Seeing Myself, Six Months Ago

I found the blog of one of the Hands On girls who went to Senegal the semester after me.  I got to live with her for a week in November, and I will always remember that one night when Liz and I had already gone to bed, she freaked out by Melanie's sudden appearance in the doorway and threw herself on us, butt in the air.  Liz laughingly pointed out that she had incapacitated any of us from defending ourselves, but she was unapologetic in her flail.

Jesse is obviously a cool person.  Her blog kind of breaks my heart, because she is dealing with all the emotions I was six months ago.  Who am I kidding?  They were still a big deal a couple months ago, and even today her words were quickly sending me back to American culture shock.

That is, until I started writing comments on her posts, trying to be encouraging.  And I started writing awesome things that I didn't even know I knew until I wrote them!  I love when that happens.  One thing I wrote was this:

"God has a bigger heart for the nations than we could ever have, so trust that He'll send us where we're most needed."

And ugh.  Apparently I know that, but I need to internalize it.  Also I need to constantly remind myself that America is one of the nations he has a heart for.  Whether I am in Peoria or Senegal or Mongolia or Japan or Antarctica....God has put me here, there, and everywhere for a reason.  I can't waste time moaning about how I'd rather be somewhere else.  I have to trust that He knows my passions and will take me to new and exciting countries when the time is right.

That is very smart and encouraging!  But I realized something else from reading her blog.  Jesse talked about loving teaching people about God for the first time.  And that is it!  That is why I am so easily discontented here at Woodland!

I mean, I love teaching the junior high girls and mentoring them as they start in their true realization of what following Jesus means.  And I love leading the college Bible study, getting into books of the Bible that none of us are very familiar with, seeing God's love throughout all of history.

But there is a huge difference between teaching someone who has already heard it, and teaching someone who never knew that Jesus not only died but rose to life again.  People who grow up in church are so easily jaded.  I am so easily jaded!  God sending rain to flood the whole earth but saving one family and all the adorable animals because He wasn't ready to give up just yet?  That is AWESOME.  But I react with a blase sense of been there, seen the flannelgraph.

I'm grateful that I was raised in the church.  I fully believe that spending the first twenty years of my life saturated in the stories of God prepared me to serve Him at a young age.  But it's hard to teach people who are where I was....a little interested, but more concerned with their hair or their boyfriends or their lack of boyfriends.

Give me people who ignore those stories or obviously change the subject any day.  At least then I knew I was making progress.  And granted, my attempts at talking about Jesus in Senegal were sporadic and chaotic at best.  But I miss the feeling that I was doing something important, that I was telling Lamba and Mame Codou and Bigue things they might not hear from anyone else.

I guess this just puts me back to where I've been:  confident that God is using me here, but ready to go back to the front lines whenever He thinks I'm ready.  Which, granted, might be awhile (re: evangelizing chaos, above).