Just for Fun

This is one of my favorite pictures. I was walking with a friend back to our dorm, and this is what we saw. Good thing I happened to have my camera with me. I just got around to playing with the photo in picnik this week (years after I took the picture).

Belize

It has been over three years since I went on a missions trip to Belize City with my college fellowship over spring break. This week I pulled out an old journal from my week in Belize City.

I was a mess that semester. I copied some lines below from my journal specifically relating to the anxiety I was experiencing at that time and my need to control my life.

Day 1 - "Sitting in my last class before leaving for Belize, I was nearly in tears. I didn't want to go to Belize. I needed to do homework, to sleep, and to have a week of personal reflection. Today I felt like a spectator. Things were happening but I wasn't really in it all. I was completely self-involved. I was concerned with how serving God this week would affect the things I have going on at Penn State. I still am not sure why I specifically am here."





Day 5 - "I think if I weren't so anxious about all the work I have to do when I get back, I wouldn't have panicked so much because of the lightning storm. It was a terrifying experience. I'm just not sure of a lot. I don't need to be sure because God has a perfect plan, but I want know and have some control."

Day 8 - "I don't want to leave yet, but I'm excited to tell people at school about my experience and how God showed up at the Burial Grounds in Belize."

Day 9 - "We got back to the dorms at midnight. I did my work and even got about two hours of sleep. When I was actually back and doing work, I wasn't anxious. I didn't do any of my kinetics homework, and I didn't turn it in, but I was okay with that. Belize was worth it."

For most people two hours or sleep and not turning in a homework assignment may not seem like trusting God, but that was a start for me. That semester went on to get much worse leading to staying awake for 50 hours straight, but God met me there at the point where I had lost total control, and I surrendered to Him.

I can hardly describe all the different ways that God loved me during that week in Belize City. That single week was an integral part of God’s sovereign plan to have me appointed as a missionary to Sudan.

I am still learning to trust God, and I will continue to learn to trust God and rely on Him. Good thing that missionaries are not all perfect people who have everything figured out. =)

Beauty

I have been raising support for a few months now, and it has been a blessing to be able to share what God has been doing in my life and hear about and pray for the things that are on my friends hearts and minds. Many of you have heard about and seen pieces of the ways that God has been working in my life in the past year and the ways God continues to work in my life. After a perfect day hiking Mt. Nittany with Bekah last month and sharing in each others lives, I thought about the times in college I had spent an afternoon in the mountains with a close friend or alone. I missed it, so I took a day to just pray and be still before God. So much has changed since last summer, and I needed to get away from my apartment and just listen. I spent the day at Maymont, and I was once again amazed by the things God has done for me and the reality of the gospel. There is so much that I don't know or understand about God and creation, but the one thing I really appreciated that day was the beauty of it all. I had written down the lyrics to "In Christ Alone" and some thoughts I had in my notebook at RUF one night, and reading those lyrics again with no music, slowly, and quietly at Maymont, well it was just beautiful. And yes the women in my Bible study will tell you that I think fractals and elegant solutions to problems are beautiful, and the flowers at Maymont pictured above are beautiful, but the truth about Jesus just beautiful on a different order of magnitude.