with God and people.
But.
I have noticed a small transpiring difference within myself glinting off the smiles on these beginning friendships here, almost undetectable with a spark that might be thought of as imagined at first. It's hard to say why, but for some reason I feel more curious to know them, and kind of concerned over their moods, but most bizarre is that I want to make them full of the same joy God gives me. I want to share....I genuinely see the seedling of a desire to share, not just share something this big or something that I break off of something else, but like share as in welcome them to the home in my heart. Where everything I am and all that I have (which all come from God) rests neatly in my type A control freak cottage home (that's what my heart probably looks like if it was a home) haha that it a farm house.
They might shift things around, dirty my floors or furniture, eat my food without asking, maybe even try to rob me when my back is turned! But what good is a home all neat and beautiful if there is only me to enjoy it? The reasoning isn't clear, but it doesn't have to be, we just know that that wouldn't be as grand as a house brimming full of love and laughter, I feel like that's what God is doing to me. Preparing me to be ok for when my cottage gets wrecked. And I want it to get wrecked, cuz perfection is a mirage without Perfection Himself. So God says to consider others more than yourself. He says to give to others, to help people, serve, wash feet, love others....all things I am praying would take root in me.
Anyway.
So my prayer today is that I step out onto the ocean's surface, above the deep that threatens to pull me under, above the sharks that encircle me, above all that I imagine to harm me, and ask Jesus to call me out by name to meet Him. Because I keep getting distracted by the people shouting their fears, showing the worry on their faces, and the ocean that looks too vast for one person to just walk all over.
Isaiah 40:12 reminds me how big God is...
12 Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand
and marked off the heavens with a span,
enclosed the dust of the earth in a measure
and weighed the mountains in scales
and the hills in a balance?
If I'm in the ocean I'm still all in His hands.
God I see just how You love us....only in Cambodia have I seen a lady wearing pink faded sweat pants and a green snoopy sweater lead a powerful prayer during Sunday service. You see us the way we really are, and I ask for more help. I need more help. Or if this something I am going through for the sake of shedding more of my irrational fears, then I ask for more encouragement to help me keep going. Only though You will I do anything and everything You want me to.
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