Thank You, Thank You

I just want to take a moment to say thank you to every person who has donated a dollar or said a prayer (or many dollars or many prayers), or who has given me their love and support to help me be on mission for these past six years. I am so thankful to the Lord for this time that I have been blessed enough to spend as a missionary for Him. What a gift! Thank you for your yes to being on mission with me.


The three years that I spent in Haiti were some of the hardest and best times of my life. I had to wrestle with a new language and culture, with suffering, with poverty, with my own human weakness, but ultimately learned to trust more in the goodness of God the Father and His deep, unending love for me.

While I am convinced that my time in mission will never really be over, I know that God is calling me forward to something different and new. I left Haiti on August 21st and am confident that this is exactly what the Lord is asking of me at this point in my life. I cannot clearly see the road ahead of me, but I have a deep sense of thankfulness in my heart to God for the moments that I have spent as His little missionary.

If I could try to explain the biggest thing that I think God did for me during my time in Haiti, it would be this: He gave me the grace to stop living my life from a place of fear. Often that was a fear of my own weakness – a fear of what I am not, or what I can’t do – a fear of what I am lacking. There were times that I made a list in my mind of all of my weaknesses and things that I don’t do well . . . as if I can tell God what He can and cannot do . . . as if I can tell God who He can and cannot use for His glory. Somehow, although I can’t pinpoint the exact moment, God gave me the grace to trust Him enough to know that even my weaknesses are actually a gift. I may be the smallest, most inadequate missionary – but the Lord in His goodness can fill all of my emptiness with His strength that is so much greater than my weakness. This has given me a new confidence in Him that I have never felt before.

Here is one of my favorite things that Mother Teresa said in one of her letters to a priest. It describes what I have often felt. She said,

“God cannot fill what is full. He can fill only emptiness – deep poverty – and your “Yes” is the beginning of being or becoming empty. It is not how much we really “have” to give – but how empty we are – so that we can receive fully in our life and let Him live His life in us. In you today – He wants to relive His complete submission to His Father – allow Him to do so. Does not matter what you feel – as long as He feels alright in you. Take away your eyes from your self and rejoice that you have nothing – that you are nothing – that you can do nothing. Give Jesus a big smile – each time your nothingness frightens you. This is the poverty of Jesus. You and I must let Him live in us and through us in the world. Cling to our Lady – For she too – before she could become full of grace – full of Jesus – had to go through that darkness “How could this be done?” But the moment she said “Yes,” she had need to go in haste and give Jesus to John and his family. Keep giving Jesus to your people not by words but by your example – by your being in love with Jesus – by radiating His holiness and spreading His fragrance of love everywhere you go. Just keep the joy of Jesus as your strength. – Be happy and at peace. – Accept whatever He gives – and give whatever He takes with a big smile – You belong to Him – tell Him I am Yours and if you cut me to pieces every single piece will be only all Yours.”

I am thankful for the ways that the Lord cut me to pieces during my time in Haiti. When a few people in our neighborhood died within a few weeks of each other, that moment cut me to pieces. When several of our teens were experiencing some serious spiritual attacks all at once and we spent night and day praying with them and for them, those weeks cut me to pieces. When I encountered my own selfishness and sin in the midst of a mission that required selfless and holy missionaries – those moments cut me to pieces. And when I saw the suffering of people who love the Lord and have human dignity, who are just like you and me but happened to be born in a place with more poverty – those moments and faces will continue to cut me to pieces.


But it is there in the midst of the mess that I have found the love and grace and strength of God. I am thankful that He has made me new, over and over and over again. I am thankful that He came from Heaven to be in the midst of our suffering with us, to save us, and to show us His deep love, and the way to the Father. I am thankful that no suffering that I experience will ever be as great as His suffering on the cross.

I am thankful and rejoicing to get to fall deeper in love with Jesus every day now that I don’t have a missionary title, but can live out my baptismal call to be a missionary in the freedom of my every day life! I am ready to continue the wild adventure that is a love relationship with Jesus! :)


Thank you again and please keep praying for me and for our mission in Haiti! If I can make one last shameless plug.. become a monthly donor to our mission base here: http://donate.lifeteen.com/haiti365 :)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Does it Mean to Give?

There’s something I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around lately.   I live in a country where people don’t have a lot of material possessions. They also don’t have a lot of food, and the food that they do have is not the most nutritious or balanced type of diet. Their houses are not great; they don’t have cars; many don’t have jobs. The question: What is my response? Many times, people here ask me for things. It seems that I can’t leave our mission base without someone asking me for my water bottle, my sweater, my shoes, some money. I’m pretty sure they see me as a rich white person. What I’ve realized recently is that in many ways, this is actually true. If you look at the big picture of the whole world and all of the people in it, I am rich, even though I am a missionary and I have to ask for money for everything that I have. I am rich, even though I buy almost all of my clothes on sale, and have many that were given to me. I am rich, even though my laptop is five years o
Read more

From Naivete to Growth

Image
I remember sitting caffeinated, late at night, in the library with a friend in college, talking about foreign mission. One day, we could live in Africa, we said over our lattes and laptops. It seemed a glorious thing to me, this missionary life in a foreign country. At the time, I wanted to travel. I did have a true and real desire to love and live among the poor, but the rest of it was a dream, built on nothing – I had barely left the country then. In fact, I don’t think I had ever met a real live missionary. I had heard about mission trips, but never been on a foreign one. My imaginary life was just that, imaginary. A little more than a few years later, I was moving to Haiti to start a mission there with a few other people from an organization that I loved. I don’t think I could have admitted it then, but it definitely felt glorious. I had read a few books about missionaries, met some missionaries, been on mission trips, been inspired by the passion, zeal, and sacrifice of others
Read more

Under the Shade of the Almond Tree

The air is fresh and clean up here.  Can you hear that? The sound of silence. The breeze moving through the trees. No traffic, no big trucks or motorcycles. Peace and stillness. Sitting outside under the shade of an almond tree. She has AIDS, we are told. She is frail, we can see. A man disappears to get us food from the garden. Bananas, sugar cane. A gift for our visit. A gift for the priest. We sit on chairs. She sits on the floor, in the doorway. The air is fresh and clean up here.  The silent mountain where death is coming but has not yet taken the one we came to see. So we sing and we pray and we talk under the shade of the almond tree, up in the clear, cool mountain air. The place that feels like Heaven, though Heaven is not yet here. Months later, we hear news of her death.
Read more